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the deadly tornadoes that hit our state on April 27," said Stan Pylant, WHNT News 19's president and general Manager. "We had a tremendous amount of interest from a lot of qualified candidates from all over the country. In the end, the right person was right here in our own backyard. I couldn't be more pleased to announce Jason as our next Chief Meteorologist."
Jason was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Certified Broadcast Meteorologist Seal for excellence in television weather in 2007. Simpson graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in broadcast meteorology. He began his career while still in college as an intern in the weather office at ABC 33/40 under longtime Chief Meteorologist James Spann. In 2004, Simpson became the morning meteorologist at ABC 33/40. Before that, Simpson was the Chief Meteorologist at WTOK-TV in Meridian, Miss.
"Jason is a north Alabama native," said Denise Vickers, WHNT's station manager/news director. "He cares about the people and places in the Tennessee Valley. And, he understands the importance of providing weather information for where and how people live.
"He is going to do a tremendous job leading our talented team of meteorologists."
Simpson has covered many weather events from hurricanes to tornadoes and blizzards. He was on the air April 27 and saw firsthand the magnitude of the destruction. After the storm he took action, volunteering in devastated areas to help people rebuild and where he couldn't go, sent supplies.
A staunch advocate for science education in the classroom, Simpson has been instrumental in building curriculum for elementary and middle school science classes through the "ABC's of Weather" series that he produced for the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative.
"My days in Birmingham have given me some great memories, but we are looking forward to settling our family in Huntsville," Simpson said. "I have always respected WHNT.
"I knew if I ever had the chance, I would take the opportunity to work there. It is an honor for me to be chosen as WHNT News 19's new chief meteorologist. I am resolved to meet and exceed the high expectations that people in the Tennessee Valley expect from this station."
Last year, Simpson married Lacey, whose parents live in Huntsville. Their first child, Walt, was born recently on October 11.Neem expeller oil
Neem oil is a vegetable oil pressed from the fruits and seeds of the neem (Azadirachta indica), an evergreen tree which is endemic to the Indian subcontinent and has been introduced to many other areas in the tropics. It is the most important of the commercially available products of neem for organic farming and medicines.
Composition [ edit ]
Neem oil varies in color; it can be golden yellow, yellowish brown, reddish brown, dark brown, greenish brown, or bright red[citation needed]. It has a rather strong odor that is said to combine the odours of peanut and garlic. It is composed mainly of triglycerides and contains many triterpenoid compounds, which are responsible for the bitter taste. It is hydrophobic in nature; in order to emulsify it in water for application purposes, it is formulated with surfactants.
Azadirachtin is the most well known and studied triterpenoid in neem oil. Nimbin is another triterpenoid which has been credited with some of neem oil's properties as an antiseptic, antifungal, antipyretic and antihistamine.[1] Neem oil also contains several sterols, including campesterol, beta-sitosterol, and stigmasterol.
Extraction [ edit ]
The method of processing is likely to affect the composition of the oil, since the methods used, such as pressing (expelling) or solvent extraction are unlikely to remove exactly the same mix of components in the same proportions. The neem oil yield that can be obtained from neem seed kernels also varies widely in literature from 25% to 45%.
The oil can be obtained through pressing (crushing) of the seed kernel both through cold pressing or through a process incorporating temperature controls 40 to 50 °C. Neem seed oil can also be obtained by solvent extraction of the neem seed, fruit, oil, cake or kernel. A large industry in India extracts the oil remaining in the seed cake using hexane. This solvent-extracted oil is of a lower quality as compared to the cold pressed oil and is mostly used for soap manufacturing. Neem cake is a by-product obtained in the solvent extraction process for neem oil.
Use [ edit ]
Cosmetic [ edit ]
Neem oil is not used for cooking purposes. In India, it is used for preparing cosmetics such as soaps, hair products, body hygiene creams, hand creams.
Traditional medicine [ edit ]
Neem oil has an extensive history of traditional human use in India and surrounding regions for a variety of therapeutic purposes.[2] Ayurvedic uses of neem include the treatment of acne, fever, leprosy, malaria, ophthalmia and tuberculosis.[citation needed] Various folk remedies for neem include use as an anthelmintic, antifeedant, antiseptic, diuretic, emmenagogue, contraceptive, febrifuge, parasiticide, pediculocide, and insecticide, and for the treatment of tetanus, urticaria, eczema, scrofula and erysipelas.[citation needed] Traditional routes of administration of neem extracts included oral, vaginal, and topical use.
Pesticide [ edit ]
Formulations made of neem oil also find wide usage as a biopesticide for organic farming, as it repels a wide variety of pests including the mealy bug, beet armyworm, aphids, the cabbage worm, thrips, whiteflies, mites, fungus gnats, beetles, moth larvae, mushroom flies, leafminers, caterpillars, locust, nematodes and the Japanese beetle.[3][4] Neem oil is not known to be harmful to mammals, birds, earthworms or some beneficial insects such as butterflies, honeybees and ladybirds (ladybugs in US English) if it is not concentrated directly into their area of habitat or on their food source. It can be used as a household pesticide for ant, bedbug, cockroach, housefly, sand fly, snail, termite and mosquitoes both as repellent and larvicide.[2] Neem oil also controls black spot, powdery mildew, anthracnose and rust fungi.
In the UK and the EU, pesticides that contain azadirachtin, the active compound found in neem oil, are subject to control and their sale is regulated.[5]
Neem extracts act as a phagorepellent (antifeedant) and by blocking the action of the insect molting hormone ecdysone. Azadirachtin is the most active of these growth regulators (limonoids), occurring at 0.2–0.4 % in the seeds of the neem tree.[6]
Toxicity [ edit ]
Neem oil and other neem products, such as neem leaves and neem tea, should not be consumed by pregnant women, women trying to conceive, or children.[7]
There is some evidence that ingestion of neem oil may be associated with liver damage in children.[8]
Several case reports detail severe toxicity associated with ingestion of neem oil. In one case, ingestion of 20ml was sufficient to cause vomiting, convulsions, and toxic encephalopathy.[9]That was before the Paris terrorist attacks and the revelation that at least one of the terrorists arrived in France as a refugee last month.
Recently. the Obama administration opened additional refugee processing centers in Iraq and Syria to speed the vetting of the extra 10,000 Syrians that they wish to bring to America.
Seeing an opening, several Republican presidential candidates called on the administration to halt the process of resettling most Syrian refugees in the US - the exceptions being Christians who are being persecuted in the region.
Reuters:
"President Obama and Hillary Clinton's idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America, it is nothing less than lunacy,” Senator Ted Cruz said in an interview on Fox News. “Now on the other hand, Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them," Cruz added. Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the Paris attacks, saying it sent militants strapped with suicide bombing belts and carrying machine guns to various locations in the heart of the capital. The White House announced plans in September to increase to 10,000 the number of Syrian refugees accepted in the United States during fiscal year 2016, which began Oct. 1, up from the less than 2,000 accepted last year. Globally, the United States will accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, and 100,000 in 2017, up from 70,000 in each of the previous two years, Robert Jenkins, a U.S. AID official, told a Washington forum on Friday. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said Syrian refugees should be provided a safe haven, but it does not have to be in the United States. "We need to have a better process,” Huckabee said on CNN. “We don't just have open borders like they do in Europe,” he added.
The FBI has already said they don't have the resources to vet tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. Nor do they have the manpower to keep track of potential violent extremists that would be coming into the country.
The only conclusion we can draw is that the Obama administration is willing to risk the lives of Americans that we'll get lucky and the jihadists will go someplace else. To deliberately open our door to perhaps dozens of terrorists is mindblowingly stupid. But the administration is far more concerned about appearing to be tolerant and open minded than in securing the homeland.
Congress can refuse to appropriate funds to bring the Syrians here. And that's something they should do immediately.Doctors and students at University of Phoenix are trying to erase the stigma of mental health counseling by offering free help to the community.
The College of Social Sciences is running a pro-bono clinic on campus where graduate students work with certified doctors to get the experience they need while helping the community.
The school says almost every county in the U.S. has a critical shortage of mental health providers and this program aims to fill the gap.
Doctors also don't want worries over a co-pay to hold people back from getting help.
Clinical Director Dr. Mandee Bahadar says counseling isn't just for people struggling with depression or mental health disabilities; counseling can also help with anxiety, navigating divorce, finding a new job, even life coaching.
"We're a whole person. We're not just our body. We're not just our mind. We're not just our emotion. We are everything and so if we ignore our mental wellness, or our mental emotional health, then then we are doing a disservice to our body," said Dr. Bahadar.
The clinic is located on the main campus in Tempe on Fountainhead Parkway. The clinic is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m.Without further ado, we present you with our end-of-season Home Run Tracker Awards.
*Please note: All information goes back to the 2006 season, the first year of the ESPN Home Run Tracker database. In addition, this excludes inside-the-park home runs unless otherwise indicated.
Longest Home Runs Since 2006
NO-DOUBTER OF THE YEAR
2012 Winner: Giancarlo Stanton, Miami Marlins (494 feet)
Giancarlo Stanton won the award for longest 2012 home run by hitting a 494-foot blast on August 17 off Josh Roenicke at Coors Field. It was the fifth-longest home run since ESPN HR Tracker began in 2006.
WALL-SCRAPER OF THE MONTH
Upton 2012 Winner: B.J. Upton, Tampa Bay Rays (323 feet)
B.J. Upton hit a 323-foot home run off Ervin Santana on April 24, the shortest home run of the season and the shortest home run at Tropicana Field since the beginning of ESPN HR Tracker in 2006.
MOONSHOT OF THE YEAR
2012 Winner: Todd Helton, Colorado Rockies (162 feet)
Todd Helton’s walk-off home run off J.J. Putz on April 14 had an apex of 162 feet, the ball hanging in the air for 6.92 seconds. It had the highest apex since 2009, when Alex Rodriguez hit a 390-foot home run with a 169-foot apex.
LINER OF THE MONTH
2012 Winner: Adam Jones, Baltimore Orioles (43 feet)
Adam Jones’ 354-foot home run off Edwin Jackson on June 23 had an apex of 43 feet, the lowest by an Oriole player and the lowest at Camden Yards since the beginning of ESPN HR Tracker in 2006.
Fastest Speed off Bat
Home Runs Since 2006
FAST BALL OF THE YEAR
2012 Winner: Giancarlo Stanton, Miami Marlins (122.4 mph)
Giancarlo Stanton’s second award set a record, as his 462-foot home run off Jamie Moyer on May 21 had a speed off bat of 122.4 miles per hour -- the fastest since the beginning of ESPN HR Tracker in 2006.
SERVER OF THE YEAR
2012 Winner: Ervin Santana, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Ervin Santana gave up 39 home runs this season, the most in the majors. Jason Vargas and Phil Hughes tied for second with 35. Since 2006, only Bronson Arroyo has given up more home runs than Santana.
MASHER OF THE YEAR
Cruz 2012 Winner: Nelson Cruz, Texas Rangers (418.6 feet)
Nelson Cruz averaged 418.6 feet per home run this season, beating out teammate Josh Hamilton by an average of 2.9 feet. Cruz’s 484-foot home run on June 3 was the fourth longest of the season, and he had home runs of 470 and 464 feet as well. Only six of his 22 home runs went less than 400 feet.The Gamburtsev Mountain Range (also known as the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains) is a subglacial mountain range located in East Antarctica, just underneath the lofty Dome A, near the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility.[1] The range was discovered by the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1958 and is named for Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy A. Gamburtsev.[2][3] It is approximately 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) long, and the mountains are believed to be about 2,700 metres (8,900 ft) high,[4] although they are completely covered by over 600 metres (2,000 ft) of ice and snow. The Gamburtsev Mountain Range is currently believed to be about the same size as the European Alps,[5] and, as of 2008, it is unknown how the mountains were formed, though the current speculated age of the range is over 34 million years[6] and possibly 500 million years.[4] Current models suggest that the East Antarctic ice sheet was formed from the glaciers that began sliding down the Gamburtsev range at the end of the Eocene.[1] Vostok Subglacial Highlands form an east extension of Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains.[7]
Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province (AGAP) project [ edit ]
Gamburtsev Gamburtsev Mountain Range in Antarctica
As part of the 2007–09 International Polar Year, so called, the AGAP project was a multinational effort to gather information about the Gamburtsev mountain chain.[8][9]
Completion [ edit ]
Scientists announced the completion of their mission on 25 February 2009.[5] Modern-day remote-sensing technology revealed a very jagged landscape.[5] The gathered data will be analysed by researchers in the following months.[5] Dr Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey said: "We can confirm they are there; we've seen them under the ice. Not only are they similar in dimension to the European Alps, but they are also similar in aspect: we see very sharp peaks and valleys which are remarkably similar to the Alps themselves. It all adds to the mystery – from the tectonic perspective of how these mountains were created; and from the glacial history perspective of how the East Antarctic ice sheet was formed and didn't erode these peaks."[5]
The AGAP project comprised scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[5][10] Two field camps were established deep within the Antarctic interior and aircraft flew across the ice, mapping the shape of the sub-glacials using an ice-penetrating radar.[5] The local gravitational and magnetic fields were also measured.[5] 120,000 km were flown, with over 20% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet being explored during the course of the mission.[5]
Information was recorded on a network of seismometers that picked up earthquake signals passing through the rock from the opposite side of the planet.[5] Despite the extreme temperatures — around -30 °C at the two base camps as reported by AGAP US co-leader Dr Robin Bell — liquid water was detected in the valleys three kilometres beneath the team.[5] Ferraccioli added: "Up until now we just had an ambitious plan. Now we have all this remarkable data to pore over."[5]
By December, 2009, data analyzed so far from the AGAP project indicate the mountain range is generally oriented southwest to northeast, and arose from tectonic plate activity.[11]
The team's next goal is to drill through the ice and collect the first Gamburtsev rock samples. "Amazingly, we have samples of the moon but none of the Gamburtsevs," said Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "With these rock samples we will be able to constrain when this ancient piece of crust was rejuvenated and grew to a magnificent mountain range."[12]
Origin [ edit ]
The result of the 2007-2009 study has found that the Gamburtsev are very old, first forming around a billion years ago when continental drift pushed two plates together to form the super-continent of Rodinia. This early range was eroded above the surface but left a deep cold root, which is visible today in seismic images,[13] reaching down into the Earth's mantle. About 250-100 million years ago, the crust started to pull apart in a series of rifting events close to the east of this old root. A forked rift valley runs along the northern side of the mountains containing lakes Sovetskaya and 90East within it. This rifting warmed and rejuvenated the root, giving it the buoyancy to be lifted up to re-establish the mountains as an 800 km long massif. Further uplift still was achieved as deep valleys were later cut erosion lightening the overall mass of the system. Around 35 million years ago, the glaciers merged to form the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, burying the Gamburtsev Range in the process.[14]In an increasingly digital world, algorithms are being used to make decisions in a growing range of contexts. From decisions about offering mortgages and credit cards to sifting job applications and sentencing criminals, the impact of algorithms is far reaching.
How an algorithm is formulated, its scope for error or correction, the impact it may have on an individual—and their ability to understand or challenge that decision—are increasingly relevant questions.
This topic was pitched to the Committee by Dr Stephanie Mathisen (Sense about Science) through the Committee's 'My Science Inquiry' open call for inquiry suggestions, and has been chosen as the first subject for the Committee's attention following that process. It follows the Committee’s recent work on Robotics and AI, and its call for a standing Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
Submit written evidence
The Committee would welcome written submissions by Friday 20 October 2017 on the following points:
The extent of current and future use of algorithms in decision-making in Government and public bodies, businesses and others, and the corresponding risks and opportunities;
Whether 'good practice' in algorithmic decision-making can be identified and spread, including in terms of:
— The scope for algorithmic decision-making to eliminate, introduce or amplify biases or discrimination, and how any such bias can be detected and overcome;
— Whether and how algorithmic decision-making can be conducted in a ‘transparent’ or ‘accountable’ way, and the scope for decisions made by an algorithm to be fully understood and challenged;
— The implications of increased transparency in terms of copyright and commercial sensitivity, and protection of an individual’s data;
— The scope for algorithmic decision-making to eliminate, introduce or amplify biases or discrimination, and how any such bias can be detected and overcome; — Whether and how algorithmic decision-making can be conducted in a ‘transparent’ or ‘accountable’ way, and the scope for decisions made by an algorithm to be fully understood and challenged; — The implications of increased transparency in terms of copyright and commercial sensitivity, and protection of an individual’s data; Methods for providing regulatory oversight of algorithmic decision-making, such as the rights described in the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016.
The Committee would welcome views on the issues above, and submissions that illustrate how the issues vary by context through case studies of the use of algorithmic decision-making.
You can submit written evidence through the algorithms in decision-making inquiry page.
Previous inquiry
This inquiry follows on the work of the previous Committee, in their inquiry Algorithms in decision making.
Further information
Image: iStockphotoA cosmopolitan
A cosmopolitan, or informally a cosmo, is a cocktail made with vodka, triple sec, cranberry juice, and freshly squeezed or sweetened lime juice.
History [ edit ]
The International Bartenders Association recipe is based on vodka citron, lemon-flavored vodka.[1] The cosmopolitan is a relative of cranberry coolers like the Cape Codder.[2] Though often presented far differently, the cosmopolitan also bears a likeness in composition to the kamikaze cocktail.
The origin of the cosmopolitan is disputed.[3]
The 1930s [ edit ]
While the cocktail is widely perceived to be a more modern creation, there is a strikingly similar recipe for a cosmopolitan which appears in Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars 1903-1933, published in 1934.
Jigger of Gordon's Gin (1 1⁄ 2 US fl oz [4.4 cl] Beefeater)
2 dash Cointreau (1⁄ 2 US fl oz [1.5 cl] Cointreau)
Juice of 1 Lemon (1 US fl oz [3.0 cl] Lemon Juice)
1 tsp [.5 cl] Raspberry Syrup (homemade)
Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Made with ingredients that would have been readily available during the period, this identically named cocktail aims for the same effect. If this drink is in fact the source of the modern cosmopolitan, then it would be an adaption of a Daisy rather than a Kamikaze.[4][5][6][7]
Provincetown [ edit ]
One version of the creation of this popular drink credits the accomplishment to the gay community in Provincetown, Massachusetts.[3]cosmopolitan
Neal Murray [ edit ]
Bartender Neal Murray says he created the cosmopolitan in 1975 at the Cork & Cleaver steak house in Minneapolis.[8] According to Murray, he added a splash of cranberry juice to a Kamikaze and the first taster declared, "How cosmopolitan."[8] This event supposedly led to the naming of the new beverage.
John Caine [ edit ]
John Caine is the owner of several popular bars in San Francisco and a cosmopolitan expert. He partially credits the upsurge in cocktails during the 1970s to the Cosmo being served at fern bars.[3] Caine is credited with bringing the Cosmo west from Cleveland.[9]
Cheryl Cook [ edit ]
There are a number of other claims made as to the origin of the cosmopolitan. Cocktail historian Gary Regan credits bartender Cheryl Cook of the Strand Restaurant in South Beach, Florida with the original creation.[2][3] Some people think that Cook is a mythical character,[3][10] but in a letter to Regan, Cook related the story of how she created the drink in 1985 or 1986:[10]
What overwhelmed me was the number of people who ordered Martinis just to be seen with a Martini glass in their hand. It was on this realization that gave me the idea to create a drink that everyone could palate and was visually stunning in that classic glass. This is what the Cosmo was based on.
Cook's original recipes called for "Absolut Citron, a splash of Triple sec, a drop of Rose's lime and just enough cranberry to make it oh so pretty in pink."[10] Although Absolut Citron was not introduced anywhere officially until 1988, it was test marketed in Miami.
Toby Cecchini [ edit ]
Notable bartender Gaz Regan says that the internationally recognized version of the cocktail was created by Toby Cecchini in 1987 in Manhattan based on a poorly described version of Cheryl Cook's creation.[10]
Melissa Huffsmith-Roth [ edit ]
Cheryl Charming details the story of how in 1989 at The Odeon restaurant, the internationally recognized version of The Cosmopolitan was created by Melissa Huffsmith-Roth.[11]
New York City [ edit ]
According to Sally Ann Berk and Bob Sennett, the cosmopolitan appears in literature as early as 1993 and derives from New York City.[12][13][14][15]
Popularity [ edit ]
The cosmopolitan cocktail gained popularity quickly. It traveled from Provincetown, through New York, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and on to San Francisco (Caine[9]). It could also possibly have been from Miami to San Francisco, and on to New York (Cook[10]).
The cosmopolitan gained popularity in the 1990s. It was further popularized among young women by its frequent mention on the television program Sex and the City,[8] where Sarah Jessica Parker's character, Carrie Bradshaw, commonly ordered the drink when out with her girlfriends. The film adaptation made a reference to its popularity when Miranda asks why they stopped drinking them, Carrie replies "because everyone else started."[citation needed]
Preparation and serving [ edit ]
The cosmopolitan is usually served in a large cocktail glass, also called a martini glass. For this reason, the drink is sometimes mistakenly categorized as a type of martini.
The use of citrus flavored vodka as the basis for this cocktail appears to have been widely popularized in the mid 1990s by Dale DeGroff[16] and is used in the IBA approved recipe. However, many bartenders continue to use a standard unflavored vodka and this alternative would undoubtedly be historically consistent with any of the supposed predecessors of this drink that were popular in Ohio, Provincetown, or Minneapolis during the 1970s, or in San Francisco during the 1980s.[17][18][19][20] A lemon twist is sometimes used to garnish.
Variations [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Gary Johnson is gaining ground nationally in his bid to reach the 15 percent that would guarantee him a place alongside Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the presidential debates, according to the results of a new IBD/TIPP poll. The Libertarian candidate’s surge in poll numbers appears to be coming on the backs of the support he has been able to muster among the young voters in America, with the poll suggesting that one in three millennials would prefer voting for Johnson over both major-party candidates.
This poll result comes at an especially crucial time for Johnson with the date for the first presidential debate to be held in New York — September 26 — looming ever closer. According to a report in the Huffington Post, the presidential debate gives the only opportunity available to third-party candidates to increase their reach by almost 50-fold by helping them reach upwards of 50 million Americans at once. Johnson has previously conceded that the future of his campaign depends on whether or not he can make the presidential debate stage, having said that it would be “game over” against Clinton and Trump if he fails to make it.
According to the IBD poll, however, there are reasons for Gary Johnson to feel more confident. He now has 12 percent of national vote, gaining from the roughly 10 percent most polls showed him at the beginning of the last month. In the same poll, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are tied with 39 percent vote, with Green Party candidate Jill Stein trailing all other candidates with just 3 percent of the vote.
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Moreover, young voters seem to be increasingly turning towards Gary Johnson. With the major-party candidates both faring terribly poorly when it comes to support among millennials — especially Donald Trump, who, as the Inquisitr reported recently, was third behind both Clinton and Johnson with just 9 percent of the young vote in a recent poll — it is little wonder that the Libertarian candidate has emerged as the most rational choice for young voters among all the presidential nominees. His views on immigration and foreign policy, coupled with his fiscally conservative and socially liberal outlook, seem to have held him in good stead among voters who consider restricting America’s military role overseas as a major draw, especially when both Clinton and Trump are considered as pro-war candidates.
[Photo by George Frey/Getty Images] During the nominating season, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders commanded a huge support among millennials. But with him out of the picture now, millennials have little choice but to rally behind a candidate with proven credentials and a general unwillingness to steer America into further military interventions in the Middle East and parts of North Africa. While Green Party’s Jill Stein seemed to have appealed to a chunk of those young voters immediately after the Democratic nomination of Hillary Clinton, now with the first debate only three weeks away, Gary Johnson perhaps presents the only realistic option of giving a tough match to both Clinton and Trump in the presidential race.
Among voters aged 18 to 24, Johnson commands a handsome 33 percent of the vote in the new poll, just 4 percent shy of Hillary Clinton. This is a steep rise from Johnson’s performance a month ago, when he was performing at nearly 23 percent among millennial voters.
Moreover, Johnson also commands 22 percent of the independent vote, just 5 percent shy of Hillary Clinton.
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If Gary Johnson’s poll numbers continue to rise in similar fashion over the course of the next three weeks, it is very likely that Americans would see him on the debate stage next to Clinton and Trump on September 26. In fact, as The Hill reports, that is something a majority of Americans also want, with a recent Morning Consult poll showing that 52 percent of Americans want to see Johnson participate in the debate, while another poll carried out by Quinnipiac University showed that 62 percent of likely voters nationally wanted to see Johnson included in the debates.
Would you like Gary Johnson on the debate stage alongside Clinton and Trump?
[Photo by George Frey/Getty Images]Posted on by Art Powell
This post is to accuse the Buttonwood columnist in The Economist of encouraging the theft of people’s savings.
In the Nov 30th 2013 issue he/she says “Debt needs to be reduced by default, inflation or financial repression (keeping interest rates as low as possible).”
Lots of others including economists concerned with government policy make similar statements.
The problem is that one person’s debt is another person’s savings. Therefore when debt is reduced by default or inflation it is going to take away from somebody’s savings. This might be more visible if loans were made directly from a saver to a borrower without the financial intermediation of banks.
It might also be easier to understand if we were to define money as something representing purchasing power. Thus a loan is a transfer of purchasing power from the lender to the borrower. If the loan is not repaid because of default or is reduced by inflation then the lender has lost some of his/her purchasing power.
Some people might say the losses from default are carried by financial institutions. This is true only if the banks are making excess profits. If they are not making excess profits and maybe even if they are the losses are most likely to be spread over all their depositors in the form of reduced interest payments.
Of course people who owe lots of money, especially governments, benefit from inflation because they don’t have to repay as much purchasing power. The ideal should be price stability – zero inflation and zero deflation.
However it happens default or inflation reduces the purchasing power previously owned by savers. To me this is theft by or on behalf of borrowers.
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Filed under: Economics | Tagged: banks, Buttonwood, default, financial institutions, financial intermediation, inflation, money, purchasing power, savings, The Economist, The Econommist |Update (Oct. 26, 2017)– Vice Pumpkin Pence has arrived at the home.
CARMEL, Ind.– A home in Carmel is getting into the Halloween spirit and poking fun at President Donald Trump.
People driving by have been stopping and taking selfies with the scarecrow, which is outfitted in a suit with a red tie and has a pumpkin head carved to look as though it is yelling. The pumpkin is topped with straw for hair. The scarecrow also features very small hands.
The home is located near on Main Street just west of the Arts and Design District.
“Pumpkin Trump” hasn’t garnered any complaints, according to a Carmel city official. The homeowner told the official he was thinking about adding in another scarecrow for Vice President Mike Pence.
A Facebook fan who sent a photo of the scarecrow to us said the display didn’t bother him.I was thinking about doing a full recap/review of Triplemania XXV, but it seems the internet has already garnered a verdict. Despite the high and lows(mostly lows) of Triplemania XXV, I think 1 thing stands out as a diamond in the rough and that has to be the stellar main event between Dr. Wagner Jr. and Psycho Clown. The rest of the show is pretty skippable with lots of matches that just get goofy finishes that seem to be booked to get no one over.
Still the main event featured the legendary Dr. Wagner Jr. and the growing in popularity Psycho Clown. I think the two did a good job and this match held a weight of importance that was more grand than winning the G1 Climax or fighting Brock Lesnar at Summerslam. If you only watch 1 match on the card make it this one at the 5:13 mark.
That’s all, I really liked the match. If this doesn’t convince you to watch the match you can see some gif highlights below :
Edit : It’s no longer on Twitch for free, but they have uploaded it up onto their Youtube Channel.https://youtu.be/iJgD3nDJ_I8This morning, Maker's Mark executives announced that they're reversing the decision to water down their bourbon, in a classy apology posted to the company's Facebook page and website.
When the company announced plans to cut the alcohol content in its bourbon from 45 percent (90 proof) to 42 percent (84 proof) due to supply problems, customers were mad. Really mad. Turns out, people would rather deal with a shortage of their favorite bourbon than a shortage of alcohol in their bourbon.
After taking in the backlash, Maker's Mark had a change of heart. Today, the company tweeted “You spoke. We listened," with a link to a public apology from COO Rob Samuels and his dad, chairman emeritus Bill Samuels, Jr. Here's the text of the letter:
Dear Friends,
Since we announced our decision last week to reduce the alcohol content (ABV) of Maker’s Mark in response to supply constraints, we have heard many concerns and questions from our ambassadors and brand fans. We’re humbled by your overwhelming response and passion for Maker’s Mark. While we thought we were doing what’s right, this is your brand – and you told us in large numbers to change our decision.
You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.
So effective immediately, we are reversing our decision to lower the ABV of Maker’s Mark, and resuming production at 45% alcohol by volume (90 proof). Just like we’ve made it since the very beginning.
The unanticipated dramatic growth rate of Maker’s Mark is a good problem to have, and we appreciate some of you telling us you’d even put up with occasional shortages. We promise we'll deal with them as best we can, as we work to expand capacity at the distillery.
Your trust, loyalty and passion are what’s most important. We realize we can’t lose sight of that. Thanks for your honesty and for reminding us what makes Maker’s Mark, and its fans, so special.
We’ll set about getting back to bottling the handcrafted bourbon that our father/grandfather, Bill Samuels, Sr. created. Same recipe. Same production process. Same product.
As always, we will continue to let you know first about developments at the distillery. In the meantime please keep telling us what’s on your mind and come down and visit us at the distillery. It means a lot to us.
Sincerely,
Rob Samuels Chief Operating Officer rob@makersmark.com
Bill Samuels, Jr Chairman Emeritus bill@makersmark.com
Of course the reversal was primarily a business decision, but this apology is heartfelt and nicely done. Maker's Mark's leaders are human, they made a bad decision, and they're going to make it right. It's that simple. They didn't defend their motives or sneak in any excessive marketing. They didn't even try compromising to cut the difference. Instead, they acknowledged that they let down their customers and promised to return to the original recipe—even if that means more shortages. The letter reminds fans that Maker's Mark is still a family business, and including their direct email addresses is a meaningful gesture in itself.
We can't always predict our customers' feelings, and when we get something wrong, they have every right to tell us they're mad. The way we respond to angry customers says a lot about our brand, and Maker's Mark was listening. This sort of transparency goes a long way with customers.
Follow me on Twitter: @katekieferIt is being reported that girl group KARA member Han Seung Yeon has bought a building in Cheongdamdong, a high-scale neighborhood in Seoul.
According to the press, she bought the building for 4,550,000,000 Korean won, which is approximately |
all around
Your designer will love the flexibility, and your PM will fart rainbows at how fast you are.
Oh, and that observer thingy? That ensures your components re-render when state changes.
Next week, I'm going to write about persisting those changes to a backend of some sort. I’m still working on how to make that part effortless and clean 🙂
Maybe I should make a Building Webapps With React and MobX book? Tell me if you're interested.
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It's where I go to shoot the shit about programming.Michigan isn’t called “the Great Lake state” for nothing. No matter where you go in the state, you’ll never venture more than 85 miles away from at least one of the Great Lakes. And hidden within those lakes are thousands of historic shipwrecks — 1,500 of which are owned by Michigan itself.
Related Content Explorers Find Second Oldest Shipwreck in the Great Lakes
The statistic comes from Laura Ashlee, who works for the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office. Last week, she dropped the staggering number of state-owned shipwrecks in an interview given to MLive’s Stephen Kloosterman, who was reporting on recent revelations that a ship thought to be a French wreck that disappeared in the seventeenth century wasn’t in fact the earliest-known shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
Why does Michigan possess so many wrecked ships? Chalk it up to the Great Lakes’ historic importance as a commercial shipping route. The Michigan Shipwreck Research Association estimates that a total of 6,000 ships litter the bottom of the Great Lakes, deposited there by the ravages of weather, human error and just plain bad luck.
Because the Great Lakes are chilly and fresh, they do a great job of preserving wrecked vessels. Clear waters can make the vessels visible from the air, but the real treasures lie beneath the surface.
“Clearly the remains of these vessels are invaluable,” writes former Michigan State Archaeologist John Halsey. But, he notes, that doesn’t mean every state has always taken shipwrecks seriously. It’s hard to find and document shipwreck sites, let alone find funds to preserve them. Another problem, writes Halsey, is sport divers — though they are often the primary parties to explore and locate shipwrecks, their activities sometimes disturb invaluable artifacts.
That led to the creation of Michigan’s underwater preserve system in the 1980s. UpNorthLive’s Brody O’Connell reports that the system keeps shipwrecks open to divers as long as they don’t disturb or remove underwater artifacts. Tamper with a wreck, and you could face felony charges, equipment confiscation, and even prison time.
Still, sport divers are an invaluable source of information about shipwrecks. Organizations like the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association work with divers to help assess, explore, document and interpret what lies beneath, while the state gathers information about wrecks from divers who make sometimes astonishing finds.
But watch out — shipwreck diving can become an addiction. In the words of the Michigan Underwater Preserve Council, “after diving in any of Michigan’s underwater preserves, you may find yourself wanting to try them all.”A New Zealand All Blacks’ jersey signed by the 2016 All Blacks’ Squad has sold for Rp300 million (US$21,200; NZ$31,300) at a charity auction in Jakarta, with the proceeds earmarked for the development of the sport among young women in Indonesia. The figure is believed to be a world record for an All Blacks’ jersey at a charity event.
Former All Blacks’ half-back Byron Kelleher was present at the auction and expressed his sincere gratitude to all assembled knowing just what it means seeing such generosity and as to what it means to those like him who have worn the famous jersey.
Audience members at the auction organised as part of the annual Priscilla Hall Memorial Foundation (PHMF) Golf Invitational Day, a charity for needy children, were left “stunned” when a bidding war broke out between two expatriate businessmen.
The successful bidder was Kevin Jose, who is the head of Aedas (an international architectural design firm) in Singapore and also an Aedas Board member in London. Kevin in his humbleness said that he was most happy to help the young ladies from the Komodos’ Women’s Rugby Team and that he had bought the framed jersey as a gift for his daughter’s 16th birthday.
“Bidding started at Rp 5 million [US$370], which climbed immediately to Rp50 million, then Rp 100 million, then Rp 150 million and just kept on going,” said Jess Djamhoer, chairwoman of the Jakarta Komodos Junior Rugby Club. “The crowd were blown away when the final figure hit Rp300 million. It was an emotional moment for everybody there.”
Proceeds of the auction of the All Blacks’ jersey, donated by PT AIG Insurance Indonesia, will go toward the Komodos’ team of young women from the Mama Sayang Orphanage, including a planned trip to the Bangkok International Rugby Tens in February, 2017.
During the auction Jess stood on the stage with John Paul Jones, the head of AIG, Stephen Barber, Indonesian Rugby Life Member, and three young ladies, Ester, Angel and Lina, from the Jakarta Komodos Women’s Rugby Team. Together on the stage they all shared their tears of joy and smiles of thanks as the auction price grew and grew to its ultimate height. The feeling of elation was incredible among the group on the stage and this overflowed into the room.
The Jakarta Komodos Rugby Club places a strong emphasis on junior rugby development, with a number of age-group teams, plus development sides comprising boys and girls from Mama Sayang, as well as local children living near the club’s training grounds in Kranggan. The club regularly sponsors disadvantaged children to attend international rugby tournaments.
“We are sending teams to Singapore for a tournament starting tomorrow, including five Kranggan players,” said Jess. “A month ago these kids didn’t have passports. Tonight they are flying abroad for an international rugby tournament to compete against the best in Southeast Asia. It’s impossible to put into words how much of a positive impact this will have on their lives. This is why we love rugby.”
Jess said the Jakarta Komodos Rugby Club were passionate about rugby and about developing the game in Indonesia. “We have great sponsors, such as AIG, DHL, Danone, PHMF, Britcham, ACH Management, MacMahon and Britmindo, but events such as the charity auction really showcase how individuals can rally around a great cause and contribute.”
Aaron Meadows, coach of the Mama Sayang side, said the Komodos and the team were “both grateful and humbled” by the funding. “We have done our best with a shoestring budget over the past few years, but this much-needed assistance will allow us to give our players more opportunity and the chance to compete in Bangkok next year.”
He said that despite their circumstances, the Mama Sayang team had embraced the game of rugby.
“Having taken over from founding coach, Stephen Barber, this season, I have been fortunate to have the chance to work with a new crop of young female players who now will be better equipped to a for a spot in touring and national teams thanks to this amazing act of generosity,” Aaron said.“I can’t say thank you enough for the difference this will make in the lives of some very special young people.”
Barber, a key founder of rugby in Indonesia and in recent times Women’s Rugby, said rugby was more than just 80 minutes of on-field action. “The Komodos and all rugby players in Indonesia want to acknowledge the efforts of everybody behind the scenes who donate time, energy and money to the growth of the sport in Indonesia and around the world,” he said. “We are not only aiming to develop rugby among children in Indonesia, but also developing children through rugby.”The head of the TTC's union says management isn't doing enough to protect maintenance workers who repair and maintain subway tracks during overnight shutdowns.
Bob Kinnear spoke about the issue on CBC Radio's Metro Morning Friday, one day after the release of a TTC report into the death of track supervisor Peter Pavlovski.
A 49 year-old supervisor with more than 20 years of experience, died after he was hit by a southbound work car while inspecting the tracks north of Yorkdale station at 4:44 a.m. on Sept.14, 2012.
A TTC mechanic also suffered head and leg injuries in the accident.
The report concluded the two men crossed from the northbound track to the southbound track without first notifying transit control, which is TTC protocol.
The crew of the southbound work train did not know the two men were on the southbound track and in the darkness were unable to see them in time to stop.
But Kinnear said overnight track crews are expected to complete their work in tight, four-hour windows before subway service resumes, which he said puts them at risk.
"When it comes to safety of workers, the financial constraints and the time constraints should not be imposed on us," he told host Matt Galloway.
"There is severe pressure down there for them to conclude that work and get it done," he said.
The incident report also said there exists "a culture" in which track workers and supervisors often cross into unprotected areas at track level for short periods of time during the late-night maintenance sessions.
Kinnear, however, denied TTC workers regularly violate safety rules.
"Right now, we have about four hours at the best of times in which they've got to conduct improvements and maintaining of the track and that is a real concern."
The report recommends the TTC extend its blue light warning system, which alerts train operators when work crews are on the tracks. That system is currently only in use when the subway is operating.PRINCETON, NJ -- The historically high gap between partisans' job approval ratings of Barack Obama continued during Obama's third year in office, with an average of 80% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans approving of the job he was doing.
In fact, Obama's Year Three average 68-percentage-point partisan gap is tied for the fourth highest in Gallup records dating back to the Eisenhower administration. Only George W. Bush's fourth, fifth, and sixth years in office showed higher degrees of political polarization. Together, Bush and Obama account for the 7 most polarized years, and 8 of the top 10.
Notably, 3 of the top 10 years coincided with presidents' re-election years, including Bush in 2004, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Ronald Reagan in 1984. In fact, a president's fourth year tends to be the most polarized, as has been the case for each of the last six elected presidents. Since 1953, Eisenhower is the only elected president whose fourth year was not his most polarized; his sixth year -- a midterm election year -- was the one with the largest gap in his approval ratings by party.
Americans likely view a president seeking re-election in more sharply partisan terms as they decide whether he is deserving of a second term in office. Thus, it would be expected that Obama's already highly polarized ratings may become more so over the next 12 months.
2011 Is Most Polarized Third Year by a Wide Margin
The 68-point gap between partisans' approval ratings of Obama last year is nine points higher than that for any other president's third year. George W. Bush had the previous high for a third year. The list of third-year averages underscores the point that the highly polarized ratings are a more recent phenomenon, with four of the last five presidents at the top of the list.
Obama also holds the record for most polarized first and second years in office.
Implications
Obama ran his successful 2008 presidential campaign partly on bringing Americans together, but that has not been the case in practice to date. Republicans rarely say they approve of the job he is doing, while Democrats rarely say they disapprove. Thus, Obama's ratings have been consistently among the most polarized for a president in the last 60 years.
That may not be a reflection on Obama himself as much as on the current political environment in the United States, because Obama's immediate predecessor, Bush, had similarly polarized ratings, particularly in the latter stages of his presidency after the rally in support from the 9/11 terror attacks faded.
Given the typical pattern in which presidents' ratings tend to be most polarized in their fourth year in office, when presidents are seeking re-election, Republicans' and Democrats' views of Obama may diverge even further this year.
Explore President Obama's approval ratings in depth and compare them with those of past presidents in the Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center.Jurgen Klopp’s face after seeing the new Liverpool shirt. (Picture: Getty Images)
If we’re being completely honest, the home kits of Premier League teams never really changes that much, does it?
Every year a modified version of the overpriced jersey becomes available to buy just months after shelling out on the previous effort in time to give it an airing during the new season.
This campaign Liverpool donned their New Balance effort with Standard Chartered scrawled across the front like a rather wealthy badge of honour in the hope that come May, they’ll be able to cover it up with a glistening Premier League medal.
Given the time of the season, the Merseyside club have reduced the price of their current jersey to £30 for men, £30 for women and £28 for children in preparation for the Klopp’s stars to don next year’s effort during the final domestic game of the season away at West Brom.
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That kit, according to Footy Headlines, has been leaked online… and it is a magical strip.
The traditional red remains (obviously) but the white has been replaced with yellow, the collar has been snazzed up with what looks like a button and well, you can cast your own opinion because here it is:
Do you like Liverpool’s new home kit? Let us know in the comments below.David Michael Hasselhoff (born July 17, 1952),[1] nicknamed "The Hoff",[2] is an American actor, singer, producer, and businessman, who set a Guinness World Record as the most watched man on TV.[3] He first gained recognition on The Young and The Restless, playing Dr. Snapper Foster. His career continued with his leading role as Michael Knight on Knight Rider and as L.A. County Lifeguard Mitch Buchannon in the series Baywatch. Hasselhoff produced Baywatch from the 1990s until 2001 when the series ended with Baywatch Hawaii. On screen, he appeared in films including Click, Dodgeball, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and Hop.
In 2000, he made his Broadway debut in the musical Jekyll & Hyde. Following his debut, he starred in other musicals including Chicago and The Producers.
Early life [ edit ]
Hasselhoff was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Dolores Therese (née Mullinex/Mullinix; died February 11, 2009), a homemaker, and Joseph Vincent Hasselhoff, a business executive.[1][4] His family is Roman Catholic, and of German, Irish and English descent.[4][5][6] His great-great-grandmother, Meta, emigrated with her family to Baltimore from Völkersen, Germany, 30 kilometres (19 mi) from Bremen, in 1865.[7]
He spent his childhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and later lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended Marist High School. Hasselhoff made his theatrical debut at the age of seven in Peter Pan, and ever since his childhood dream was to have a career on Broadway.[8] He graduated from Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois in 1970.[9] He was a member of the speech team, senior discussion leaders, president of the choir, captain of the volleyball team and held roles in several plays (including one lead role as Matt in The Fantasticks). He studied at Oakland University before graduating with a degree in theater at the California Institute of the Arts.[10]
Early career [ edit ]
Hasselhoff in costume as Michael Knight in 1986
Hasselhoff portrayed Dr. "Snapper Foster" on The Young and the Restless from 1975–82, leaving the series as the show wrote out many of their original characters. In 1979, he played "Simon" in Starcrash. He launched his singing career with guest appearances on the first season of children's program Kids Incorporated, performing "Do You Love Me". He guest starred on two episodes of Diff'rent Strokes and the soap opera Santa Barbara as himself in 1984.
Knight Rider [ edit ]
Hasselhoff was recruited by then NBC President Brandon Tartikoff to star in the science-fiction series Knight Rider from 1982 to 1986 as Michael Knight. He has described Knight Rider as more than a TV show: "It's a phenomenon. It's bigger than Baywatch ever was." On the success of Knight Rider – "It's because it was about saving lives, not taking lives, and it was how one man really can make a difference."[citation needed]
He describes the acting he has done as "a little more difficult than if you had a regularly well-written script – like, if I was going to be in, say, Reservoir Dogs, or The Godfather, or Dances with Wolves or Lawrence of Arabia or ER, I had to talk to a car."[11] His role in the show led him to a People's Choice Award for 'Most Popular Actor'.[12] Now, over 33 years later, the show is still playing throughout the world.[13]
Baywatch [ edit ]
Hasselhoff in 2005
Hasselhoff returned to television on Baywatch which premiered in 1989. Although it was canceled after only one season, he believed the series had potential, so Hasselhoff revived it for the first-run syndication market in 1991, investing his own money and additionally functioning as executive producer. His contract stipulated royalties to be paid to him from the rerun profits, which gave him the financial liberty to buy back the rights to Baywatch from NBC.
In its second incarnation, Baywatch was much more successful. It ran for a total of 11 years and, from the 1990s until its series finale in 2001, was watched by almost 1 billion viewers across 140 countries, solidifying his status among the world's foremost television personalities of the said period.[14] This success combined with his royalties and his other ventures have placed Hasselhoff's fortune at more than $100 million.[15]
In 1991, Hasselhoff reprised his role as Michael Knight in the television film Knight Rider 2000 as a sequel to the original series. The movie served as a pilot for a proposed new series, but despite high ratings, the plan was abandoned.
In 1996, Hasselhoff was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1997, he performed a duet with Filipino singer Regine Velasquez, which was used as the main theme for his 1998 movie Legacy. He made his Broadway debut in 2000 in the title role of Jekyll & Hyde. In August 2001, he hosted an event at the Conga Room, in Los Angeles honoring the Latin rock band Renegade for record sales in excess of 30 million units worldwide, taking the stage with the Latin rockers and singing in Spanish.[16] Beginning on July 16, 2004, he played the lead role in London performances of Chicago for three months.[17]
Hasselhoff has made several self-parodic appearances in movies. He had a major role in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, released November 19, 2004, starring as himself (though resembling his bygone Baywatch character) and meeting SpongeBob and Patrick (his full name is heard once in the movie; he is referred to as "Hasselhoff"). Hasselhoff also had another short appearance in the movie DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story as the dodgeball coach to the German national dodgeball team, Team Hasselhoff. Berating his team after being eliminated from a tournament, he shouts "Ihr seid alle Schweine!" (translated: "You are all pigs!", a common German insult) and smashes a photo of himself in his Baywatch attire. In 2004's EuroTrip, Hasselhoff appears in a washroom. In the 2006 Adam Sandler film Click Hasselhoff portrays Sandler's despicable boss. Hasselhoff also appears in an episode of Wildboyz. In 2007, he again played himself in the Jamie Kennedy comedy Kickin' It Old Skool.[citation needed]
In his music video for "Jump in My Car", he engages in self-parody; this time parodying his performance as Michael Knight in Knight Rider. The car in the video was a black Pontiac Trans Am with a pulsing LED and an interior nearly identical to that of the KITT car in the series. The video was shot in Sydney, Australia using a right-hand drive KITT replica, including KITT's ejection seat system.[18]
In November 2006, Mel Brooks announced Hasselhoff would portray Roger DeBris, the director of the Nazi musical Springtime for Hitler, in the Las Vegas production of The Producers.[19]
In 2006, Hasselhoff became a co-judge on NBC's America's Got Talent, a show that showcases America's best amateur entertainers. He also judged in the second, third and fourth seasons alongside Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan. On the 2007 season finale, Hasselhoff sang "This is the Moment." He was replaced by comedian Howie Mandel for season five.[20]
Later career [ edit ]
Hasselhoff produced Baywatch for first run syndication. He has spoken at both the Oxford and Cambridge Student Unions.[21]
He was a celebrity cast member on the eleventh season of Dancing with the Stars which increased in ratings by 36% from the previous year and served as a judge on NBC's America's Got Talent from 2006–09. In 2011, he joined the Britain's Got Talent judging panel, replacing Simon Cowell.[22]
Hasselhoff was later honored on Comedy Central's The Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff[23] in addition to receiving the International Star of the Year Award for Outstanding Contribution to Global Entertainment by the Bollywood Awards.[24] He was awarded the Comeback Star of the Year award during the VH1 Big in '06 Awards.[25]
David Hasselhoff waving the checkered flag at the 2008 Gumball 3000
In February 2008, towards the end of the Knight Rider 2008, he reprised his career-making role as Michael Knight as he walked on to introduce himself to his on-screen son, Mike Traceur. On November 12, 2008, he became the first celebrity downloadable character for the PlayStation Network's video game Pain.[citation needed]
In September 2009, he featured on a radio podcast for Compare the Meerkat, part of the advertising for British website, Comparethemarket.com.[26] He was the subject of an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as a result of his support for the re-opening of Morecambe Winter Gardens.[27]
In 2010, Hasselhoff guest hosted professional wrestling's WWE Raw in London, England. On August 15, 2010, Comedy Central aired a special "roast" of Hasselhoff.[28]
Hasselhoff returned to The Young and the Restless, reprising his role as "Snapper" for a short arc that aired in mid-June 2010.[29] Hasselhoff appeared as a contestant on season 11 of Dancing with the Stars. His professional dance partner was Kym Johnson. On September 21, 2010, they were the first couple eliminated from the competition. Coincidentally, Hasselhoff competed against Brandy Norwood, who judged alongside him in the first season of America's Got Talent.[30]
In October 2010, it was announced that he would be playing Captain Hook in the New Wimbledon Theatre production of the pantomime "Peter Pan" from December 2010 to January 2011.[31] He has reprised his role of "Hoff the Hook"[32] for 2012 at the Manchester Opera House.
In 2011, he was a guest judge at the Belgian Idols competition.[33] Hasselhoff became a judge on Britain's Got Talent in 2011 alongside Amanda Holden, Michael McIntyre and Simon Cowell. However, Hasselhoff was axed after only one series on the show. In 2011, he revived his music career with a short tour across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.[citation needed] In the same year, Hasselhoff was featured in the trailer of the spin-off downloadable game, Burnout Crash!.
On February 24, 2014, he opened his own 10-week talk show in Sweden on TV3, in English.[34] A similar show was later recorded in Finland, premiering on Sub on April 2, 2015.[35]
On New Year's Eve he performed again at the Brandenburg Gate, arriving late because his plane was diverted to Hannover.[36][37][38]
Hasselhoff had a major role in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! which premiered globally on July 22, 2015. He then starred in a new musical, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life at the Blackpool Opera House, late in 2015.[39]
On May 18, 2017 Funner, California[40] introduced its first official mayor: David Hasselhoff.[41][42][43]
Hasselhoff also starred in a cameo role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as himself. He additionally lent his appearance to a retro styled music video found on the film's DVD and Blu-Ray release.
Get Hasselhoff to Number 1 campaign [ edit ]
On April 21, 2006, fans of David Hasselhoff launched a tongue-in-cheek website "Get Hasselhoff to Number 1"[44] in an attempt to get the 1989 hit "Looking for Freedom" to the top of the UK music charts through Internet downloads of the single. The campaign attracted attention on British radio and television broadcasts, in the national press[45] and on the Internet.[46][47] Over 40,000 people signed up to receive the "Hoff Alert" e-mail when the time had come to purchase the single. The focus of the campaign shifted to "Jump in My Car", when that was actually released as a single, and BBC Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills lent his support.[48] On October 3, 2006, "the Hoff Alert" was sent out, and Hasselhoff promptly gained his highest ever UK chart entry (number 3) on October 8, 2006.[citation needed]
HoffSpace [ edit ]
Hasselhoff with journalist Irina Slutsky promoting social networking venture HoffSpace
In 2008 Hasselhoff launched a MySpace-like social networking site, known as "HoffSpace".[49]
The Hasselhoffs [ edit ]
Hasselhoff and his daughters, Taylor-Ann and Hayley, starred in a reality series on A&E called The Hasselhoffs. The series launched on December 5, 2010, and focused on Hasselhoff's attempts to resuscitate his career and launch his daughters onto the Hollywood stage.[50]
On December 10, 2010, A&E confirmed in a statement that, after airing just two episodes, The Hasselhoffs had been canceled. According to Nielsen Co. ratings, the first episode was seen by 718,000 viewers. Viewers dropped to 505,000 for the second installment, which aired on the same evening. The full series aired in the UK on May 30, 2011, on The Biography Channel.[51]
Hasselhoff stars in a casino-style game series online, produced in partnership with Eric Bischoff[citation needed] with Europe being among the first markets to roll out the game. In keeping with internet and online gambling culture in the UK, "The Hoff" series of games includes video slots and scratch-card type games, all played for real money in Europe's online casino environment. The first in the series of games launched on Valentine's Day in early March 2013, with media and promotional activities commencing in early February.[52]
Hoff the Record [ edit ]
In 2014, UK channel Dave announced that it had commissioned Hoff the Record, a sitcom series in which Hasselhoff plays a fictionalized version of himself. The series started airing on June 18, 2015.[53]
It's No Game & The HoffBot [ edit ]
In 2017 Hasselhoff appeared in short film It's No Game by director Oscar Sharp, playing "The HoffBot". Hasselhoff's lines were generated by a neural network artificial intelligence (called Benjamin) using a statistical model trained on his own 80's and 90s television performances. Hasselhoff said the A.I. "really had a handle on what's going on in my life and it was strangely emotional".[54]
Music career [ edit ]
Looking for Freedom [ edit ]
His music career took off in the late 1980s and achieved success at the tops of the charts, with his album Looking for Freedom which went triple platinum in Europe. He had one #1 hit in the German pop charts in spring of 1989 ("Looking for Freedom").[55] He was noted for his performance of the single at the Berlin Wall on New Year's Eve 1989, two months after the East German government had opened the wall, but nine months before unification took place. Wearing a piano-keyboard scarf and a leather jacket covered in motion lights, Hasselhoff stood in a bucket crane and performed the song along with the crowd. The performance has had a lasting impact on German pop-culture with Hasselhoff commenting that the song became an "anthem" and "song of hope" for the people of East Germany. In 2004, Hasselhoff lamented the lack of a photo of him in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin.[56][57]
Later music career [ edit ]
In 1993, he released the single "Pingu Dance" based on the children's show Pingu. In 1994, he was scheduled to perform a concert on pay-per-view from Atlantic City. The concert was expected to help reignite his singing career in the United States. However, on the night of the concert, O. J. Simpson was involved in a police chase in southern California. Viewership of the concert was significantly lower than expected due to the live coverage of the chase, and the event was ultimately a $1.5 million loss.[58]
In May 2006, Hasselhoff returned to the spotlight after he was mentioned in an interview of Dirk Nowitzki, an NBA star playing for the Dallas Mavericks and a native of Germany. Nowitzki was asked what he does to concentrate when shooting foul shots. Dirk replied that he sings "Looking for Freedom" to himself. He meant this as a joke but it was thought to be a serious answer. Shortly thereafter, Hasselhoff attended the May 26, 2006, Mavericks home playoff game where they faced the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Western Conference Finals. Interviewed by Craig Sager, Hasselhoff stated he was as much a fan of Nowitzki as Nowitzki was a fan of him. In The 2006 NBA Finals, fans of the Miami Heat in the American Airlines Arena held up facial photos of Hasselhoff and chanted his name when Nowitzki went to the foul line. On August 2, 2006, he proclaimed himself "King of the Internet" in a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for Pipex.[59]
In December 2008, he sang the national anthem at the NCAA Las Vegas Bowl. Although the game was televised live by ESPN, the station chose not to broadcast Hasselhoff's performance.[60]
In 2015, he recorded the single "True Survivor", accompanied by a music video, which featured as the lead track for the 2015 Swedish short film Kung Fury.[61] The song was composed by Mitch Murder (Johan Bengtsson). Recorded in Sweden, the song and the video is designed as an ostentatious over-the-top 1980s homage/parody, with the video featuring dinosaurs, kung fu, Adolf Hitler, skateboarding, Norse Gods and time travelling. Hasselhoff claimed that he had received the offer to record the song and the video by a request from Sweden Universal to "sing a tribute to the '80s".[62] Hasselhoff performed a live version of the song during the 2016 Guldbagge Awards.[63][64] In 2017, a retro music video called "Guardians' Inferno" was released as a bonus on the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 home release, where Hasselhoff does the singing.[65]
Personal life [ edit ]
Hasselhoff's autobiography Making Waves was released in the UK in September 2006. In an interview in April 2006, he said the book would present the "last chapter" regarding controversial elements of his personal life.[66]
In November 2015, Hasselhoff posted a YouTube video in which he announced that he had changed his name to "David Hoff".[67] It was then reported that he was not changing his name; that the video was an excerpt from an upcoming advertising campaign.[68]
After touring Glasgow in late 2015, Hasselhoff stated that he supports Scottish football team Partick Thistle F.C..[69]
Family [ edit ]
Hasselhoff was married to actress Catherine Hickland from March 24, 1984, to March 1, 1989.[1] Their wedding was recreated in the Knight Rider Season 4 episode "The Scent of Roses" which first aired on January 3, 1986.
Hasselhoff married actress Pamela Bach in December 1989.[70] The couple have two daughters: Taylor Ann Hasselhoff, born May 5, 1990,[71] who attended the University of Arizona and was cast for the 2015 season of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills, and actress Hayley Hasselhoff, born August 28, 1992.[72] In January 2006, Hasselhoff announced he was filing for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.[70] Their divorce was finalized in August 2006.[73] Bach was given custody of one daughter and Hasselhoff custody of the other,[74] until Hasselhoff later obtained custody of both.[73] As of December 2010 he resided in Southern California with his daughters.[75]
In 2012, Hasselhoff began dating Hayley Roberts, from the town of Glynneath in Wales. He is a fan of Welsh rugby union, and they regularly attend matches in Wales.[76][77][78] He and Hayley were married at a ceremony in Italy on July 31, 2018.[79][80]
Alcoholism [ edit ]
On May 3, 2007, a viral video surfaced online of Hasselhoff appearing to be severely drunk inside his home. His daughter, Taylor Ann, who filmed the video, can be heard interrogating him and asking him to stop abusing alcohol. She also warns her father he could be jeopardizing his spot on the Las Vegas production of The Producers he starred in at the time.[81] In the wake of the leaked clip, Hasselhoff issued a statement saying it was recorded by Taylor Ann so that he could see how he behaved while intoxicated and the footage was deliberately released.[82][83] As a result of the video, Hasselhoff's visitation rights with his two daughters were suspended on May 7, 2007, for two weeks until the video's authenticity and distributor were determined.[84] In May 2009, Hasselhoff's attorney, Mel Goldsman, described Hasselhoff as "a recovering alcoholic".[85]
List of works [ edit ]
Honors and awards [ edit ]
1983 – Favorite Male Performer in a New TV Program: People's Choice Awards
2005 – International Star of the Year Award for Outstanding Contribution to Global Entertainment: Bollywood Awards
2006 – Comeback Star of the Year: VH1 Big in '06 Awards
2010 – The Comedy Central Roast of David Hasselhoff: Comedy CentralThis article is about military applications. For more general information, see Allotropes of phosphorus § White phosphorus
White phosphorus is a material made from a common allotrope of the chemical element phosphorus that is used in smoke, tracer illumination, and incendiary munitions.[1] Other common names include WP and the slang term "Willie Pete" or "Willie Peter" derived from William Peter, the World War II phonetic alphabet for "WP", which is still sometimes used in military jargon.[2] As an incendiary weapon, white phosphorus is pyrophoric (self-igniting), burns fiercely and can ignite cloth, skin, fuel, ammunition, and other combustibles.
In addition to its offensive capabilities, white phosphorus is a highly efficient smoke-producing agent, which burns quickly and produces an immediate blanket of smoke. As a result, smoke-producing white phosphorus munitions are very common, particularly as smoke grenades for infantry, loaded in grenade launchers on tanks and other armoured vehicles, as part of the ammunition allotment for artillery or mortars and as payload of incendiary cluster bombs. These create smoke screens to mask friendly forces' movement, position, infrared signatures, or shooting positions.
History [ edit ]
White phosphorus is believed to have been first used by Fenian arsonists in the 19th century, in the form of a solution in carbon disulfide. When the carbon disulfide evaporated, the |
way.
Our culture is bombarded with images of breasts as sexual objects, so we can barely catch a glimpse of side boob without thinking it’s sexual. I remember visiting my aunts’ house when I was a young girl for an after-christening party. All of my aunts and my mom went into one of the bedrooms at one point during the party and being curious, I followed and knocked on the door continuously until they let me in. I walked about the room not spotting anything out of place until I noticed my aunt on a corner of the bed with a baby up to her chest. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I realised later on that she was breast feeding. Now as I look back I realise that my aunt had to go to her bedroom in her own home during a party celebrating the baptism of her child and breast fed him through a locked door.
The stigmatisation of breast-feeding that results from sexualisation of breasts has caused widespread discomfort for nursing mothers. In 2006, the editors of US Babytalk magazine received many complaints from readers after the cover of an issue showed a baby nursing at a bare breast. Even though the model’s nipple was not shown, readers wrote that the image was ‘gross’. This is from a magazine called ‘BABYTALK’. Seriously.
editor Susan Kane commented, “There’s a huge puritanical streak in Americans.” In a 2004 survey conducted by the American Dietetic Association, only 43% of the 3,719 respondents believed women ought to have the right to breast-feed in public.
Indeed, another UK magazine called Mother & Baby came under fire when the deputy editor, Kathryn Blundell, told readers that she bottle fed her baby because, ‘I wanted my body back and to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach. They’re part of my sexuality too, not just breasts but fun bags, and when you have that attitude, seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy.’ The anti-breastfeeding overtone of her words resulted in six complaints to the British Press Complaints Commission and prompted a heated debate, but Blundell also received support for her comments.
Many cultures consider women who expose their nipples as immodest and contrary to social norms. In many places a woman can be socially or officially harassed for indecent exposure, public indecency or disorderly conduct. Even social networking sites such as Facebook remove images of breasts and breastfeeding because they are ‘obscene’. Although other cultures accept toplessness as the norm, notably Native Americans, the Dayek, Javanese, and the Balinese people of Indonesia before contact with the West and the introduction of Islam.
Check out the picture below. They’re just breasts. They’re so similar looking if you stare at them long enough you start to wonder what the big deal is!
Topfreedom is a cultural and political movement whose objective is to advance gender equality by recognising that women have the right to be bare chested in public the same way men can. Women get together on August 24th each year to protest this, and people in cities all around the world participate to show solidarity.
Fetishes are created by selectively hiding and revealing, making that which is hidden enticing. Both men and women become intrigued. There are many things you can find attractive in a person, like their eyes, their neck or their muscles, but men in general seem to have life long membership to the boob appreciation club. Like it or not, breasts are a widespread fetish.
Taking nudist colonies for instance; they spend the majority of their time naked but they don’t link nudity to sex the way we as a culture do. I think there would be a great deal of benefits for society if public toplessness for women was accepted. These include an increase in equality by not sexualising women’s bodies, an increase in positive body image because bodies would be normalised, less objectification over time and reduction in the sexualisation power of the media.
If women could choose whether or not to show their breasts in the same context men could, then perhaps over time we as a culture could become desensitised to the idea of breasts being sexual. We can’t know for sure but fair play to Topfreedom and topless women all over the world for trying to bring about some change.This article presents a number of methodologies that have been suggested for the task of comparing the greatest chess players in history. Statistical methods offer objectivity but, while there is agreement on systems to rate the strengths of current players, there is disagreement on whether such techniques can be applied to players from different generations who never competed against each other.
Statistical methods [ edit ]
Elo system [ edit ]
Perhaps the best-known statistical model is that devised by Arpad Elo in 1960 and further elaborated on in his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present.[1] He gave ratings to players corresponding to their performance over the best five-year span of their career. According to this system the highest ratings achieved were:
(Though published in 1978, Elo's list did not include five-year averages for Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. It did list January 1978 ratings of 2780 for Fischer and 2725 for Karpov.)[2]
In 1970, FIDE adopted Elo's system for rating current players, so one way to compare players of different eras is to compare their Elo ratings. The best-ever Elo ratings are tabulated below.[3]
As of December 2015, there were 101 chess players in history who broke 2700 and nine of them exceeded 2800.[4][5][6][7][8] Particularly notable are the peak ratings of Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov, who achieved their peak ratings in earlier years (1972, 1994, and 1999 respectively).
Average rating over time [ edit ]
The average Elo rating of top players has risen over time. For instance, the average of the top 10 active players rose from 2751 in July 2000 to 2794 in July 2014, a 43-point increase in 14 years. The average rating of the top 100 players, meanwhile, increased from 2644 to 2703, a 59-point increase.[9] Many people believe that this rise is mostly due to a system artifact known as ratings inflation, making it impractical to compare players of different eras.[10]
Arpad Elo was of the opinion that it was futile to attempt to use ratings to compare players from different eras; in his view, they could only possibly measure the strength of a player as compared to his or her contemporaries. He also stated that the process of rating players was in any case rather approximate; he compared it to "the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind".[11]
Chessmetrics [ edit ]
Many statisticians besides Elo have devised similar methods to retrospectively rate players. Jeff Sonas' rating system is called "Chessmetrics". This system takes account of many games played after the publication of Elo's book, and claims to take account of the rating inflation that the Elo system has allegedly suffered.
One caveat is that a Chessmetrics rating takes into account the frequency of play. According to Sonas, "As soon as you go a month without playing, your Chessmetrics rating will start to drop."[12]
Sonas, like Elo, claims that it is impossible to compare the strength of players from different eras, saying:
Of course, a rating always indicates the level of dominance of a particular player against contemporary peers; it says nothing about whether the player is stronger/weaker in their actual technical chess skill than a player far removed from them in time. So while we cannot say that Bobby Fischer in the early 1970s or José Capablanca in the early 1920s were the "strongest" players of all time, we can say with a certain amount of confidence that they were the two most dominant players of all time. That is the extent of what these ratings can tell us.[13]
Nevertheless, Sonas' website does compare players from different eras. Including data until December 2004, the ratings were:
In 2005,[19] Sonas used Chessmetrics to evaluate historical annual performance ratings and came to the conclusion that Kasparov was dominant for the most years, followed by Karpov and Lasker. He also published the following list of the highest ratings ever attained according to calculations done at the start of each month:[20]
Warriors of the Mind [ edit ]
In contrast to Elo and Sonas's systems, Raymond Keene and Nathan Divinsky's book Warriors of the Mind[21] attempts to establish a rating system claiming to compare directly the strength of players active in different eras, and so determine the strongest player of all time (through December 2004). Considering games played between sixty-four of the strongest players in history, they came up with the following top ten:[22]
These "Divinsky numbers" are not on the same scale as Elo ratings (the last person on the list, Johannes Zukertort, has a Divinsky number of 873, which would be a beginner-level Elo rating). Keene and Divinsky's system has met with limited acceptance,[23] and Warriors of the Mind has been accused of arbitrarily selecting players and bias towards modern players.[24]
Moves played compared with computer choices [ edit ]
Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko [ edit ]
A computer-based method of analyzing chess abilities across history came from Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko from the Department of Computer and Information Science of University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2006.[25] The basis for their evaluation was the difference between the position values resulting from the moves played by the human chess player and the moves chosen as best by the chess program Crafty. They compared the average number of errors in the player's game. Opening moves were excluded, in an attempt to negate the progress in chess opening theory.
The method received a number of criticisms, including: the study used a modified version of Crafty rather than the standard version; even the standard version of Crafty was not strong enough to evaluate the world champions' play; one of the modifications restricted the search depth to 12 half-moves, which is often insufficient.[26] As of 2006 Crafty's Elo rating was 2657, below many historical top human players and several other computer programs.
A study by online chess data provider Chess-DB, based on an analysis of over 50,000 chess games, claims that the "strength" of a player, as determined by the method of Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko, correlates with the Elo rating strength of modern players.[27]
Rybka [ edit ]
A similar project was conducted for World Champions in 2007–08 using Rybka 2.3.2a (then-strongest chess program) and a modified version of Crafty 20.14.[28] It arrived at the following results:[29][30]
Position best year best 2-year period best 3-year period best 5-year period best 10-year period best 15-year period 1 Fischer (1968, aged 25) Fischer Fischer Fischer; Kasparov Fischer; Capablanca Capablanca 2 Kramnik (2007, aged 32) Kramnik; Capablanca;
Kasparov Capablanca; Kasparov Karpov; Kramnik 3 Kasparov (1998, aged 35) Capablanca Kramnik 4 Botvinnik (1939, aged 28) Smyslov Kramnik; Botvinnik Kasparov Smyslov; Kasparov 5 Capablanca (1915, aged 27) Karpov; Smyslov Botvinnik Karpov; Smyslov 6 Karpov (1983, aged 32) Kramnik Smyslov Fischer 7 Smyslov (1983, aged 62) ;
Tal (1987, aged 51) Botvinnik; Alekhine Karpov Karpov; Lasker Botvinnik; Spassky Botvinnik; Spassky;
Petrosian 8 Spassky; Lasker 9 Petrosian (1962, aged 33) Anand Alekhine; Anand Anand 10 Euwe (1938, aged 37) Tal; Spassky Anand Lasker; Petrosian Anand 11 Spassky (1980, aged 43) Petrosian Petrosian; Spassky Tal 12 Alekhine (1927, aged 35) ;
Anand (2006, aged 37) Lasker; Euwe Tal; Alekhine Tal; Alekhine Alekhine; Lasker 13 Euwe; Tal 14 Lasker (1909, aged 41) Petrosian Euwe Euwe Euwe 15 Morphy (1858, aged 21) Morphy Morphy Steinitz Steinitz Steinitz 16 Steinitz (1886, aged 50) Steinitz Steinitz — — —
A 2008 analysis, using Rybka 3, showed that Capablanca had the smallest average error factor (i.e. the most accurate play); but after adjusting for factors such as the complexity of positions, the best player came out as Fischer, followed by Capablanca, Karpov and Kramnik. The best players had an average error of about 0.07 pawns per move (after the opening). Capablanca was the most positional player, and Anand by far the most tactical. The most complex game tested was Fischer v Spassky (1972 game 6, Fischer won) while the most accurately played game was Tal v Benko (1958, Tal won).[31]
CAPS [ edit ]
CAPS (Computer Aggregated Precision Score) is a system created by Chess.com that compares players from different eras by finding the percentage of moves that matches that of a chess engine. A score is then assigned based on percentage of matches and move value (for example, if the move was not the best, but still good, points are awarded). CAPS ignores both style and psychology.[32] According to the system, Carlsen was the best player ever, with a CAPS score of 98.36 and a top engine match of 85.26%. He was followed closely by Kramnik, and then Kasparov.[33]
Markovian Model [ edit ]
In an article [34] published by the ICGA Journal, Jean-Marc Alliot of the Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute (IRIT) presents a new method, based on a Markovian interpretation of a chess game. Starting with those of Wilhelm Steinitz, all 26,000 games played since then by chess world champions have been processed by a supercomputer using Stockfish (rated between 3310 ELO at the CCRL and 3337 at the SSDF as of 10/2015, but around 3150 under the test condition according to the authors)[35] in 62000 CPU hours, in order to create a probabilistic model for each player. For each position, the model estimates the probability of making a mistake, and the magnitude of the mistake by comparing the two best moves calculated at an average of 2 minutes by move (26 plies on the average) with the move actually played, [36] starting from move number 10.[37] These models can then be used to compute the win/draw/lose probability for any given match between two players. The predictions have proven not only to be extremely close to the actual results when players have played concrete games against one another, they also fare better than those based on ELO scores. The results demonstrate that the level of chess players has been steadily increasing. Magnus Carlsen (in 2013), tops the list, while Vladimir Kramnik (in 1999) is second, Bobby Fischer (in 1971) is third, and Garry Kasparov (in 2001) is fourth.[dubious – discuss]
The complete results are as follows (each player taken in his best year, Carlsen: 2013, Kramnik: 1999, Fischer: 1971, Kasparov: 2001, Anand: 2008, Khalifman: 2010, Smyslov: 1983, Petrosian: 1962, Karpov: 1988, Kasimdzhanov: 2011, Botvinnik: 1945, Ponomariov: 2011, Lasker: 1907, Spassky: 1970, Topalov: 2008, Capablanca: 1928, Euwe: 1941, Tal: 1981, Alekhine: 1922, Steinitz: 1894). The numbers represent the winning percentage of one player against his opponent. Tables are not symmetric as playing with white and with black is not the same.
Head to head match result predictions between different World Champions Ca Kr Fi Ka An Kh Sm Pe Kp Ks Bo Po La Sp To Ca Ta Eu Al St Carlsen 52 54 54 57 58 57 58 56 60 61 59 60 61 61 64 66 69 70 82 Kramnik 49 52 52 55 56 56 57 55 59 60 58 60 60 60 63 65 68 70 83 Fischer 47 49 51 53 57 56 57 56 59 60 60 61 61 62 64 68 70 73 85 Kasparov 47 49 50 53 54 54 54 53 57 58 56 56 58 58 60 62 66 68 82 Anand 44 46 48 48 54 52 53 53 57 56 57 57 59 59 62 64 69 71 86 Khalifman 43 45 44 47 47 50 51 52 53 54 55 55 56 56 60 62 64 67 79 Smyslov 43 45 45 47 49 51 50 51 53 55 54 54 54 55 59 63 64 68 82 Petrosian 43 44 45 47 49 50 51 52 53 54 54 55 55 56 59 63 63 67 80 Karpov 44 46 45 48 48 49 50 49 51 52 52 52 52 52 56 58 60 63 76 Kasimdzhanov 41 43 42 45 45 48 48 48 50 52 52 52 54 53 56 60 62 65 80 Botvinnik 40 41 41 44 45 48 46 48 49 49 50 54 52 52 56 60 60 64 80 Ponomariov 42 43 41 45 44 47 47 47 49 49 51 51 52 52 55 58 59 62 77 Lasker 41 41 40 45 44 46 47 46 49 49 48 50 51 50 54 58 59 63 78 Spassky 40 41 40 43 42 45 47 46 48 47 49 49 50 51 53 58 57 61 75 Topalov 40 41 39 44 42 45 46 45 49 48 49 49 50 51 54 57 57 61 75 Capablanca 37 38 37 41 39 42 42 42 45 45 45 47 47 48 47 53 54 59 76 Tal 35 36 34 39 37 39 39 38 43 41 41 43 43 43 44 48 49 54 72 Euwe 32 33 32 36 32 37 37 38 41 39 41 42 43 44 44 47 52 56 75 Alekhine 31 31 29 34 30 35 33 35 38 36 37 39 38 40 40 43 47 45 69 Steinitz 20 19 17 20 16 22 19 22 25 22 22 25 24 27 27 26 30 27 33
The complete database of the chess games and their evaluations can be downloaded from the page presenting this work on the author's website.
Subjective lists [ edit ]
Many prominent players and chess writers have offered their own rankings of players.
Bobby Fischer (1964 and 1970) [ edit ]
In 1964, Bobby Fischer listed his top 10 in Chessworld magazine: Morphy, Staunton, Steinitz, Tarrasch, Chigorin, Alekhine, Capablanca, Spassky, Tal, Reshevsky.[38][39] He considered Morphy to be "perhaps the most accurate", writing: "In a set match he would beat anyone alive today."[40]
In 1970, Fischer named Morphy, Steinitz, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Petrosian, Tal, Spassky, Reshevsky, Svetozar Gligorić and Bent Larsen the greatest chess players in history.[41]
Irving Chernev (1974) [ edit ]
In 1974, popular chess author Irving Chernev published an article titled Who were the greatest? in the English magazine CHESS.[42] He followed this up with his 1976 book The Golden Dozen, in which he ranked his all-time top twelve: 1. Capablanca, 2. Alekhine, 3. Lasker, 4. Fischer, 5. Botvinnik, 6. Petrosian, 7. Tal, 8. Smyslov, 9. Spassky, 10. Bronstein, 11. Rubinstein, and 12. Nimzowitsch.[43]
Miguel Quinteros (1992) [ edit ]
In a 1992 interview GM Miguel Quinteros gave the opinion:[44] "I think Fischer was and still is the greatest chess player of all time. [...] During his absence other good chess players have appeared. But no one equals Fischer's talent and perfection."
Viswanathan Anand (2000, 2008 and 2012) [ edit ]
In 2000, when Karpov, Korchnoi and Kasparov were still active, Anand listed his top 10 as: Fischer, Morphy, Lasker, Capablanca, Steinitz, Tal, Korchnoi, Keres, Karpov and Kasparov.[45]
When interviewed in 2008 shortly after Fischer's death, he ranked Fischer and Kasparov as the greatest, with Kasparov a little ahead by virtue of being on top for so many years.[46]
In 2012, Anand stated that he considered Fischer the best player and also the greatest, because of the hurdles he faced.[47]
Chess Informant readers (2001) [ edit ]
Svetozar Gligorić reported in his book Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess? (Batsford, 2002):
At the beginning of 2001 a large poll for the "Ten Greatest Chess Players of the 20th Century, selected by Chess Informant readers" resulted in Fischer having the highest percentage of votes and finishing as No. 1, ahead of Kasparov, Alekhine, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Karpov, Tal, Lasker, Anand and Korchnoi.[48]
David Edmonds and John Eidinow (2004) [ edit ]
BBC award-winning journalists, from their book Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time (HarperCollins, 2004):
Fischer, some will maintain, was the outstanding player in chess history, though there are powerful advocates too for Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Kasparov. Many chess players will dismiss such comparisons as meaningless, akin to the futile attempt to grade the supreme musicians of all time. But the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to Reykjavik, his breathtaking dominance at the Palma de Majorca Interzonal, the trouncings of Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian—all this was unprecedented. There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player has so overshadowed all others.[49]
Vladimir Kramnik (2005 and 2011) [ edit ]
In a 2005 interview, Vladimir Kramnik (World Champion from 2000 to 2007) did not name a greatest player, but stated, "The other world champions had something'missing'. I can't say the same about Kasparov: he can do everything."[50]
In an interview in 2011, Vladimir Kramnik said about Anand: "I always considered him to be a colossal talent, one of the greatest in the whole history of chess", "I think that in terms of play Anand is in no way weaker than Kasparov", and "In the last 5–6 years he's made a qualitative leap that's made it possible to consider him one of the great chess players".[51]
Leonard Barden (2008) [ edit ]
In his 2008 obituary of Bobby Fischer, Leonard Barden wrote that most experts ranked Kasparov as the best ever player, with probably Fischer second and Karpov third.[52]
Levon Aronian (2012 and 2015) [ edit ]
In a 2012 interview, Levon Aronian stated that he considers Alexander Alekhine the best player of all time.[53]
In a 2015 interview after the 8th round of the Sinquefield Cup, Levon Aronian stated that he considers Garry Kasparov the strongest player of all time.[54]
Magnus Carlsen (2012 and 2015) [ edit ]
In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, adding that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.[55]
In December 2015, he repeated his great respect for both Fischer and Kasparov when he mentioned them several times in an interview, saying he would like to play against them at their peak performance. Also, he said he liked the style of play and games of Vladimir Kramnik. As the toughest opponent to beat at that time he named Levon Aronian.[56]
World Champions by world title reigns [ edit ]
The table below organises the world champions in order of championship wins. (For the purpose of this table, a successful defence counts as a win, even if the match was drawn.) The table is made more complicated by the split between the "Classical" and FIDE world titles between 1993 and 2006.
See also [ edit ]Guild Leveling - Guild Perks List
Stonecore Boss Videos
Guild Talents were removed a while back and replaced with Guild Perks.There are 25 guild levels and each level will automatically reward with an extra perk. The leveling process remains unchanged and your guild will gain experience through PvP, Dungeon and Raid progression, questing, etc...Guild currency has also been removed and rewards will just be "unlocked" after you reach a specific level or complete a guild achievement. Once a reward is unlocked, members will be able to purchase it with gold. Some of the rewards include guild tabards, mounts, heirlooms, and it looks like you will finally be able to have a guild tabard on your mount. (Just like the Argent Tournament banners)New members of a guild won't be able to buy everything directly, they will have to contribute to the progression of the guild before they can access the top rewards. Each time a player helps towards the leveling he will gain reputation with the guild, the best rewards will require players to be exalted with their guild before they can buy it.The Stonecore was made available for testing last week and a few videos are now available on Youtube!A bomb exploded earlier today in the Greek political scene after Reuter’s made a revelation about how Greece’s caretaker PM Lucas Papadimos called Barroso and asked him to make a strong statement about Greece leaving the eurozone. Reuters claims that Barroso had never intended to make such a strong statement. He did so only because he got a call from Greece’s caretaker Prime Minister Lucas Papademos asking him to, a Commission official said.
The Actual Incident
A couple of weeks ago, in an interview with Italian television, President of the European Commission Barroso, was asked what he thought of Alexis Tsipras’ plans to trash the bailout agreement.
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Projecting the Europeans as monsters, and the reforms as measures that are only being imposed because the foreigners force us, is Greek politicians’ favorite game for the past two and a half years.
“It wasn΄t Barroso΄s initiative. It was a direct request,” said the Commission official, adding with a degree of understatement, “It didn΄t work.”
Talking to the newspaper To Vima, Papademos denied the report. “I haven΄t asked anyone to make any statement, nor talked to anybody those days. Some want to create a problem.”
After the Reuter’s report became known, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s left SYRIZA’s leader attacked Papademos and stated that the real danger for Greece doesn’t come from abroad but from the domestic political scene. Tsipras is partly right. Greece’s current tragedy was caused by its politicians. But Tsipras himself is part of this system. He may not have been involved in scandals but his populistic anti-austerity agenda doesn’t present an alternative to the current loan agreement — or his plans for restoring Greece to growth while keeping it in the eurozone. One thing is for sure: crisis-hit Greeks simply do not know who and what to believe anymore.Hello to everyone.This will be my first Build log Called Quantum Ares (if some have a better name in mind please let me know).I will share all the process with you guys and any help or advise its really welcome since this is my first build log.Here the list of the partsMain components:Cpu: Intel Core i7-5930KMotherboard: AsRock X99X KILLER LGA2011-v3Mem: 16 Gb (2x8) ADATA XPG Z1 DDR4GPU: Asus ARES 3Case: Caselabs S5 whitePSU: Seasonic x 1250 wattSSD: 2x SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GBSSD: Data: 1 x WD 1TBCoolingFan: 4x jet flo 120Fan Controller: lamptron v3FC5CPU Block: EK Supremacy (CSQ) Plexi CopperRam Block: EK Ram CSQ plexi CopperGPU Blcok: ARES 3Rad: 1 x XSPC AX360 and 1x XSPC EX240Reservoir: 2 x EK X3 Res with white top and bottomPump: 2 x D5 VarioPump top: 2x Ek Acrylic d5 pump topRigid Tubing: PrimoChill 10/12mm hard tubingFittings: Bitspower compression fitting, angle all red, (or white)Coolant: Mayhem pastel red and mayhem pastel White or Aurora 2 red (Cannot decide now)ModSleeving: White and red and sata data Sleeving red and whiteConnector: all white connector:Paint: white primer paint and red paintwhite and red screw, and thumb screw:Power psu cord red sleevingCase labs custom power botton red and blackWaiting for the case to be delivered this Thursday also waiting for frozen cpu parts and most of the main parts.Also im not pretty sure what coolant i want to us. pastel red and white pastel, Or aurora red and white pastel or aurora white and red pastel. Or some color to match with white or redIf you guys have any idea please let me know any advise its welcome.Here my idea of the sleeving cableshere some picture of the Beast'Breaking Bad' Fans Get Their Fix In Spanish
Enlarge this image toggle caption Manuel Rodriguez/UniMás Manuel Rodriguez/UniMás
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Enlarge this image toggle caption Manuel Rodriguez/UniMás Manuel Rodriguez/UniMás
Like the English-language version, Metástasis begins with the midlife crisis of Walter Blanco, played by Colombian actor Diego Trujillo.
"He starts with his 50th birthday, underestimated in his work. He's got a sick son. He's expecting a baby they never planned. And then suddenly he finds out he's got cancer," Trujillo explains. "I've always worked in television, doing soap operas here in Colombia. And the characters I've played are always predictable. But the character of Walter White is so complex."
Walter's cancer diagnosis acts as a wake-up call that eventually leads him to cooking crystal meth with a former student, José Miguel Rosas. (Breaking Bad fans, that should translate as "Jesse Pinkman.")
Roberto Urbina, who plays José, says Metástasis changes some details to make the story more believable in Latin America. For instance, Walter teaches at a private — not public — school, and he and José cook meth inside an old school bus instead of an RV, which would be harder to find in Colombia. Setting the show in Bogotá rather than Albuquerque had other implications on the storyline.
"The drug dealing aspect of it had to be very carefully thought out because Colombia is a country that has a history of drug dealing," Urbina says. "So people there, in our reality, we're very touchy when it comes to that subject."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Ben Leuner/AMC Ben Leuner/AMC
Drug dealing is a major plot point in the series, but its themes about morality and family are what hooked viewers like Laura Martínez, a Spanish-language media critic and editor for CNET en Español. Martínez says she was skeptical when she heard about Metástasis.
"My first reaction was, 'This is ridiculous! I don't need a Hispanic Breaking Bad; we already have a regular Breaking Bad,' " she explains.
But after watching the show, Martínez says she's changed her mind.
"It is not the first time we adapted a series in Latin America. But I think it is the first time that it's done with such care," she says.
The remake's production values also impressed Brian Delgado, a high school senior in Los Angeles who's been following Metástasis since it debuted in June. He says he's seen Breaking Bad five times and even got his parents, who grew up in Mexico, to start binge-watching with him — although they weren't accustomed to waiting months for the last episodes to air.
"Once they finished the first half of the Season 5 [of Breaking Bad], it was hell for them! Because they were so used to watching telenovelas," Delgado says.
Unlike Breaking Bad, Metástasis follows the Spanish-language soap opera tradition of airing several times a week. But Delgado's parents prefer the original version of Breaking Bad when it's dubbed in Spanish. Delgado says there is no wrong choice.
"Either way — Breaking Bad or Metástasis — I think you're in for a treat," he says.
In February, AMC will treat Breaking Bad fans to a spinoff series about Walter White's lawyer, Saul Goodman, called Better Call Saul -- though Metástasis viewers better call him Saúl Bueno.DOINK THE CLOWN: The Man Behind the Paint, Matt Borne
As Doink the Clown, Matt |
rule makers of web world giving stress to reliability of content, the internet is finally looking cleaner and on course to reclaim some lost reliability. Certainly web designing is playing a major part in the whole spectrum of events.
There have been plenty of new techniques that any web design company can follow to keep their services viable in the context of evolving web trends. Being a dynamic art, there is never a set parameter of web design, but then again the industry experts vouch for the tested formula than going for a trial and error methodology.
What to expect in 2016?
The year 2015 was something of a revelation for web design with many fresh ideas conceptualized and implemented. The trends in year 2016 continue the transition with refined perspective and better set of tools to implement. So what kind of techniques one can expect to be integrated in mainstream production pipeline? Let’s dig deeper.Disasters are inherently political, because government is political, and preventing and responding to disasters is a primary role of the state. But there is an innate tension in overtly politicizing a disaster. At the moment of greatest urgency, emotions run so hot that it’s hard to fairly assess the costs and benefits of disaster response. On the other hand, moments of normality are too cool, and it is far too easy to minimize the costs of preparing for an eventuality that is far from the horizon.
What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They’re right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies.
Funding for FEMA is something the parties wrangle over, with Republicans pushing to limit the agency’s budget, and Democrats pushing back. FEMA has to fight for its share of a constricted pot of money for domestic non-entitlement spending, a pot of money that the Republicans propose to radically constrict. How radically? Romney’s budget promises require shrinking domestic non-entitlement spending as a share of the economy by about two-thirds.
The Republican proposal to eviscerate this wide array of public functions is one of the underdiscussed questions of the election. Republicans have defended it using a very clever trick. They don’t explain how they would allocate the massive cuts to all these programs. When President Obama explains what would happen if those cuts were allocated in an across-the-board fashion, Republicans scream bloody murder. And when any single one of those programs enters the political debate, they can deny plans to make any specific cuts: They won’t cut education, they won’t cut support for veterans, and so on.
Now, it is true that Republicans have no special animus against disaster response. They oppose domestic spending in general, and programs that either impinge upon business or redistribute income from rich to poor in particular. But the most concrete statement of Romney’s view of disaster spending came in a Republican debate last summer. John King, the moderator, asked Romney whether FEMA needed to be devolved to the states. Romney agreed and went farther:
As he has on so many issues, Romney avoided any specific programmatic commitment here. But the clear point he conveyed was that he would not exempt FEMA from his general opposition to federal spending. The question was whether FEMA falls into the category of spending that Romney wants to return to the states, and his response was entirely in the affirmative.
The GOP is the party arguing for splurging on a long vacation at the beach rather than repairing the roof. Naturally, they want to have this argument only when it’s sunny and never when it’s raining. There’s no reason to accommodate them.You can help translate WordPress.com into your native language without leaving the page!
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Happy translating! Thank you so much for your help!Two virtually unknown presenters have reportedly been picked to be Chris Evans' sidekicks on the new Top Gear, as the show appears to descend into turmoil before it has even begun.
German racing driver Sabine Schmitz and motoring journalist Chris Harris are said to have been chosen to join the revamped BBC motoring show.
David Coulthard, the former Formula One star, has also been appointed to the new-look presenter panel, according to The Sun.
It comes after Top Gear - which is rebranding after former hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond left earlier this year - was hit by two backroom departures.
It was revealed on Tuesday that the show's executive producer, Lisa Clark, was leaving the show after five months. And Tom Ford, a script editor, will also reportedly not be returning at the end of his contract.
Schmitz - a 46-year-old professional German motor racing driver for BMW and Porsche who is also known for driving the BMW "ring taxi" around the Nürburgring race track - previously appeared on Top Gear in 2004, when she beat Clarkson in a race.
She also drove a white Ford Transit van around the same track in under ten minutes:
Harris, 40, has written for motoring magazines including Autocar and has also presented a YouTube series on cars.
A Top Gear insider told The Sun: "Sabine and Chris are virtually unknown to the wider public and David isn't the most charismatic driver."
Clark, who had previously worked with Evans on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, said in a statement she was "moving on to new projects".
She added: "I'd like to wish production all the very best with the show."
The BBC issued a statement thanking Clark for her "incredible work for the last five months readying new Top Gear for its busy filming schedule in 2016 and planned return in May".
Photo: Yui Mok/PA
She was hired following the departure of Andy Wilman, who will join the old Top Gear presenting line-up on the new Amazon motoring show.
The BBC said it expects to announce a new executive producer "in due course".
So far, Evans - who also hosts the Radio Two breakfast show - has been tight-lipped about the format of the show.
But speaking in Cannes earlier in the year, he hinted that there may not be co-hosts with him at all times on the new show.
Appearing as a guest on BBC One's Saturday Kitchen recently, he revealed the first episode would air on Sunday, May 8. There will be 16 episodes when the new incarnation of Top Gear is broadcast next year.
Evans, who also presents TFI Friday, has signed a three-year deal to lead an all-new line-up of presenters.
The BBC said it would not comment on any speculation regarding the line-up for the new show.
Clarkson, Hammond and May's new show Amazon Prime show has a reported budget of £160 million after they signed a "very, very, very expensive" deal with the online streaming service.
Reports have suggested the name for the show could be Gear Knobs, but neither Amazon nor Clarkson has commented on the speculation.
The trio left the BBC after their contracts were not renewed following Clarkson's fracas with a Top Gear producer.
But the team's contribution to the BBC Two hit was recognised with a nomination in the Factual Entertainment category at next year's National Television Awards.
In October, Clarkson made his first return to the BBC since his high-profile sacking when he hosted Have I Got News For You - and took a brutal battering from his guests.
Clarkson cancelled his appearance in the last series of the popular current affairs show after the outcry surrounding his “unprovoked physical and verbal attack” on Mr Tymon.
Mr Tymon had his lip split in a 30-second-long assault on March 4 and had to take himself to hospital.
Photo: (WARREN ALLOTT)
He was also shouted at by the ex-Top Gear presenter, who was suspended by the broadcaster on March 10 before it announced his contract would not be renewed.
Director-general Tony Hall said "a line has been crossed" and that "there cannot be one rule for one and one rule for another".
The new Amazon Prime show will reportedly make Clarkson Britain's highest paid TV host, drawing the equivalent of his annual BBC salary for each episode.
He is said to be set to earn almost £10 million a year for the new programme. Amazon Prime is reportedly spending £160 million on 36 episodes over three years, giving each show a budget of £4.5 million.(Reuters) - Peru’s leftist presidential hopeful Veronika Mendoza was seen statistically tied with front-runner Keiko Fujimori if the two women end up in a second-round battle after Sunday’s election, according to an Ipsos poll obtained by Reuters Thursday.
Peru's presidential candidate Veronika Mendoza of 'Frente Amplio' party talks to supporters during her closing campaign meeting in Lima, Peru, April 7, 2016. REUTERS/Janine Costa
Mendoza, a 35-year-old lawmaker promising “radical change,” would win 42 percent of votes while center-right Fujimori would get 43 percent in a run-off, according to the survey, the first time they were seen head-to-head in the increasingly likely situation.
The survey, which had a margin of error of 2.3 points, was conducted on April 6 after tens of thousands of Peruvians protested against 40-year-old Fujimori’s candidacy on the anniversary of the day her father, former strongman Alberto Fujimori, ordered the military to shutter congress, 24 years ago.
Fujimori slipped 3 points in the Ipsos poll but remained the clear favorite for the April 10 election, with 37.7 percent of valid votes and a double digit lead over each of her nine rivals.
However, at least 50 percent of votes are needed to win outright and stiff opposition to Fujimori is widely expected to force her into a second-round battle with the runner-up.
Mendoza has surged on promises to ditch Peru’s business-friendly constitution to virtually tie investor-favorite Pedro Pablo Kuczynski for second place in opinion polls - spooking markets that had bet on a fifth straight conservative government in the global minerals exporter.
The Ipsos survey showed Mendoza with 20.1 percent of valid votes in the first-round, while Kuczynski would get 20.3 percent. Those figures excluded 16.4 percent of blank or spoiled ballots.
Remaining undecided voters were mostly poor, rural and female - voters who have opted for Mendoza as election day nears.
However, Mendoza also faces growing resistance from voters wary of upsetting a long stretch of economic growth with unorthodox policies.
The share of Peruvians who said they would “definitely not” vote for Mendoza rose three points to 44 percent, while opposition to Fujimori jumped six points to 51 percent, according to Ipsos.
A Fujimori-Mendoza run-off would be the first in Peru to feature two women.
Kuczynski was seen beating Fujimori by seven points in a second-round election, according to Ipsos.We think of Australia as a solid landmass. But it’s actually more like a jigsaw puzzle that has been put together over many millions of years.
The problem with working out how Australia formed is that the evidence is often buried, making access to geological materials quite difficult.
But now new techniques, new drill holes and the reevaluation of older samples are reshaping our understanding of how and when Australia formed.
And the results are not what you’d expect. An ocean and mountains once existed in the west and centre of Australia, and the eastern states are latecomers - they’re relatively new to the continent.
Read more: A map that fills a 500-million year gap in Earth's history
Australia is old, very old
Alan Collins
Australia has only been a unique continent for around 55 million years. However, the rocks and minerals beneath us date back to an earlier time. These give clues as to the composite nature of the lands that make Australia.
The world’s oldest known material – some unprepossessing grains of sand – are found in Western Australia. These are 4,374 million years old, nearly as ancient as the planet Earth itself.
Between Perth and Kalgoorlie lies an ancient piece of the Earth called the Yilgarn craton. This is dated between 3,700 and 2,600 million years old. Further north, centred around the iron-ore towns of Newman and Tom Price, lies an equally old terrane called the Pilbara craton.
These cratons are really proto-continents, or “wannabe-continents”. They are made of the same materials continents are made of, but quite small compared to the modern landmasses. They are the earliest jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Building ‘the lucky country’
We now know that in Earth’s middle age, sometime between 1,800-1,300 million years ago, three contributing continents came together to form part of what we now recognise as Australia. At the time, each was still linked to rocks that are now found elsewhere in the world.
Surprisingly, the cratons that came from the three continents are broadly defined by our present state and territory boundaries.
The South Australian Craton (SAC) was connected to a big chunk of modern day Antarctica. The North Australian Craton (NAC) – matching roughly to the Northern Territory, the Kimberley and northern Queensland – was likely linked to parts of what is now northern China. The West Australian Craton (WAC) was made up of both the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons that had collided together earlier.
As the ancestral plates moved around, these three continents smashed into each other and formed ancient mountain belts. These mountains are now eroded to low stumps – such as the Musgrave Ranges in central Australia – or buried beneath much later sediments, such as those that make up the vast western deserts.
Marcella Cheng for The Conversation, modified from Yang et al, CC BY-ND
An ocean between states
The boundary between the West Australian Craton and the other cratons lies buried beneath the Nullabor Plain in the south, and beneath the Great Sandy Desert further north.
Until very recently, geologists thought this collision, which brought together much of the continent, occurred 1800 million years ago. This was based on the ages of some rocks poking out of the Great Sandy Desert in remote Western Australia.
But intriguing recent research using new dating techniques suggests that the collision represented by these rocks is actually 500 million years younger than anyone thought.
New exploratory drilling by state and federal geological surveys also suggests that an ocean once separated Western Australia and South Australia until at least 1,400 million years ago. This ocean was named after the Mirning people who are indigenous to the region.
Volcanoes along the border
Closing the Mirning ocean bought Australia together for the first time, around 1,350 million years ago. Oceans close by subduction: this is the process when an oceanic plate moves beneath an overriding continent, and is similar to that occurring in the Andes, Japan, or New Zealand today.
This process is thought to have created volcanic mountains along the region now straddled by the South Australia-Northern Territory-Western Australia borders. Our latest research paper proposes that as this mountain range formed, then eroded over time, the sediment produced was moved by rivers and deposited in a large inland sea that covered a lot of the Northern Territory under a blanket of sand and mud. This now forms the bedrock under much of the area between Tennant Creek and Katherine.
Geological Survey of Western Australia
What makes this particularly exciting is that this increased volcanic erosion bought nutrients into the sea. As a result, we suggest that huge bacteria growths injected our atmosphere with oxygen.
When the bacteria died, they were buried, underwent decay and resulted in vast gas reserves encased in rocks of the region.
Read more: A time capsule containing 118 trillion cubic feet of gas is buried in northern Australia
The eastern states are young
So these cratons, and the roots of the mountain belts that mark where they collided, make up Western Australia, South Australia, northern Queensland and the Northern Territory, but what about the eastern states?
Well for quite a long period of time, these areas of Australia simply did not exist. These relative newcomers consist mainly of rocks formed on the edge of old Australia as the Pacific Ocean evolved over the last 500 million years (in the last ninth of Earth history).
Read more: Explorers probe hidden continent of Zealandia
Tasmania is older and may well have been a part of North America until within the last billion years.
But apart from that, mountain ranges have grown, faults have moved, but the bulk of Australia has been together for the last billion years or so, only to have broken out finally as our present landmass 55 million years ago.Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, president and founder of the Ruth Institute, a former National Organization for Marriage affiliate, joined Patrick Coffin of “Catholic Answers Live” on June 26th to discuss the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.
Morse agreed with a caller who said he could envision in the future “a judge issuing a court order to a priest that they are to marry a homosexual couple within the church.”
After joking with Coffin that President Obama promised Christians that this would not happen, Morse warned that this situation is just “another one of the dominoes that is likely to fall.”
“And I want to just point out,” Morse continued, “this is the whole pattern of the Sexual Revolution.” She recalled how Christians were tricked 50 years ago into agreeing to widespread contraceptive access when proponents argued “that contraceptives will only be used by married couples who need to space their births because of serious health reasons.”
However, it “never occurred” to contraceptive proponents, she said, that eventually “we’d be giving condoms to fourth graders.”
Marriage equality, she said, fits into this same pattern of progressives coming “up with one little thing that seems so harmless” and telling conservatives that they’re “so mean to not give us what we want.”With a record-breaking number of skyscrapers and new developments changing the identity of cities around the world, architects have never been busier. As worldwide architecture and design firms continually expand their footprint across international borders, their global reputation correspondingly receives a boost. Some of that increased attention is expressed through the media, particularly Building Design Magazine, whose annual survey of the largest companies — ranked by the number of fee-earning architects — celebrates the accomplishments of the world's leading architecture and design practices.
Gensler's Shanghai Tower, image by Flickr user tangi bertin via Creative Commons
The 2017 World Architecture Top 100 list is a who's who of the prominent talent shaping the urban fabric of the world's cities today. With 2,570 architects employed, 1,000 more than just two years ago, American firm Gensler dominated the rankings. Their sustained work in 46 geographical locations has been bolstered by projects in North America, which has continued to be a source of strength for the practice. Shanghai Tower, Le Phare de Québec, and Metropolis are among their most significant developments.
1 William Street in Brisbane, image by Mark Nilon via Woods Bagot
Japan's Nikken Sekkei placed second in the list with 1796 architects employed, progressing their reputation as the Pacific Rim's dominant architect. A slowing Chinese economy has sent the group to other Southeast Asian markets including South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia. 2016 also saw the firm's breadth stretch to India and Europe. Meanwhile, AECOM's good fortunes continue, landing them third on the list. The American practice has seen steady growth in the infrastructure sector, with the Olympic site and venues of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio doubling as a priceless global advertisement of their work. At fourth and fifth are Perkins + Will and HDR, both based in the United States. Sixth and seventh respectively, IBI Group and Woods Bagot are the only Canadian and Australian practices finding a place in the top ten. HOK, Aedas, and DP Architects take the remaining spots.
30 St Mary Axe in London, designed by Foster + Partners, image by Flickr user Martin Pettitt via Creative Commons
A ranking of the Most Admired Architects saw Foster + Partners come away with the title for the 11th consecutive year. The UK group — responsible for groundbreaking projects like London's 30 St Mary Axe and New York's Hearst Tower — ranked 14th by fee income.
The full report can be purchased online here.Email Share +1 923 Shares
David Baldwin is many things. He’s a 57-year-old New Orleans resident. He’s a former service member in the Navy. He’s in a seven-year-relationship with a same-sex partner he met through the Metropolitan Community Church.
He’s also responsible for the lawsuit that led the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to make clear anti-gay discrimination in the workplace is illegal in all 50 states and constitutes gender bias under existing civil rights law.
The plaintiff in the case of Complainant v. Foxx was kept confidential in the redacted decision from the agency. For the first time since the ruling, Baldwin makes his identity public in an interview with the Washington Blade.
“I am confident that this decision will be the deciding factor in saving countless jobs,” Baldwin said. “That anyone would lose their job simply because of whom they are is a travesty.”
Baldwin filed the lawsuit in 2012 against the Federal Aviation Administration when he learned he wasn’t selected for a permanent position as a frontline manager at Miami International Airport, alleging he experienced anti-gay harassment on the job.
For example, when talking with his co-workers about a trip he took to Mardi Gras with his partner, Baldwin’s supervisor allegedly said, “We don’t need to hear about that gay stuff.” On July 15, EEOC determined the law allowed Baldwin to bring a claim, ruling anti-gay discrimination was unlawful under gender provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Blade agreed to an email interview with Baldwin and his Miami-based attorney, Lowell Kuvin, on the basis that his litigation is ongoing. Although no information about the plaintiff was included in the EEOC decision, the agency and multiple parties confirmed Baldwin was responsible for it.
Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work, said Baldwin’s achievement for the LGBT community is on par with an earlier decision from the EEOC determining transgender discrimination is unlawful under Title VII.
“Like Mia Macy before him, David Baldwin has made LGBT history by winning a tremendous legal victory that will benefit millions of LGBT Americans in all 50 states,” Almeida said. “Baldwin belongs in the LGBT history books with other brave plaintiffs who stood strong against harassment and discrimination. Now it’s time for more LGBT Americans to follow the lead of courageous people like Baldwin and Macy by filing claims under the sex discrimination bans in the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and other existing federal statutes.”
Q&A with David Baldwin
Washington Blade: Who is David Baldwin and what is his life like with his partner?
David Baldwin: David Baldwin is a 57-year-old gay man from Richmond, VA. I grew up in a blue collar family in a semi-rural county with two brothers and a sister, and always knew I was “special.”
At 18, I joined the Navy to escape the bigotry and racism of my youth, and made a new life for myself as a young gay man. I trained as a Navy air traffic controller and traveled the world on two aircraft carriers, the USS Ranger and USS Nimitz.
In 2004 I accepted a position in Pensacola, Fla., as a frontline Manager at the FAA approach control serving the Navy flight training command.
I met my partner Keith in 2008 thru friends from Holy Cross MCC Church in Pensacola. Keith is a great guy and means everything to me. He’s Italian, has a big funny family, is my best friend, and I can’t imagine my life without him.
We made the decision to return to MIA in 2010 to finish out my career. We moved back to Wilton Manors, attended this great big gay church, the Sunshine Cathedral MCC and made lots of friends there. As things began to change for the worse in my FAA career at MIA, I found that this church and my partner to be a great source of personal strength that carried me through some really difficult times.
After I retired due to age 56 mandatory retirement in December of 2013, we decided to move back to New Orleans. We bought a big funky old house in desperate need of repair. It has two window units, four dogs, two cats and lots of fans blowing hot air around, and life has never been better. Currently, we are working on reopening a health club that closed in New Orleans last year.
Blade: Tell me about the discrimination you experienced and how that made you feel. At what point did you decide to take action?
Baldwin: There was a change in upper management at MIA. Without warning, I realized there was a huge difference in how I was regarded. At first, I was puzzled. At this point I had almost 18 years as a manager and had seen a lot. I thought it was just a phase at first but it became clear to me that having a gay supervisor at MIA was not going to happen. I am not one to be toyed with and I started to document what was going on around me. I simply let those that had it out for me implicate themselves. When I was passed over for a job that I was the clear choice for, I filed the appropriate paperwork and let the facts speak for themselves.
Blade: When you filed the lawsuit, did you have any idea the outcome would be as big as it was in terms of its implications for other gay people?
Baldwin: I have a great attorney. He looked at the facts, believed in me, and my case, and let me know this was going to be a long battle. My response, Bring It ON! I was pissed that as a gay man I wasn’t covered under Title VII. Why not challenge this? We knew it was a long shot, and never expected anything like this, but Lowell is really sharp and his arguments prevailed in the end. We are both in total shock at the magnitude of the outcome.
Blade: Were you involved in any kind of LGBT advocacy work before you participated in this lawsuit?
Baldwin: I worked as a volunteer for the New Orleans AIDS Task force for four years during the late 90’s before moving to South Florida.
Blade: Going forward, what do you hope the ruling in your case will mean for other gay people and do you think it’ll help pass the Equality Act?
Baldwin: I hope and pray that this decision will be the impetus to help move the Equality Act forward. It almost seems tailored for that end. I am confident that this decision will be the deciding factor in saving countless jobs. That anyone would lose their job simply because of whom they are is a travesty. The LGBT community was never looking for ANY special consideration. We simply want the exact same protections as every other American citizen under already existing laws. Nothing more, nothing less.
While our community waits for the Equality Act to pass, I really hope LGBT Americans who face workplace discrimination will file Title VII cases with the EEOC and in federal court. People should know that under these new EEOC rulings, we have protections now, and you can stand up for yourself if you’re being harassed or discriminated against.
Q&A with Lowell Kuvin
Blade: There’s no explicit federal law on the books against sexual orientation discrimination. What made you think Mr. Baldwin had a case?
Kuvin: The FAA does have a specific regulation that prohibits sexual orientation discrimination. However, after speaking with Mr. Baldwin and conducting some research it became very apparent to me Mr. Baldwin’s battle was going to be a difficult one. Mr. Baldwin understood his case could take months or even years to conclude and we both made the commitment to see it through to the end.
Blade: What are the next steps in Mr. Baldwin’s lawsuit? How long before it’s resolved and what do you expect that resolution will be?
Kuvin: After the EEOC decision came out Mr. Baldwin and I discussed several options available to him and the timeline as dictated by the EEOC and the procedural law for FAA discrimination complaints. The next step will most likely be to reach out to the FAA again and see if the Agency is willing to resolve Mr. Baldwin’s claims without litigation. I believe Mr. Baldwin’s demands are very reasonable and appropriate given the circumstances. I expect the FAA to do the right thing such as granting Mr. Baldwin’s promotion to the position he was denied retroactive, adjusting his back pay and retirement benefits accordingly, and compensating Mr. Baldwin for the humiliation and anguish he has experienced. If the FAA does not want to work to resolve the issues, then Mr. Baldwin will have no other option but to file the appropriate lawsuit. The amount of time it will take to resolve the issues is dependent on which path we are forced to take. Mr. Baldwin’s case could be resolved in six weeks or it could take six years. Regardless of the amount of time it takes, both Mr. Baldwin and my office are committed to seeing through to the end.
Blade: Would the additional sexual orientation and gender identity to federal non-discrimination workplace laws through means such as the Equality Act be a helpful tool, or are the existing protections sufficient going forward?
Kuvin: I believe that all employees need to be sufficiently protected against workplace discrimination and employees can never be “too protected.” I also believe that Title VII needs to be amended to specifically include LGBT employees because there are agencies in the United States that might “read around” the Baldwin v. Foxx decision and deny LGBT employees their equal rights. The Equality Act would be a logical place to start because the at the present time Baldwin v. Foxx does is not binding on courts throughout the United States, it is merely persuasive.
NOTE: This interview has been edited and condensed.Share this
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U. TORONTO (CAN) — Brain regions that process anger and sadness are overactive in people with borderline personality disorder, a new study reveals.
The research also finds that the areas of the brain that would normally help dampen negative emotion are underactive.
The work offers the best description yet of the neural circuits that underlie the severe mental illness and could lead to better treatments and diagnosis.
[sources]
A number of brain imaging studies have found differences in the function of brains of people with BPD, but some of the studies have been contradictory.
For the study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, a team led by Anthony C. Ruocco, assistant professor in the department of psychology and program in neuroscience at the University of Toronto, analyzed data from 11 previously published studies and confirmed a number of important differences between people with BPD and those without.
On the one hand, a brain area called the insula—which helps determine how intensely we experience negative emotions—is hyperactive in people with BPD. On the other hand, regions in the frontal part of the brain—which are thought to help us control our emotional reactions—are underactive.
“It’s not just that they have too much drive from their emotions,” Ruocco says. “They seem to have less of the ‘brakes’ to try to curb those emotions and to help regulate their intensity.”
The findings fit well with symptoms seen in people with BPD, Ruocco says. “The hallmark symptom that people describe is emotion dysregulation—you’re happy one moment, and the next moment you’re feeling angry or sad or depressed. People with BPD can cycle through emotions, usually negative ones, quite rapidly.”
More important is how the findings might be useful in diagnosis and treatment. One challenge is that BPD often occurs with other disorders, such as major depression, which can make it harder to identify and treat.
The new results raise the possibility that brain imaging could be used to make a more definitive diagnosis of BPD, Ruocco says.
In the future it might also help determine what treatments are most likely to be effective for an individual patient, based on what the imaging studies show about their brain function before they even begin treatment.
Source: University of TorontoCain Velasquez relies on medical marijuana to get him through his training sessions.
Former UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is in a constant state of pain.
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With a myriad of medical setbacks forcing him to watch from the sideline, it seems the former Arizona State wrestling standout has gone under the knife more than he’s actually stepped foot into the Octagon.
While he has managed to hobble his body to get in recent months, that hasn’t kept the pain at bay.
“It’s an achy pain that goes down your leg and it gets to a point where if you’re standing for 10 minutes, you have to sit down,” Velasquez told ESPN.com. “If you’re going out for a while, a half-hour, you know it’s going to be pretty painful. You have to sit down and take the compression off your back.”
As a result of these symptoms, Velasquez revealed he’s already planned to undergo back surgery following his rematch against Fabricio Werdum at UFC 207.
“The surgery is basically shaving off some bone to make room for my sciatic nerve. After the last surgery, the doctor said I might be pain-free forever, but knowing how I train and what I do as a fighter, the pain could come back. I didn’t really know how long I was going to feel good. It ended up being about a year.”
Werdum (21-7-1) previously submitted Velasquez (14-2) in their title fight at UFC 188 last July, dethroning the then-champion in the process.
Velasquez would later rebound with a dominant TKO over Travis Browne at UFC 200 in July. This marked his first win since his decimation of long-time rival Junior dos Santos at UFC 166 in October 2013. Since that night, a myriad of injuries had forced Velasquez to watch the heavyweight division unfold from the sidelines.
But with the constant pain from the constant setbacks hindering his performance, the former champion revealed he’s actually turned to Cannabidiol (CBD) to help dull the pain during training camp
According to the report, Velasquez first used CBD, a compound found in cannabis, to help cope with his surgery earlier this year. But when the pain returned, he utilized CBD oral spray, with great effect
“It’s the only thing that allows me to still train, and I’m not taking a harmful painkiller into my body that I’ll later become addicted to,” said Velasquez. “I don’t know how everyone is going to feel about me saying this, but this is just one of the hard facts we as fighters have to go through. In the past, in the NFL, players have gotten addicted to painkillers. I don’t want to be an addict of some sort.”
UFC 207 will go down on Dec. 30 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. No bouts have been made official for the card. A women’s bantamweight title fight between reigning champion Amanda Nunes and the returning Ronda Rousey will serve as the headliner.
This article originally appeared onThe NSW government has released its MyServiceNSW customer service portal to the public, offering citizens a one-stop online shop for interactions with government agencies.
NSW Finance Minister Dominic Perrottet first announced plans for the service - which is intended to offer the same "tell us once" functionality as the federal myGov portal - in July last year.
The Finance department quietly soft-launched the central account service late last year, and following user feedback and a subsequent revamp has now unleashed it to the public.
At the moment, only the Roads and Maritime Services and Office of State Revenue government agencies have signed up to the service.
Users can currently use the portal to access their license information, vehicle information, to pay and dispute fines, and check demerit points.
The department plans to update the digital profile service every few months with new functionality as further government agencies come on board.
“Too often online services for different government agencies require different websites and multiple accounts,” Perrottet said in a statement.
“Our citizens should only have to ‘tell us once’, and that’s what we are aiming for with MyServiceNSW.”
MyServiceNSW accounts are accessible through the Service NSW website and mobile app, which was recently updated to make it easier for drivers to pay fines and access detailed information about their infringements.
NSW premier Mike Baird identified digital service delivery as one of his its 12 "premier's priorities" in September last year as part of a rewrite of the state's ten-year plan.
He wants to have 70 percent of government transactions conducted digitally by 2019, from a current standing of around 44 percent.Tennessee is out of the gates for the class of 2019. Thompson Station (Tenn.) Independence wide receiver Kendrell Scurry has committed to the Volunteers and becomes the first commit for the class of 2019.
"I just committed to the University of Tennessee," Scurry said on Tuesday night. "I was just thinking, talking to my mom and I just thought it would be good. Why wait when you find the right school?"
Scurry describes his mother as a "huge fan" of Tennessee and though he grew up a fan of Oregon, he's quickly found a home at Tennessee.
"I just thought I would stay home and try to recruit other players from Tennessee and make Tennessee a great football team," he said. "I'm excited to be the first person and show everybody where they need to be at UT."
Scurry is a 6-foot-3, 185-pound wideout that steps in to one of the most explosive offenses in the state of Tennessee as a sophomore. He fills in for Michigan signee Nate Johnson on the Independence offense.
"I've got some big shoes to fill in Nate Johnson. We have all seniors and I'm the one sophomore starting receiver so I feel pretty great about it."
Scurry is expected to be part of the 247Sports Top100 for the class of 2019 when that is released this summer.Cam Newton wore a hat with a button bearing the World War II-era |
is possible that some of the older children in the 2005 and 2010 IDEA age-resolved snapshots were never reevaluated for autism and thus remained undiagnosed despite the increased awareness in recent years. Second, a recent mathematical analysis of the CDDS 2002 snapshot data identified 1988–1989 as the inflection point in the curve when autism prevalence started its sharp rise [3]. (Notably, CDDS prevalence already had been rising more gradually since about 1980, doubling from 5 to 10 per 10,000 by 1988 [3].) The 1988–1989 inflection point is consistent with the current analysis of IDEA data, which found relatively large slope errors when trying to fit a linear trend to IDEA data beginning prior to about birth year 1988. While proving the 1988–1989 change point is beyond the scope of the current study, the existence of an identifiable inflection point in the autism trend data is important, because it would tend to argue against diffuse intergenerational epigenetic explanations and would suggest instead that the temporal drivers of autism may be fairly specific. Although many different toxic exposures may contribute to oxidative stress and inflammation and thus may be identified as statistically significant risk factors for autism in epidemiological studies, the existence of an inflection point would suggest the value of considering which environmental factors could be driving a steep and ongoing increase in autism prevalence beginning circa 1988–1989.
Air pollution Recent epidemiological studies have found that autism is associated with ambient exposure to ozone and PM2.5 during pregnancy [41] as well as with birth residence proximity to freeways but not major roads [23]. This latter result suggests a connection to large diesel trucks, which travel more often on freeways than surface streets. It may also implicate ultrafine or nanoparticles, whose number concentration is high near freeway traffic, but falls off exponentially away from the freeway due to atmospheric dilution, coagulation and other loss mechanisms [42, 43]. While large diesel truck miles traveled have increased 4-fold from 1970 to 2005 [44], the increase in miles appears to be overwhelmed by larger reductions in emissions per mile for key pollutants [45]. Estimated vehicular emissions of the carcinogenic PAH benzene α pyrene (BaP) show a strongly decreasing trend that is anticorrelated to trends in autism (Additional file 1: Figure S16a). The emission factors for 8 other PAHs, as well as for CO, VOCs and particulate organic carbon, show a similar decreasing temporal trend [45]. These decreases are supported by United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) estimates of highway emissions of 5 major pollutants contributing either directly or indirectly to PM2.5 and ozone formation (Figure 4), which have decreased by ~50-75% from their reference values, available from either 1970 or 1990 [46]. The trends in highway emissions parallel decreasing trends in total emissions of these pollutants from all sectors [46, 47]. The large drop in vehicular emissions occurred mainly by the 1980s and is attributed to the introduction of catalytic converters in the 1970s and ongoing improvements in fuel and emissions technology. Emissions of black carbon, which are closely associated with diesel fuel combustion and large trucks, also appear to be dropping significantly, thanks to improved technology such as diesel particle filters [48]. However, a counter trend toward increasing emissions of nanoparticles, a subset of PM2.5 that generally is not resolved by routine measurement techniques [42], cannot be ruled out, although a literature search turned up no articles indicating such a trend. Direct measurements of air pollution provide an integrated metric of the effect of vehicular and other emissions on the atmosphere. Ozone and PM2.5 are two of the most widely monitored air pollutants and both recently have been linked to higher rates of autism in Los Angeles [41]. However, EPA 8-hour ozone standard violations in Los Angeles as well as 10 other major U.S. cities show flat or downward trends that correlate poorly to the rise in autism (Additional file 1: Figure S17). Similarly, PM2.5 levels in Los Angeles and 3 other major cities in states with some of the highest ASD prevalence also show flat or downward trends (Additional file 1: Figure S18). While the ozone violation and PM2.5 time series shown in these figures are available only from 1995 and 2000, respectively, studies taking a longer view confirm that the U.S. has achieved significant reductions in ozone since the U.S. Clean Air Act was established in 1970. Across the United States on average, ozone has decreased by 28% since 1980 [47]. In the Los Angeles basin, maximum 8-hour average ozone levels have decreased by a factor of 3 between 1973 and 2010 [49]. In summary, there is no obvious evidence to suggest that trends in estimated vehicular emissions or directly measured air pollution are consistent with the sharp temporal increase in U.S. autism. It is therefore intriguing that vehicular emissions and air pollution have been associated with autism in multiple epidemiological or ecological studies [23, 41, 50–52]. While air pollution, and nanoparticles in particular, can create metabolic conditions that are consistent with some of the biochemical imbalances seen in autism [53–55], the inverse trend relationship suggests the need for a coherent theory of how air pollution may interact with as yet unidentified temporal drivers to explain the increase in U.S. autism.
Mercury and vaccines It has been hypothesized that autism is a form of mercury poisoning, based on the similarities between known symptoms of mercury poisoning and the behavior traits and biological abnormalities of autistic children [56–58]. In the original hypothesis, the vaccine preservative thimerosal was suggested as the main relevant route of exposure [56]. Additional file 1: Figure S6 shows that the expansion of thimerosal exposure in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincides closely with the rise in autism around that time. However, as noted by others [26], the temporal trends in autism and thimerosal following the childhood vaccine thimerosal phaseout are incompatible. Postnatal thimerosal therefore seems unlikely to be driving the ongoing increase in autism in the 2000s, although a recent reported decrease in the severity of ASD among younger birth cohorts may coincide with the thimerosal phaseout [2]. A possible confounding factor in the postnatal thimerosal analysis is the administration of flu shots to pregnant women, which increased in the late 1990s/early 2000s around the same time that thimerosal was being phased out of children’s vaccines. Many flu shots still contain 25 μg Hg and thus may be leading to increased prenatal exposure. Anti-D Immune Globulin products, which contained up to 65 μg Hg per dose in the 1990s, were another prenatal source of thimerosal. Beginning in 1991, these shots were recommended routinely for RH- pregnant women (about 11% of the population), who often received two or more doses during their pregnancy [59]. However, thimerosal was removed from these immune globulin products around 2001, creating a competing trend in prenatal exposure from that due to flu shots. An additional complication is that the relative impact of prenatal and postnatal thimerosal is difficult to compare quantitatively, due to uncertainties in the degree of protection provided by the mother and in the sensitivity in the timing of fetal development to Hg [60]. Other vaccine indices, including cumulative aluminum adjuvants and cumulative total number of immunizations, continue to correlate strongly with autism trends (Figure 5, Additional file 1: Figure S7-S8). Aluminum is a demonstrated neurotoxin that can induce neuroimmune disorders and cellular oxidative stress [61, 62]. Several recent studies have described biological mechanisms by which aluminum could contribute to autism and have emphasized the need to consider the interaction of aluminum and vaccines with other pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics and the antipyretic acetaminophen [34, 63–66]. The upward trend in aluminum adjuvant exposure is also notable in that very young infants have experienced the largest relative increases from the early 1980s to 2005. Newborns have seen essentially an infinite increase due to the hepatitis B birth dose, the receipt of which has been linked epidemiologically to increased autism risk [67], while 2 month-olds have seen about a 3-fold increase in aluminum adjuvant exposure (range 2.5 to 5.7, depending on the Al content assumed for DPT and DTaP, which varies widely among different manufacturers [33]) (Additional file 1: Figure S7b). However, with the exception noted above, most epidemiological studies have found no correlation between vaccines and autism, although these studies have focused specifically on either thimerosal or the MMR vaccine rather than on aluminum [35, 68, 69]. The remaining Hg trend investigations below focus on prenatal exposure, since mercury is known to be particularly harmful to the developing fetus and to concentrate by about a factor of 2 in cord blood relative to maternal blood [70]. Total blood Hg provides a direct, integrated measure of recent mercury exposure from a variety of influences including diet, dental amalgams, thimerosal and atmospheric pollution. Within the time frame of available U.S. data (1999-present), the blood Hg trend is flat and shows little evidence of a sharp increase in recent years among women of reproductive age. At a mean value of 0.8 μg/L, U.S. women’s blood Hg levels are also relatively low compared to other countries such as Japan, South Korea and Sweden [71–73]. A final notable feature of the U.S. blood data is the tendency toward increasing Hg levels with advancing age (Additional file 1: Figure S3) [27]. Since the available blood Hg data were limited to the final seven years of the autism record, additional data sources were explored to try to reconstruct earlier trends. Consumption records of seafood and high fructose corn syrup provide some indication of trends in dietary Hg exposure. However, they are weaker indices than direct blood measurements, since exposure also depends on trends in the Hg content of these products, which this study was unable to resolve. Seafood is one of the most important sources of human Hg exposure, since MeHg can bioaccumulate in higher trophic level fish. Fish are also a good source of poly-unsaturated fatty acids, selenium and Vitamin D, all of which have beneficial effects on neurological function that may help counter the harmful effects of mercury [74, 75]. Total U.S. seafood consumption has increased 40% since 1970, but consumption of pelagic fish, including tuna and large fish with highest MeHg content, has declined since 1990 (Additional file 1: Figure S4). The above results appear consistent with previous findings that women may be shifting away from high MeHg species even as their total fish intake increases [76], suggesting a relatively flat tend in MeHg exposure. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is another source of dietary mercury, with an upward trend in consumption that was moderately well correlated to trends in autism during the 1980s and 1990s, although current Hg exposure through HFCS is declining (Additional file 1: Figure S5). Using high-end Hg content estimates, the mean consumption of 12 μg Hg/day via HFCS in 2005 corresponds to a substantial annual intake of 4400 μg Hg/year. This is comparable to the amount of MeHg ingested via seafood at the U.S. per capita consumption rate of about 24 kg/yr, assuming a mean content of ~ 0.2 ppm. Unlike fish, which contain mitigating nutrients, HFCS is associated with highly processed, nutrient-poor diets that can contribute to autism risk factors such as zinc deficiency and obesity [17, 75, 77]. However, the wide range of uncertainty in the Hg content of HFCS makes it difficult to quantify the exact temporal trend in mercury exposure. Atmospheric Hg is an additional exposure that has been linked to autism [50–52] and is essentially a ubiquitous, unavoidable source. Gaseous Hg(0), the dominant form of atmospheric mercury, is considered toxic if inhaled because it can directly enter the blood stream from the lungs. However the concentration of Hg(0) in air is low [78] at about 1.5-2 ng/m3, such that the typical amount inhaled is about 0.02 μg Hg/day for U.S. adults. This a factor of 103-104 less than the MeHg ingested in a single serving of tuna. Further, in Europe and North America, improved emissions controls on coal plants and other major emitters have led to substantial declines in anthropogenic Hg emissions in recent years. In response, atmospheric Hg concentrations and deposition rates have stabilized over the U.S. in the last two decades, although they have not actively declined [79, 80] (Additional file 1: Figure S9a). Meanwhile, atmospheric concentrations appear to be declining at several remote monitoring sites [78] (Additional file 1: Figure S9b). These trends may reflect competing influences from the ongoing expansion of coal combustion in Asia, improved emissions controls in Europe and North America, and changes in natural and "legacy" emissions from the large reservoir of anthropogenically mobilized Hg now residing in the earth’s crust and surface ocean [81]. Considering the flat trends and small doses described above, it seems unlikely that atmospheric Hg can be driving the U.S. increase in autism.
Organophosphate pesticides Epidemiology has linked ASD and PDD in children to both prenatal and postnatal exposure to cholinesterase-inhibiting organophosphate (OP) insecticides [24, 82]. Further, the biological plausibility of these insecticides as a cause of autism has been described and wheat and corn have been identified as the most important sources of OP exposure among U.S. children [19]. However, the temporal trend in total OP insecticide use does not correlate well to the trend in autism. According to USEPA and USDA data, total agricultural use of OP insecticides on 5 major crops (including corn, wheat, potatoes, cotton and soy) declined about 30% between 1995 and 2005 (Additional file 1: Figure S12a) [83]. An important reason for the decline in OP insecticide application to corn, cotton and potatoes was the adoption of crops genetically modified to produce Bt toxin, which repels targeted insect pests, thus reducing the need for external insecticides. However, the combined 5-crop dataset does not resolve how the shift to GM crops has affected OP insecticide application specifically to wheat over the 1970–2005 time frame. In addition to the 5 major crops, USEPA data showing declines of ~50-75% in organophosphate residues on apples, grapes, carrots and tomatoes from 1998–2000 to 2007–2009 suggest that use is also declining on fresh fruit and vegetable crops [29]. The reasons for the decline in fruit and vegetable residues are not stated in the USEPA report, and the substitution of other pesticides for OP cannot be ruled out. Along with the decline in agricultural use, chlorpyrifos, an OP insecticide commonly used in household applications, was banned for residential use by the USEPA in 2001. Chlorpyrifos concentrations have subsequently declined in urban streams and rivers in the northeastern and midwestern United States [84]. However, other OPs continue to be used in household applications, e.g., as pet flea products, with temporal trends that are not resolved by this study. Total insecticide use and herbicide use appear to have flat or slightly declining trends from about 1980 through 2006 [85] (Additional file 1: Figure S12b,c). An exception to the overall modest decline in U.S. pesticide use is the rapidly increasing application of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup® (Figure 6). Glyphosate is applied widely to genetically modified crops, including corn, soybean, cotton, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa. While glyphosate has the basic chemical structure of an organophosphate pesticide, it is not a conventional cholinesterase-inhibiting insecticide. Rather, its mechanism of toxicity involves the disruption of the shikimate pathway needed in the synthesis of essential aromatic amino acids in plants. This pathway is used by human gut bacteria, which play an important role in the immune system and are often compromised in autistic children [86]. An additional biochemical connection is that the metabolism of glyphosphate depends on glutathione, which is significantly depleted in autistic individuals [87, 88]. From a temporal trends perspective, glyphosate was first created in the 1970s, whereas the first reported cases of autism occurred in the 1930s [1]. Further, its widespread use did not begin until the mid 1990s, well after the beginning of the surge in autism diagnoses in the late 1980s. In recent years, however, its temporal trend closely tracks the ongoing increase in autism. Based purely on these timing considerations, it appears that glyphosate cannot be responsible for the first autism cases in the 1930s and is unlikely to have caused the late 1980s uptick, but could be interacting in recent years with other toxins to drive up the prevalence of U.S. autism.On the evening of 12 July, more than a fortnight after the rebellion against Jeremy Corbyn began, his opponents played their final card - and lost. A vote of no confidence by 81 per cent of Labour MPs and 65 frontbench resignations had failed to dislodge him. The rebels’ last hope of avoiding another leadership contest against Corbyn was forcing him to reseek nominations. After being backed by just 40 colleagues in the confidence vote, all sides knew that the leader would struggle to achieve 51 signatures from MPs and MEPs.
Legal advice provided to Labour had stated that the incumbent should not be automatically on the ballot. It was this view which was adumbrated by lawyer James Goudie when the National Executive Committee (NEC) assembled at the party’s Victoria Street headquarters on 12 July. Rebels had cited the precedent of 1988, when Neil Kinnock was challenged by Tony Benn and achieved the requisite nominations. "That’s the rules, and anyway, I’m not going to hide behind incumbency,” the then leader told his campaign manager Robin Cook.
As Kinnock recalled in a piece for the New Statesman on 12 July: “To us, it was vital that the leader of a party committed by constitution, history, and conviction to the parliamentary road to socialism was able to prove wide support among the elected Labour MPs as well as the broader movement.”
Regardless of legal opinion, many felt that Corbyn should defer to this view. But faced with the possibility of the leader failing to make the ballot, to the outrage of his supporters, Labour’s NEC backed him by 18-14. Throughout the day, speculation grew that Corbyn would lose the vote. At the start of the six and a half hour meeting, the NEC agreed by 17-15 to hold a secret ballot, regarded by some as an omen of defeat. But as I reported on 11 July, senior Labour figures believed Corbyn would prevail even in these circumstances. With the support of left-wing allies such as shadow business secretary Jon Trickett (who replaced leadership challenger Angela Eagle) and trade union delegates, the leader was automatically included on the ballot.
But the rebels' despair swiftly turned to hope. After Corbyn had left the meeting to greet supporters outside, the committee voted in favour of a six month freeze date for members. The hundreds of thousands who have joined the party since 12 January (most of whom are thought to support the leader) will not be automatically eligible to vote. By contrast, in 2015, members had until 12 August (a month before voting closed) to sign up. Registered supporters, the group among whom Corbyn performed best last time, will have just two days to do so (18-20 July) and will be charged £25, rather than £3. Those who have paid £47 for membership in the last six months will need to pay twice over to participate.
“It’s game on,” a senior Labour figure told me afterwards, deriding the “hubris” of Corbyn. Had the leader remained to vote, a Unite amendment proposing a freeze date of 24 June - the day after the EU referendum - would have passed. A vote on whether to extend the sign-up period to a week was lost by 16-10, while the rebels won that on whether to charge £25 by 15-12. "He [Corbyn] is absolutely fucking beatable," a Labour MP said.
But even if the rule changes favour the rebels (and they may not do), Corbyn begins his second leadership contest as the unambiguous favourite. His opponents' continuing failure to agree on a single "unity candidate", with both Eagle and Owen Smith competing for the title, reflects the absence of a pre-eminent alternative. Eagle, who deputised for Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions until her resignation, is admired by MPs for her work ethic, tenacity and intellect. After 116 years, and two female Conservative prime ministers, she would give Labour its first woman leader.
But her campaign launch on 11 July underwhelmed many in the party. Eagle struggled to offer a dividing line with Corbyn other than electability: the narrow turf on which his opponents lost in 2015. "One of the big reasons candidates like Tessa Jowell and Andy Burnham struggled last summer was that they put too much message emphasis on winning," Marcus Roberts of YouGov told me. "When you say 'winning' to the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] they think of landslides. But when you say 'winning' to today's membership they often think it implies some kind of moral compromise."
To beat Corbyn, Eagle needs to reach activists' hearts, rather than merely their heads. But in the view of some, she failed to even do the former. When asked why she could beat Theresa May, Eagle simply replied: “Because she’s a Tory” (seemingly disregarding the result of the last two general elections).
While a recent YouGov poll found that 54 per cent of members wanted Corbyn to resign before the general election (and to do so immediately in the case of 44 per cent), it also showed him beating Eagle by 50-40. The leader’s team believe they can exploit her past support for the Iraq and Syria military interventions. One aide described it as a "major strategic error" to appear alongside Hilary Benn, who last year dramatically challenged Corbyn over the latter.
It is partly Eagle's "Iraq/Syria problem" that explains the increasing support for Smith, who opposed both actions. The former shadow work and pensions secretary, who first revealed his leadership ambitions in an interview with the New Statesman in January, has won the backing of prominent soft left MPs including Lucy Powell, Heidi Alexander, Chris Bryant and Kate Green. But others fear that the Pontypridd MP's hitherto low profile will hinder his bid. They also charge him with excessive personal ambition. A former shadow cabinet minister spoke of being "taken aback" by the anger towards Smith in the tea rooms. "It's a bit too much about him and not enough about the party," one MP told me.
Corbyn's opponents maintain that he must ultimately face only one candidate. But when and how either Eagle or Smith will prevail remains uncertain. Whoever the challenger is, some rebels already privately predict that Corbyn will win again. It is this likelihood that conjures the spectre of a split. Advocates argue that an increasingly promiscuous electorate, a willing pool of donors and "the 48 per cent", who backed EU membership, create fertile space for a new party. Unlike in the 1980s, Labour's far-left controls the leadership (rather than merely influencing it) and enjoys the formal backing of the major trade unions (once bastions of the right). Corbyn's opponents, the argument runs, should stop fighting a losing battle and play a smarter game.
But though the possibility of a split fixates the media, it is one that few MPs genuninely contemplate. Senior figures of the kind any breakaway would depend on, believe that first-past-the-post remains an irrevocable barrier to success (as the SDP and Ukip testify). The enduring potency of the Labour brand and Theresa May's centrist positioning are further deterrents. Finally, it is tribalism, a characteristic more often found on the party's right than its left, that motivates their loyalty.
"The thing with splits is it almost gives the impression that there is a 50-50 divide," Stephen Kinnock MP told me. "But there so clearly isn’t. I think it would be better to call it a spin-off. About 10 per cent of our PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] would be very welcome to go and form the Socialist Workers Party. That’s what they’ve always wanted to do, they’re entryists. What an entryist does is come in through the back door, squats inside the house for a while until he’s wrecked it and then leaves through the front. And that is exactly what they’re wanting to do here. They’ve very welcome to go off and form their own party. We are the Labour Party, we represent the mainstream 9.3 million people that voted Labour and the others are very welcome to go off and do their own thing."
Aware that they will likely lose to Corbyn, the rebels speak of reducing his mandate and of laying the ground for future success. "Whether or not Angela wins, the fact that we’re able to build infrastructure and acquire data on moderates strengthens our cause," an Eagle supporter told me. They believe that the sight of a non-functional opposition against a new government will progressively shift membership opinion in their favour. Should Corbyn still refuse to resign, a senior MP vowed to "fight, and fight, and fight again", echoing former leader Hugh Gaitskell’s words to the 1960 party conference. Watson, Dan Jarvis, Chuka Umunna and Yvette Cooper are spoken of as potential future challengers.
May's insistence that she will not hold an early general election could buy the rebels more time. But the most pessimistic fear that they will inevitably fail to remove Corbyn, leaving them to face a "wipeout" (in the words of Wes Streeting MP). They warn that Labour could endure its worst result since 1931, falling below 150 seats. It is the national electorate, rather than the party selectorate, some predict, that may ultimately defeat Corbyn. The question is whether what remains will have been worth fighting for.Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, at a Fox News-hosted town hall in Indianapolis, on Wednesday blasted rival Ted Cruz’s decision to announce a running mate even though he’s losing the nomination race – calling it a “waste of time.”
Shortly afterward, though, Cruz VP pick Carly Fiorina fired back, saying the race isn't over yet and "close doesn't count."
The back-and-forth capped an unusual day on the campaign trail, even as the nomination seems within Trump's grasp. The billionaire businessman responded to Cruz’s campaign curveball, while also elaborating on a foreign policy speech he delivered earlier in the day, at the forum hosted by Greta Van Susteren.
“I think it’s really a waste of time, honestly,” Trump said of Cruz’s decision to name former presidential candidate and ex-HP CEO Fiorina as his VP pick. Of the race, Trump said, “It should be over.”
Cruz earlier acknowledged it was “unusual” to name a VP choice so early, but defended the decision. He claimed “nobody is getting to 1,237 delegates,” the number needed to clinch the nomination, and voters should “know what [they] will get.”
After Trump swept five states across the Northeast on Tuesday, the three remaining GOP candidates are looking next to Indiana’s primary on May 3 as a pivotal point in the race – one that can show whether Trump turns his winning streak into irreversible momentum, or whether Cruz and John Kasich still have a shot at preventing him from clinching the nomination before July.
But Trump cast Cruz’s ticket roll-out Wednesday as a bid to distract from bad headlines, calling it “awfully early” for such an announcement.
“You have to first get the nomination. … He has zero chance,” he said.
Trump declined to go into detail about his own potential running mate choices. “I have a lot of great people. I just don’t like to talk about it right now,” he said.
In an interview Wednesday night on "The Kelly File" with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, Fiorina responded to Trump's comments over Cruz making her his VP pick.
"Donald Trump hasn't won this nomination yet, despite so many people in the media just wishing it would all be over," she said.
"This isn't over until someone reaches 1,237 (delegates)... and no, close doesn't count," she added.
Fiorina told Kelly that parts of the Republican Party are uniting behind Cruz, with him receiving endorsements from former presidential candidates Gov. Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, in addition to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“A majority of Republican voters don’t want Donald Trump to be their nominee," Fiorina said Wednesday.
She also responded to a question by Kelly over her criticism of Cruz earlier in the presidential campaign.
"In the heat of a presidential campaign, like in a basketball game, you make some fouls," she said.
Trump spoke just hours after delivering what was billed as a major foreign policy address in Washington. In the speech, Trump called for a drastic shake-up in America’s foreign policy – including “getting out of the nation-building business” and demanding NATO allies pay their “fair share” or be left to “defend themselves.”
At the Fox News town hall, Trump questioned “at what point are we the guardian of the world,” saying countries have to protect themselves “or you have to pay us properly.”
“We have to be good to our allies, but they have to remember that we’re good, and they have to take care of us,” Trump said.
He also discussed his goals for bringing jobs back to America, and – when asked about Bernie Sanders’ plans for free college tuition – said he would like to look “seriously” at bringing down college costs. He said he would, if elected, work out a “deal” to address that, potentially to include giving students more time to pay back their debt.
Trump was joined onstage Wednesday by legendary Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, now a Trump supporter, who called the candidate “far and away the best person to lead America back to where we all want to be.”
Trump sought to demonstrate his foreign policy chops Wednesday as he tries to present a more presidential image – while increasingly turning his attention on the campaign trail to a general election battle he presumes will involve him and Hillary Clinton.
The billionaire businessman declared himself the “presumptive nominee” Tuesday night, after winning primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Maryland. He hasn’t shelved the trash talk and provocative language on the campaign trail, not yet anyway – repeatedly accusing Clinton of playing the “woman card” and mocking remaining GOP rivals Cruz and Kasich.In 2010, Belgian photographer Farida Lemeatrag read a moving profile about a young transgender man. The story stuck with her, and two years later, as a student photographer, she decided to launch a project focused on the experiences of young trans people.
"These youngsters struggle for years with their identity," she told Mic. Her subjects, she says, "have to overcome a lot of obstacles and disappointment with their partners, parents and family."
From the outset, Lemeatrag worked to gain her subjects' trust and consent. Doing so, she told Mic, was "very difficult," and it was a "long time before I could earn their trust and could take their portraits."
She eventually demonstrated that her interest in these individuals' lives was genuine, and has built authentic relationships with the 25 young transgender individuals she's photographed so far. Over the past three years, she said, she's learned much about their experiences, which can often be difficult, just like their counterparts' in the United States.
Studies of young people's experiences in the European Union support Lemeatrag's anecdotal findings. A 2013 study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that only half of transgender respondents were doing paid work, which in turn effected their ability to access basic services like health care. The same study also found that in the five preceding years, 38% of trans women and 34% of trans men had experienced violence or had been threatened with violence.
In addition to these external barriers, Lemeatrag witnessed her subjects work through "doubts about themselves" and the decision to undergo transition-related surgeries. The latter is a crucial choice given that in Belgium, where Lemeatrag based her project, transgender youth are legally required to attend years of psychotherapy (and possibly sterilization, according to Transgender Europe) to determine whether they want to go under the knife.
Given that difficulties like these are so frequently part and parcel of their experiences, Lemeatrag has consciously and thoughtfully approached her relationship with her subjects. Rather than simply provide blind emotional support, she frequently consults with a psychologist specializing in gender at the Ghent University hospital.
Ultimately, the photographer hopes her work will inspire viewers to "look at the youngsters and their transition without prejudice and learn more about gender identity and the long way they have to go," she said. "I try to raise awareness with the public and show them beautiful portraits with a soul."
h/t Feature ShootBacon may hardly qualify as a lethal object, but cured pig carcass was the weapon of choice for Wayne Stillwell, who was sentenced to 10 months in jail after hurling bacon into the Central Mosque in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Stillwell, 25, wrapped the door handles with the meat product and then threw it through the doors and onto the ground because, in his words, “Muslims regard bacon as unclean."
The Mosque had a security camera in place, which captured the incident. Stilwell was later taken into police custody, and was finally sentenced on Tuesday after pleading guilty to causing a breach of the peace.
Sheriff Gordon Liddle called Stillwell’s actions "grossly offensive,” and noted, "a custodial sentence is inevitable."
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Defense solicitor Matthew Nicholson told the court that Stillwell was sorry for the offense, and was prepared to spend time behind bars.
Foysol Choudhury, chairman of Edinburgh and Lothian Regional Equality Council, was content with the sentence. He said, “I really welcome the sheriff’s decision to impose a jail sentence in this case. We live in what is always called a ‘multi-cultural society’ and I think we need to work together and prove that is true. We need to respect everyone’s religion or culture, whatever it may be.”
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In the United States, some anti-Muslim activists have taken Stillwell’s idea one step further with the invention of bacon-laced bullets — which brought record sales for the North Idaho manufacturer.
Jihawg Ammo, designed to send Muslims “straight to hell,” assumes that because Muslims shun pork, their “god” (why would it be different than the Christian god if there is only one true lord?) will punish them by sending them to hell.
Novel as the idea may be, religious study professor Shannon Dunn of Gonzaga University told the Religion News Service, “There is no penalty for coming into contact with pork given by the Quran … To my knowledge, Muslims, especially unknowingly, would not be banned from heaven for eating or getting hit by pork.”
Sources: MSN, Edinburgh News, Religion News Service
undefinedIntel released the final details of its Core i9 microprocessors Monday morning, and the data is in: AMD’s high-end Threadripper processors will be faster—except when you really need it.
Remember that Intel’s Core X-series family (also called the Core i9) was announced with several key omissions: namely the clock speeds of the 12-core Core i9-7920X and above, as well as the thermal design power, or TDP. On Monday, Intel filled those in. The 12-core Core i9-7920X launches Aug. 28 while the 14-, 16-, and 18-core Core i9 chips ship on Sept. 25.
Mentioned in this article AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X MSRP $999.00 See it on Amazon
Perhaps most important, though, is that we now know how fast Intel’s Core i9s will run. When Intel inadvertently revealed that its 12-core Core i9-7920X was 2.9-GHz—slower than the comparable AMD Threadripper—a subset of the Internet had a small freakout. We now know that that will be true for the remaining Core i9s as well, but with a big caveat.
[ Further reading: 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X review ]
Here are the remaining speeds and feeds for the high-end Core i9 chips:
Core i9-7980XE (18 cores, 36 threads): 2.6GHz; Boost, 4.2GHz to 4.4 GHz
Core i9-7960X (16 cores, 32 threads): 2.8GHz; Boost, 4.2GHz to 4.4 GHz
Core i9-7940X 14 cores, 28 threads: 3.1GHz; Boost: 4.3GHz to 4.4GHz
Core i9-7920X (12 cores, 24 threads): 2.9-GHz; Boost: 4.3-GHz to 4.4GHz
Note that the boost speeds refer to both Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and 3.0. (The latter is also referred to as Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0). In this case, the boost numbers refer to the fastest dual-core frequency that can be achieved. If you’re going to be buying one of these chips, however, it’s likely you’ll be trying to achieve maximum performance.
Finally, here’s the complete matrix of Intel’s Core i9 processor family:
Intel
Essentially, both Intel and AMD can claim the title of fastest processor. As our quick comparison chart reveals below, Threadripper’s base clock speeds are faster, but Intel’s boost speeds climb higher than Threadripper can. It’s also important to note that while Threadripper consumes 180 watts, even the fastest Core i9 chips Intel has announced have a lower TDP of 165 watts.
IDG
What’s also important, however, is that Intel has left its pricing completely unchanged—still giving a massive advantage to AMD. Does Intel believe that the Core i9 will outperform Threadripper, |
.com
But Isil’s presence in Afghanistan is bitterly opposed by the Taliban, which views its fighters as usurpers and traitors. While Isil has achieved a strong presence in the eastern province of Nangarhar, its attempts to infiltrate elsewhere in the country have been beaten back by the Taliban.
This conflict within the ranks of the extremists could eventually rebound to the advantage of Afghanistan’s national government. For the moment, however, the Afghan National Security Forces have been unable to contain Isil or prevent its entry into the country.
Photo: www.longwarjournal.com
The US and its allies have ceased all combat operations in Afghanistan, handing over responsibility for security to the national security forces. This created the opening which Isil has been quick to exploit. Extremists of all kind have gained ground since the departure of US and Western combat troops.AKRON, Ohio -- A Stow man who lied about shooting himself in the leg to avoid being prosecuted for owning a weapon despite being a felon will spend three years on probation.
Joshua Jira, 30, was sentenced Friday by Summit County Common Pleas Judge Tom Parker. Jira previously pleaded guilty to possessing a weapon as a felon, aggravated drug possession and making false alarms in the May 25 incident.
Jira also will have to abide by any recommendations made following a mental health evaluation and a drug and alcohol dependency assessment. He must pass all random drug tests as part of his probation. His driver's license was also suspended for six months.
Jira on May 25 drove himself to Sagamore Hills Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the right thigh. Stow police interviewed him after he was treated and released.
Jira told police he was shot during an attempted carjacking about 10:30 p.m. at the Speedway gas station in the 1000 block of Graham Road.
He said a man pointed a handgun at him and that he struck the man's hand causing the gun to fire.
Stow police investigated and found Jira lied about the fight and that he actually shot himself in the leg. Jira lied to cover up the fact that he's barred from possessing a gun because of his felony record, according to court records.
Police also found illegally obtained Adderall inside his car. He had no prescription for the drug, court records say.
Jira has criminal convictions in 2006 for attempted possessing cocaine in Hudson and for drunken driving in Medina in 2007.Big-rig crushes car on N. Sam Houston Tollway
One person was injured Wednesday morning when a big rig crushed an sports utility vehicle Wednesday against a retaining wall on the Sam Houston Tollway in northwest Harris County, snarling traffic for miles. (Photo by Cody Duty/Houston Chronicle) less One person was injured Wednesday morning when a big rig crushed an sports utility vehicle Wednesday against a retaining wall on the Sam Houston Tollway in northwest Harris County, snarling traffic for miles.... more Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Big-rig crushes car on N. Sam Houston Tollway 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
One person was injured Wednesday morning when a big rig crushed an sports utility vehicle Wednesday against a retaining wall on the Sam Houston Tollway in northwest Harris County, snarling traffic for miles.
The crash occurred about 5:45 a.m. on the westbound North Sam Houston Tollway near Bammel North Houston, according to Houston TranStar.
Officials said an 18-wheeler pinned a Chevrolet Tahoe against the wall. It was unclear what led to the crash or if the SUV had been stopped along the roadway.
Two people were inside the SUV. One of them was taken to a nearby hospital. Officials said the person had non-life-threatening injuries.
Traffic was jammed for miles as crews worked to clear the scene. Houston TranStar reported that the accident was cleared at 7:45 a.m.Looking for news you can trust?
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Over the past three months, Goldman Sachs employees have donated more than $147,000 to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, helping him to an early lead in what might be called the Goldman Sachs primary. But winning the biggest share of contributions from the controversial, economic-crash-enhancing investment firm isn’t going to be a cakewalk for Bush. At least three other major presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton, who has longstanding ties to the Wall Street giant—have bagged money from Goldman, with two of them using Goldman Sachs lobbyists to raise money for their campaigns.
Bush’s biggest rival in the Goldman money chase is his fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio’s campaign snagged just over $60,000 from Goldman Sachs. And Rubio has a Goldman insider hitting up his own network of wealthy friends for contributions. One of the three registered lobbyists bundling donations for Rubio is Joe Wall, a vice-president for government affairs at Goldman Sachs. Wall has so far reported bundling more than $90,000 for Rubio.
Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, places third in in the Goldman sweepstakes. Her campaign reported raising at least $49,000 from Goldman Sachs donors. Like Rubio, she has a registered Goldman Sachs lobbyist drumming up donations on her behalf. According to the campaign’s filings, Steve Elmendorf, a major name on K Street, has bundled more than $141,000 for Clinton. Elmendorf’s many clients include Churchill Downs, the NFL, and the Human Rights Campaign—and Goldman Sachs. Clinton also has a history of raising big bucks from Goldman-ites. In 2008, her presidential campaign brought in more than $407,000 from the firm.
At the back of this pack is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has raised a mere $10,100 from Goldman Sachs employee. That’s something of a surprise, given that Cruz has a personal connection to the bank. His wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, though she has taken unpaid leave from the bank for the duration of her husband’s campaign. Even so, Cruz’s senatorial campaign previously raised $69,000 from Goldman Sachs employees, making the investment bank the fourth largest source of cash for the campaign that brought him to Washington and the national stage.
Among the other top-tier candidates, neither Rand Paul nor Bernie Sanders had any identifiable donations from a Goldman Sachs. (Scott Walker hasn’t filed any campaign disclosure forms yet.)An electronic afterlife is tough to find in gaming. The old makes room for the new in ways that can sometimes be brutally disruptive. Guild Wars 1 developer ArenaNet is working to ensure the community behind the 2005 MMORPG has enough support to live far into the future, according to recent comments by lead content designer Mike Zadorojny (via Eurogamer ).
Even after the release of its sequel last year, the first Guild Wars has retained a "thriving" player base, Zadorojny said, and the technology supporting the game should ensure this remains the case. "The game itself was so efficient on the server side in terms of the resources, like, it runs on a fraction of the hardware that we need for running Guild Wars 2, so having that on the back-burner is nothing compared to GW2," he said.
One key factor in maintaining the online world of the original Guild Wars has been the creation and continued use of automation to organize the game's tournaments, events, and week-to-week schedule. The small team currently dedicated to maintaining the game won't be putting together new content, but works instead to take care of any "massive issues," according to Zadorojny. These are presumably issues that go beyond the scope of the automatic system the developers have created, but the structures ArenaNet has behind the game definitely sound like they were designed with a long lifespan in mind.
"We've been doing a lot of automation support so that the game itself could last forever, even without anybody really touching it," Zadorojny said.Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.) plans to introduce legislation to undo a cybersecurity law that critics say secretly allows the federal government to spy on Americans.
The Cybersecurity Act of 2015 was included in Congress’ year-end spending bill, a piece of must-pass legislation known as the omnibus.
When I return to DC, I’m going to introduce legislation to repeal the unconstitutional cyberspying bill that was enacted with the #omnibus. — Justin Amash (@justinamash) December 28, 2015
“Many of my colleagues remain unaware that a massive surveillance bill was snuck into the omnibus,” Amash said in a statement provided to the Daily Dot. “And if they are aware, they may have been misled into believing this bill is about cybersecurity.”
On Dec. 18, the House passed the end-of-year omnibus bill, a $1.8 trillion catch-all that included everything from repeals of oil export bans to increased funding for the International Monetary Fund. Two days before its inevitable passage, lawmakers updated the bill to include language from the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that makes it easier for companies to share details of cyberattacks with the government but is universally loathed by privacy advocates.
The Cybersecurity Act of 2015 allows companies like Facebook, Google, or Visa to share cyber threat data—digital evidence of a cyberattack—with the Department of Homeland Security. It also grants American firms immunity from prosecution for sharing data that may include customers’ personal data.
“Ultimately this will be fairly embarrassing for Congress.”
Proponents of the bill say it will help protect companies and their customers from data breaches and other cyberattacks. Critics believe the new law would allow government agencies to more easily access Americans’ personal information and share it with the National Security Agency. An analysis by the Open Technology Institute found citizens’ privacy would be more adversely affected by the final language of the omnibus bill than by CISA drafts.
“Just like the Patriot Act, [Congress] re-wrote the final [omnibus] bill in secret and snuck it through Congress before most people could even read it,” Nathan White, Senior Legislative Manager at Access, an Internet freedom-supporting nonprofit, told the Daily Dot. “And just like the Patriot Act, the bill will be used for far more than what Members of Congress think that they are authorizing. Ultimately this will be fairly embarrassing for Congress.”
Amash opposed CISA’s language in the bill before it passed, going so far as to circulate a letter citing tech companies’ opposition and calling it “anti-privacy legislation,” but to little avail. Amash is part of the House Freedom Caucus, which, citing the omnibus’s large price tag, had already vowed to oppose the bill anyway, forcing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to find votes elsewhere.
Amash has a long history of trying to reduce government surveillance on American citizens. After NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked evidence that the agency was storing the phone records of large numbers Americans without individual warrants, Amash acted faster than anyone in Congress, introducing a narrowly-defeated amendment bill to defund the program, and he has repeatedly condemned the post-9/11 Patriot Act for providing legal basis for that program.
#HR2029. New cyberspying bill was folded into #omnibus to limit scrutiny. Worst surveillance bill since #PatriotAct. https://t.co/epR7iWevtd — Justin Amash (@justinamash) December 28, 2015
Any bill Amash has in mind will have to be introduced after Congress reconvenes on Jan. 6.
Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC by 2.0) | Remix by Max FleishmanIndia's Nano, A Cold War Casualty?
According to a report in Foreign Policy, sales of the Nano automobile in India have been disappointing. Launched with great fanfare just two years ago and billed as the “world's cheapest car”, the Nano has been equal parts savvy marketing campaign and act of social responsibility on the part of its creator, Tata Motors. A marked transition has been underway in Indian society as the population becomes more affluent and more urban. Unfortunately, the infrastructure of most Indian cities has not been able to keep up; roadways in many urban centers are habitually jammed, chaotic masses of humanity. Among the cars, trucks and buses plying the roadways of India's cities are swarms of mini-bikes madly weaving through traffic, often carrying two, three and sometimes four riders; for lower-income Indians, a motorbike is typically the only motorized transportation they can afford. Tata, which in India has a strong sense of social responsibility, took at look at the transportation situation and thought that a rudimentary car would at least offer these Indians some protection in traffic - certainly more then they would have perched on the back of a motorbike. Tata set out to build an extremely low-cost car, one that would be within reach for many newly-urban Indians, the result was the Nano. While it may look like the unfortunate result of a drunken union between a Volkswagen Beetle and a shopping cart, the Nano does provide its driver with four wheels and an enclosed body for the equivalent of just $2,200. Tata expected to be selling 100,000 Nanos a month to car-crazy Indians; in reality they have been moving only about 1,000 units per month.
So what happened? I'll suggest that the Nano has turned out to be another casualty of the Cold War, yes that Cold War - the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and that has been over for 20 years now. Much has been written about the decades the US and Soviets spent engaged in the Cold War: the battles, like Vietnam fought by proxy forces; the political intrigues; the ideological struggles; but at the heart of the Cold War was one simple question: how do you want to live your life? The Soviets pushed forward an idea of Communist egalitarianism, a world without class distinctions where everyone was equal, at least in theory since the reality for some high-ranking party officials proved George Orwell's line from Animal Farm: “all animals are equal, only some are more equal than others,” to be true. The United States took the opposite tack, promoting the power of the individual, and that the outward reward for this rugged individualism was the ability to acquire material goods. A social contract was implied: work hard and you too can have the American Dream - iconically represented by a house filled with modern goods, a yard surrounded by a white picket fence and a new car sitting in the driveway. In 1959 the US literally brought this version of the American Dream to the Soviet Union, building a mock suburban house in Moscow as part of the American National Exhibition, which sparked one of the Cold War's more surreal moments, the infamous “kitchen debate” between Vice-President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. For decades, American media – our movies, television, music, magazines – pushed the image of the American Dream to every corner of the globe.
And it worked. Blue jeans and rock-and-roll records became the tools of subversion inside the Soviet Bloc, the very embodiments of Western materialism and decadence (or so the Politburo claimed). When the Berlin Wall fell, those East Germans who didn't flee for the West outright traveled over before returning East with as many Western goods as their little Trabants could carry. Russia went from being the cradle of global Communism to home of some of the world's richest men, and most ardent capitalists, in the two decades since the end of the Soviet Union.
The problem today is that the United States did too good of a job in winning Cold War. Twenty years after the end of the ideological struggle, people around the world still clamor for their own piece of the American Dream, this is especially true in the developing world. After decades of seeing the American Dream presented to them as a sort of nirvana on earth, as people in the developing world become upwardly mobile, they develop an insatiable taste for consumer products and the Western consumer-driven lifestyle. They have internalized the message implicit within the American Dream, the one that dates back to our Calvinist forefathers – that material goods are an outward sign of your value as a person, simply put: the more you have, the better you are. In the developing world today, no one wants to be thought of as not being as upwardly-mobile as their peers, and that's what has hurt the plucky little Nano. While Tata could be commended for attempting to offer a safer mode of transportation that tens or hundreds of millions of Indians could actually afford, they made a huge mistake in billing it as “the world's cheapest car”. The Nano didn't have the cache of being someone's first new car, but rather it became the thing they bought because they couldn't afford anything fancier. It quickly had the stigma of poverty attached to it, and as said before, in an upwardly-mobile society no one wants it to seem like they're not keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case, perhaps the Singhs.
According to Foreign Policy, Tata is trying to salvage the Nano project by marketing it more aggressively in rural areas where people are less likely to be status-conscious, as well as planning to export it to Nepal and Sri Lanka. But that still leaves us with the problem, as illustrated by the Nano, of the ongoing power of the American Dream. India certainly is not the only country making the transition from what, in a less PC-age, we called the Third World. China, large swaths of the Middle East and Africa are also moving on a similar trajectory as India. And as people in these countries move up from poverty, they too want their slice of the “American Dream” and all the material goods that come with it. But resource depletion, increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and climate change have all shown us recently that the Earth can't handle those already living the Dream, let alone a billion (or more) people joining the “middle class”, with all the material trappings that come along with it. The skies over many Chinese cities are gray with smoke from coal-fired power plants, while oil exports from Saudi Arabia have been dropping as the Saudis burn more oil at home to generate electricity to meet the demands of their citizens; these are just two small examples. The Developed World cautions the Developing to curb their energy use and GHG output; the Developing World views this as the Developed trying to keep them out of the party, trying to deny them the lifestyle that the Developed have been living for decades. It doesn't help to sway the Developing World to a more aesthetic path that the world's largest polluter (at least until recently), the United States, has consistently worked to undermine efforts at global GHG reductions.
And that is unfortunate, since we have seen how well the United States can spread a message about a lifestyle to the world when it so chooses.
Follow Ed on Twitter @EdwardHancoxThe giant pineapple-like air purifier in Beijing has failed a series of air-cleaning tests, but China’s still keeping it.
The Smog Free Tower would, it was said, purify 30,000 cubic meters (1 million cubic feet) of air every hour, collecting over 75% of PM2.5 and PM10, the small particles that contribute to smog. It was created as an art installation, which converts the particulate matter in the surrounding air into jewelery. However, a test run by the China Forum of Environmental Journalists (CFEJ), a non-governmental organization, showed that the tower was not doing the job “effectively.”
CFEJ published results of 50 days of tests on Nov. 20 (link in Chinese), stating that PM2.5 levels were above those promised. For instance, the PM2.5 concentration was 89 micrograms per cubic meter within five meters (16 feet) of the tower, and reached 109 micrograms within 100 meters. The World Health Organization’s maximum safe level of PM 2.5 is 25 micrograms (pdf. p. 9) per cubic meter over a 24 hour period.
CFEJ concluded that the tower’s effect on PM2.5 “was unstable and the effective range was very much limited to its immediate surroundings.” Some experts told state media outlet China News that “the weight of the machine’s captured particulate matter per hour is less than that of a spoonful of salt.” (Update: A company representative told Quartz at the time of publication that it had not independently verified the test results. In May 2017, according to the company, data compiled by a scientist from Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology showed that the tower substantially brought down particulate matter up to a distance of 20 meters (65 feet).)
The tower’s developers, Dutch studio Roosegaarde, claimed on Nov. 23 that the tower had cleaned an air volume equivalent to that of ”ten Beijing National Stadiums” in its 41-day test. Roosegaarde told Quartz on Nov. 25 that “There has been some misinterpretation in the media on naming and results,” but didn’t address the findings by CFEJ.
The seven-meter-tall purifier was introduced into Beijing late September this year, where PM2.5 levels were 17 times greater than the WHO safe limit. Some are now questioning its purpose. ”Anyone, only if you can see, smell and your lungs function normally, wouldn’t need to spend money building a smog alert,” noted one user on Chinese social-media site Weibo. Another commented: ”[Officials] don’t deal with the root of air pollution, but what’s the point of spending money buying this useless equipment?”
China is nonetheless keeping it for “educational purposes.” It will just change its name from “Smog Free Tower” to “Smog Alert Tower.”
This piece has been updated to on May 31, 2017 with the new findings of the tower’s effectiveness.Recently, I was tasked with integrating a task queue into a web framework at work. For the purpose of this post, I would like note that I am operating with Python 2.7.5, Flask 0.9, Celery 3.0.21, and RabbitMQ 3.1.3. This post was written using IPython 0.13.2 in an IPython notebook.
Now, I’ve never implemented a task queue before and boy did that ever make this difficult. A quick search result showed that Celery was the main player in the Python task queue arena.
Before diving into the code base at work I set up a virtualenv and followed Celery’s First Steps with Celery tutorial. It was easy, as was the Next Steps tutorial. I would go so far as to say they were too simple. When I went to apply my freshly earned skills to my code base I ran into a series of walls. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any luck pinging either Celery’s irc channel #celery or their Google group.
But, eventually I figured it out. I’m writing this so that you will (hopefully) avoid similar frustrations. Enjoy!
Picking a Broker
Celery requires a message broker. This broker acts a middleman sending and receiving messages to Celery workers who in turn process tasks as they receive them.
Celery recommends using RabbitMQ. I opted for this as my knowledge in this area is limited and assumed they would likely have the most thorough and robust documentation for it.
Installing RabbitMQ in Ubuntu is easy:
$ sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server
Installing it on a mac was also rather simple:
$ brew update $ brew install rabbitmq # update your path in ~/.bash_profile or.profile with PATH=$PATH:usr/local/sbin
Note: A co-worker ran into issues installing RabbitMQ via homebrew. To resolve this he followed the standalone mac installation instructions here.
Once installed, starting the server is as simple as:
$ rabbitmq-server # or you can start in the background with $ rabbitmq-server -detached
And you can stop it with:
$ rabbitmqctl stop
Installing Celery
Installing Celery was very simple. From within your virtualenv (you should be using virtual environments!):
$ pip install celery
Setting up Celery config, Celery daemon, and adding ‘tasks’
The steps below are bit more convoluted than the aforementioned tutorial provided by the Celery team. This is meant to be more of a comprehensive ‘real world’ example. If you would like something simpler please go here
Project Structure:
project/ project/celeryconfig.py project/framework/celery/celery.py project/framework/email/email_tasks.py
Celery config — celeryconfig.py
# config file for Celery Daemon # default RabbitMQ broker BROKER_URL = 'amqp://' # default RabbitMQ backend CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'amqp://'
There are a couple of things to note here. First, we are using RabbitMQ as the broker and the backend. Wait, what is the backend? The backend is the resource which returns the results of a completed task from Celery. Second, you may be wondering what amqp is. amqp is a custom protocol that RabbitMQ utilizes. More information on it can be located here.
More information on celery configuration and defaults can be found in the Celery docs.
Celery daemon: Preparing our daemon — celery.py
from __future__ import absolute_import from celery import Celery # instantiate Celery object celery = Celery(include=[ 'framework.email.email_tasks' ]) # import celery config file celery.config_from_object('celeryconfig') if __name__ == '__main__': celery.start()
The two commented portions here can be a bit confusing.
celery = Celery(include=[ 'framework.email.email_tasks' ])
Here we are instantiating a Celery object and handing it a list containing the relative (to where you start your Celery daemon!) path to all modules containing Celery tasks.
celery.config_from_object('celeryconfig')
Next, we are telling that newly instantiated Celery object to import its configuration settings from celeryconfig.
Headache Number One: Celery and relative imports
I’m sad to admit that it look me 15 minutes figure out why I didn’t need celeryconfig.py in the same directory as my celery.py. So, read this and learn from my stupid mistake.
Again, I want to emphasize everything is relative to where the Celery daemon is launched.
Our Celery daemon will be launched from /
Because the config file is located at /celeryconfig.py
The daemon looks for the config file in the root: celeryconfig
Additionally the module containing tasks is located several directories deep: /framework/email/email_tasks.py
So the daemon thinks the email_tasks.py is located several directories deep framework.email.email_tasks
Creating a task: Let’s queue up some emails! — email_tasks.py
from email.mime.text import MIMEText def send_email(to=None, subject=None, message=None): """sends email from hairycode-noreply to specified destination :param to: string destination address :param subject: subject of email :param message: body of message :return: True if successful """ # prep message fro="hairycode-noreply@hairycode.org" msg = MIMEText(message) msg['Subject'] = subject msg['From'] = fro msg['To'] = to # send message s = smtplib.SMTP('mail.hairycode.org') s.ehlo() s.starttls() s.ehlo() s.login('YOUR_USERNAME', 'YOUR_PASSWORD') s.sendmail('hairycode-noreply@hairycode.org, [to], msg.as_string()) s.quit() return True
Making this function into a task is as simple as importing our Celery object and adding a decorator (almost).
Recall that when we instantiated our Celery daemon we handed it a list of relative paths. One of those was to this file ‘framework.email.email_tasks’. When Celery is started it will comb over any files in that list and look for
@celery.task
So, let’s go ahead and modify our function to meet the spec.
from email.mime.text import MIMEText # import our Celery object from framework.celery.celery import celery # add the decorator so it knows send_email is a task @celery.task def send_email(to=None, subject=None, message=None): # code removed for brevity
If everything else is in order your app will be able to add these to the Queue by either calling the.delay() or.apply_async() functions. But, before we can do that let’s make sure our RabbitMQ server and Celery daemon are up and running.
Testing Our New Task
Launch RabbitMQ
Launch your RabbitMQ server in the background from the shell
$ rabbitmq-server -detached
You can ensure it’s running the background by inspecting your processes
$ ps aux | grep rabbit --color
Which should yield three things
A very, very long output (this is the rabbitmq-server we just launched) The RabbitMQ daemon always running silently“hairycode 27491 0.0 0.0 599680 156?? S 5:24PM 0:00.33 /usr/local/Cellar/rabbitmq/3.1.3/erts-5.10.1/bin/../../erts-5.10.1/bin/epmd -daemon” And, the grep command you just executed“hrybacki 35327 1.2 0.0 2432768 596 s000 S+ 2:25PM 0:00.00 grep rabbit –color”
Note: If you see one or more additional of the “long” processes running you will run into issues. If this is the case stop all RabbitMQ servers
$ rabbitmqctl-stop
and start over. I will provide an example of what can go wrong if there are multiple brokers or Celery daemons running at once.
Launch the Celery daemon
From the project/ directory launch the Celery daemon
$ celery -A framework.celery.celery worker -l debug
which should give you a daemon monitor without put along the lines of
-------------- celery@Harrys-MacBook-Air.local v3.0.21 (Chiastic Slide) ---- **** ----- --- * *** * -- Darwin-12.4.1-x86_64-i386-64bit -- * - **** --- - ** ---------- [config] - ** ----------.> broker: amqp://guest@localhost:5672// - ** ----------.> app: __main__:0x10f5355d0 - ** ----------.> concurrency: 4 (processes) - *** --- * ---.> events: OFF (enable -E to monitor this worker) -- ******* ---- --- ***** ----- [queues] --------------.> celery: exchange:celery(direct) binding:celery [Tasks]. framework.email.email_tasks.send_email
…
[2013-07-23 15:46:55,342: DEBUG/MainProcess] consumer: Ready to accept tasks!
-A framework.celery.celery worker
informs Celery which the app instance to use and that it will be creating workers. Workers take tasks from the queue, process them, and return the result to the message broker.
-l debug
tells Celery that you want it to display log level debug output for testing purposes. Normally you would execute -l info for a log level info output.
Now, let’s make sure we have some Celery workers up and running
$ ps aux | grep celery --color
Note the concurrency number when we launched the Celery daemon. This is the number of processors and in turn workers which should have been launched. The grep output from the previous command should leave you with that many outputs similar to
hairycode 37992 0.1 0.4 2495644 33448 s001 S+ 3:20PM 0:00.74 /Users/hairycode/git/staging-celery/venv/bin/python /Users/hairycode/git/staging-celery/venv/bin/celery -A framework.celery.celery worker -l debug
Detailed information about launching the Celery daemon can be found here or from the shell
$ celery --help
Testing with IPython
Note: I am using IPython from the root directory in the code segment below. You could just as easily, well maybe not easily, use the standard Python interpreter or write a test script in Python. But, IPython is awesome. I like awesome things.
Executing our Task
# import celery import celery # import our send_email task from framework.email.email_tasks import send_email # call our email function result = send_email.delay('', 'all your smtp are belong to us','somebody set up us the bomb') type(result)
If you look at your Celery daemon you can see the task coming in, being processed, returning the result, and even how long it took to execute. For example the call above gave me the following output
[2013-07-23 15:48:29,145: DEBUG/MainProcess] Task accepted: framework.email.email_tasks.send_email[09dad9cf-c9fa-4aee-933f-ff54dae39bdf] pid:39336 [2013-07-23 15:48:30,600: DEBUG/MainProcess] Start from server, version: 0.9, properties: {u'information': u'Licensed under the MPL. See http://www.rabbitmq.com/', u'product': u'RabbitMQ', u'copyright': u'Copyright (C) 2007-2013 VMware, Inc.', u'capabilities': {u'exchange_exchange_bindings': True, u'consumer_cancel_notify': True, u'publisher_confirms': True, u'basic.nack': True}, u'platform': u'Erlang/OTP', u'version': u'3.1.3'}, mechanisms: [u'AMQPLAIN', u'PLAIN'], locales: [u'en_US'] [2013-07-23 15:48:30,601: DEBUG/MainProcess] Open OK! [2013-07-23 15:48:30,602: DEBUG/MainProcess] using channel_id: 1 [2013-07-23 15:48:30,604: DEBUG/MainProcess] Channel open [2013-07-23 15:48:30,607: INFO/MainProcess] Task framework.email.email_tasks.send_email[09dad9cf-c9fa-4aee-933f-ff54dae39bdf] succeeded in 1.46279215813s: True
some_task.delay() vs some_task.apply_async()
some_task.delay() is a convenient method of calling your function as it looks like a regular function. However, it is short hand for calling some_task.apply_async(); apply_async() is a more powerful and flexible method for calling your tasks. Detailed information on both can be located here.
Executing our task — more realistically
The AsyncResult is the Celery object that the backend (RabbitMQ) returned after the worker (Celery) completed the task. The long string following it is the task_id. More often you won’t assign the function call to a variable. Doing so would hold up our app until the task had completed. That wouldn’t make much sense would it? Rather, you will simply call the delay or apply_async function and let your code continue on like this
# import celery import celery # import our send_email task from framework.email.email_tasks import send_email # call our email function send_email.delay('', 'all your smtp are belong to us','somebody set up us the bomb')
Remember, we still have the task id. If you want to check the status or result of what we just submitted you can do so by asking the task queue
# grab the AsyncResult result = celery.result.AsyncResult('09dad9cf-c9fa-4aee-933f-ff54dae39bdf') # print the task id print result.task_id 09dad9cf-c9fa-4aee-933f-ff54dae39bdf # print the AsyncResult's status print result.status SUCCESS # print the result returned print result.result True
This is a very basic run down. If you want to much more detailed information on this I would recommend checking out the Calling Tasks section of Celery’s documentation.
Headache Number Two: My Celery daemon is only receiving every other task? Wat.
This little bug took me entirely too long to solve. At some point I started noticing that exactly half of the.delay() calls I was making were permanently in a state of PENDING.
For example, running this
###IPython output from framework.email.email_tasks import send_email send_email.delay('', 'all your smtp are belong to us','somebody set up us the bomb') send_email.delay('', 'all your smtp are belong to us','somebody set up us the bomb')
Gave the following output from the Celery daemon
[2013-07-22 18:18:44,576: DEBUG/MainProcess] Task accepted: tasks.test[0e55bfed-1f05-4700-90fe-af3dba34ced5] pid:7663 [2013-07-22 18:18:44,583: DEBUG/MainProcess] Start from server, version: 0.9, properties: {u'information': u'Licensed under the MPL. See http://www.rabbitmq.com/', u'product': u'RabbitMQ', u'copyright': u'Copyright (C) 2007-2012 VMware, Inc.', u'capabilities': {u'exchange_exchange_bindings': True, u'consumer_cancel_notify': True, u'publisher_confirms': True, u'basic.nack': True}, u'platform': u'Erlang/OTP', u'version': u'2.8.4'}, mechanisms: [u'PLAIN', u'AMQPLAIN'], locales: [u'en_US'] [2013-07-22 18:18:44,585: DEBUG/MainProcess] Open OK! [2013-07-22 18:18:44,585: DEBUG/MainProcess] using channel_id: 1 [2013-07-22 18:18:44,586: DEBUG/MainProcess] Channel open [2013-07-22 18:18:44,589: INFO/MainProcess] Task framework.email.email_tasks.send_email[0e55bfed-1f05-4700-90fe-af3dba34ced5] succeeded in 2.0180089473724s: True
0e55bfed-1f05-4700-90fe-af3dba34ced5 was there but af3846a9-4a31-4a8d-99a4-0d990d51ef22 wasn’t.
I restarted my Celery daemon. Same thing.
I restarted my RabbitMQ server. Same thing.
I created an entire new project and followed the First Steps with Celery docs. Same thing.
Confused I searched around but I could only find one other person who had encountered something similar and that issue was over a year old. Note: I tried his solution but |
your paper route in the morning... That made them stronger, to realize that you can accomplish things with hard work.
"There were times when they were real little, they wanted to play, but somebody might not want to go to practice. ‘No, you goin’ to practice!’"
Constance interjects: "You make the commitment, you follow through."
"People will respect you for your word," Chill continues, "and that’s what I instilled in them. Don’t just say something to pacify [others] -- and I see that in them now, as grown men. One of them calls me and says, ‘I’m doing this,’ I can bank on that."
Despite the money Marcus has made, and the lucrative contract Desmond will soon sign, the family remains committed to the competitive nucleus of family that fostered its inherent athletic talent.
"When I look at my sons with kids," says Constance, "Marcus and Isaiah, they’re very caring, very nurturing. Desmond, he doesn’t have any children yet, he loves kids--"
Des laughs his assent, a distinct, relaxed laugh that sounds like a less energetic version of Jay Pharoah’s impression of Jay-Z on "Saturday Night Live."
Constance finishes: "--he loves playing with his nieces, his nephews, he’s really kind-hearted."
She reminisces about the family and the time they spent together before her mother died, before the turn of the century. "We were always together at get-togethers like you saw tonight, having chicken or whatever, sweet potato pie, barbecue--"
"Cakes," Marcus adds.
"My mother’s cakes," Constance explains.
Des chimes in: "Blackberry pie!"
She finishes: "That was our family, so that’s our heritage, that’s our tradition. That’s what we do, and we want to carry that on, and the kids, they carry that on also."
***
Desmond had originally planned to be in New York for the draft, but changed his mind out of his concern for Pa. "I wanted my grandfather to be with me, it’s hard for him to travel, and I want him to experience the moment with me. I’m gonna be home with my family -- it’s gonna be similar to Marcus’ [draft party] -- we’ll have all the friends and the people that have helped me get to this point."
"My entire family was there. It was a beautiful thing." USA Today Images USA Today Images
On Thursday night, Atlanta trades up from 30 to 22 in order to draft Desmond. ESPN shows him on the phone, mostly listening to coach Mike Smith and owner Arthur Blank, while tears well in his eyes.
"It was just exciting," he tells me a few days later, back in Seattle after the Atlanta press conference. "So much hard work throughout my whole life, you dream about that one day, you finally reach it, you’re just so happy. I was just happy and thankful."
"Was it the biggest night of your life?" I ask.
"Definitely. I’ve been working for that moment my whole life, to reach it and finally get there, and just having my family with me there and supporting me, it was big. My parents were right there, my brothers, my cousins, my little nieces and nephews were there, too. My grandfather -- my entire family was there. It was a beautiful thing."
Before the draft, I asked Constance if she felt spoiled having Marcus in Seattle for 10 years while Des played his college career at UW. "We’re definitely going to miss him," she said. "We were just blessed to have Marcus here close, Desmond here close.... It was great. It was easy. We were definitely spoiled."
But, she added, they traveled to the Meadowlands regularly to see Isaiah, so they’re accustomed to long travel.
"We’ll come see him. We’ll be there."Ad blockers are completely legal, but the detection of an ad blocker by using a script is technically illegal, it was argued today (18 April) at an Ad Week Europe session.
It was Alexander Hanff, a privacy consultant and campaigner for Think Privacy, who raised the issue during an industry panel at Advertising Week Europe earlier today (18 April), that included speakers from Ad Block Plus and The Guardian.
“Calling users criminal is not relevant to UK law," continued Hanff, who was referring to an earlier statement by Richard Eyre, chairman of IAB UK, who argued that ad blocker users could be deemed as “thieves”.
Hanff said he had received written confirmation from the DCMS that the use of ad-blockers was legal, but the Department did not comment on use of ad-blocker-blockers. Hanff said in the session that he had spoken to EU regulators who are of the view that they aren't legal, referencing the Guardian’s recent trialling of whitelisting content.
He went on to explain that the Guardian’s social media management software provided by Tribal Fusion enables tracking and data mining of users “without the consent of the user to allow that tracking of data” in order to feed back to advertisers. This lack of transparency with internet users about how and where their data is being used is a driving factor for the rise of technology such as AdBlock Plus.
Meanwhile, the developer behind AdBlock Plus “felt like he was killing the free internet” according to its ops and comms manager Ben Williams, who said his business has tried a lot of different solutions with whitelisting in its early form to counter this. He said users did not respond well to the ad-tech company’s experimentation with whitelisting and asked the company to remove this function.
“We felt Adblock Plus was set up in the wrong way,” Williams said. “That is why we tried to set up whitelisting.”
It’s why AdBlock Plus developed Acceptable Ads, as a compromise between user and publisher. He confirmed a small percentage of advertisers pay for this but assured “you can't pay to play”.
For a publisher, improving privacy and security is not very relevant in the ad blocking issue, since “this is not the main reason people install ad blockers”, with only 13-15 per cent of users choosing extra privacy protection on ad blocking software, Williams confirmed.
Instead, the focus is on advertising format, with Williams saying: “We felt we needed to attack one thing and we decided to choose format. If advertisers abide to that they can be whitelisted”.
AdBlock Plus is set to relinquish control of what is deemed an ‘acceptable ad’ and give that to an independent regulator by the end of the year.Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2013.11.38 David Wolfsdorf, Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Key themes in ancient philosophy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi, 299. ISBN 9780521149754. $34.99.
Reviewed by Katharine O’Reilly, King’s College London (katharine.oreilly@kcl.ac.uk)
Preview In Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy, David Wolfsdorf explores the history of treatments of the concept of pleasure. The book is organized into two overarching but unequal parts, the first focusing on conceptions of pleasure in the ancient schools, the second examining the work done on these same questions in modern scholarship. Wolfsdorf’s text falls in line with work like that of Fred Feldman (Pleasure and the Good Life, 1994) and Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness, 1995) in taking ancient contributions seriously both as a matter of historical interest, and as relevant to contemporary debate of the issues. This is a self-conscious methodology, which Wolfsdorf defends in his opening and concluding chapters, the latter of which argues for the philosophical relevance of the ancient discussions to current research. The text is considerably more accessible than existing historical treatments of the concept of pleasure such as Gosling and Taylor’s classic The Greeks on Pleasure (1982) and Gerd van Riel’s Pleasure and the Good Life: Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists (2000). Rather than overwhelming the reader, the bird’s-eye view of pleasure across the ancient and modern periods forces both Wolfsdorf and his readers to consider and articulate the relevance of ancient authors to contemporary discussions of pleasure, the natural outcomes of which are new connections and fruitful dialectic between the two. One of the many virtues of the book is Wolfsdorf’s effective modelling of his research practice – a strategy which brings the novice reader into the fold of what would otherwise be the obscure habits of ancient-philosophy specialists. Examples of this are his description of a TLG word search, and the inferences he drew from his findings (26); as well as the introduction to chapter 8, where he effectively scaffolds the reader’s understanding of the ancient Stoic material, and models how to deal with diverging primary texts (194). The non-standard ordering of the index, set out with the non-Greek/Latin-speaking reader in mind, is another example of thoughtful accessibility. The book also includes a very helpful list of suggested readings for each chapter. One less fortunate outcome of the structure and strategy of the book is that Wolfsdorf frequently tables questions which are interesting, but which he chooses not to take on in the context of this text. Sometimes this is dictated by the scope of the discussion, sometimes not. When Wolfsdorf does take on an interpretive puzzle, on the other hand, his skill as a philosopher shines. This is frequently his starting point for the individual chapters, and I shall now turn to an overview of the chapters and their arguments. Wolfsdorf’s first chapter orients the reader to the project of the text. His treatment of each philosopher or school in the subsequent chapters is organized around their answers to what he calls the ‘identity’ and ‘kinds’ questions: “What is pleasure?” and “”What kinds of pleasure are there?”. In his second chapter, Wolfsdorf makes some interesting and plausible suggestions about how to understand Prodicus’ reported division between types of pleasure, as well as Democritus’ advice about the distinction between dynamis and physis in relation to contentment and a category he calls ‘measured pleasures’. He then problematizes Antisthenes’ complex view of pleasure, demarcating a category of ‘foolish pleasures’. He addresses the puzzle of how to reconcile what he terms Aristippus’ ‘somatic hedonism’ and his ‘present hedonism’ with the suggestion that Aristippus’ distinguishing ability was to derive somatic pleasures from a variety of circumstances, which lends his attitude to pleasure a distinctive versatility. The focus of Chapter 3 is pleasure in the early tradition of physiologia. Wolfsdorf effectively analyzes the debates in this tradition using later criticisms, such as Theophrastus’ reading of Empedocles. He suggests Diogenes of Apollonia’s physical account of pleasure as a contender for the first answer to the identity question, and goes on to expose the fascinating advice on the relation between depletion, replenishment, and pleasure in Diseases IV, so far largely overlooked as a source on these issues. He delays drawing on this source as an explicit precursor to restoration theories of pleasure until later chapters, though even then more could be made of this as yet unappreciated background. Chapters 4 and 5 address Platonic conceptions of pleasure, with the former focused on Plato’s answer to the identity question, and the latter focused on true and untrue/false pleasures (though it is not clear that this is equal to the ‘kinds’ question). These chapters are amongst the strongest and most important contributions of the text, as Wolfsdorf carefully distinguishes the treatments of pleasure in Republic 9, Timaeus, Philebus, and to some extent Gorgias and Hippias Major. Wolfsdorf skilfully analyzes the restoration model of pleasure, especially prominent in Republic 9, drawing links between that account and the earlier physical tradition, although only briefly. He then suggests insightful connections from the distinction between base and fine pleasures found in the Hippias Major to Prodicus’ hedonic categories. Chapter 5 finds Wolfsdorf criticising Plato for the use of the concept of purity in the context of his discussion of genuine and pseudo-pleasures. The chapter concludes with a systematic analysis of all the types of false pleasure in the Philebus, including an important discussion of the role of lamentation, longing, and dramatic festivals in Plato and Classical Greek culture more generally. In Chapter 6, Wolfsdorf turns to Aristotle’s answer to the identity and kinds questions, arguing convincingly for the Platonic background of these discussions (linguistic and conceptual), and giving evidence for his developmentalist take on Aristotle’s theory of pleasure. He advances a powerful criticism of Gosling and Taylor’s reading of Rhetoric I.11, and uses that text as the principal evidence for his view that Aristotle at first held a restorative conception of pleasure, then a homonymous view (according to which the term can encompass both restoration and radically different types, with one type being most properly so termed), and ultimately a view in which pleasures as restorations or genesis of any kind are excluded. Pleasure is defined, by the time he wrote Eudemian Ethics 6 as “the unimpeded activation of a natural disposition” (123). The chapter continues with a discussion of kinds of pleasure, the distinction between apparent pleasures and pleasures properly speaking (the normative aspects of which would benefit from further discussion), and, finally, an appendix connecting Aristotle’s account of sexual pleasure with the Peripatetic Problems, where Wolfsdorf argues that Aristotle’s treatment appears to respond critically to some treatment like the Hippocratic On Generation. Overall, Wolfsdorf’s handling of Aristotle is in general not as systematic as that of Plato, which is perhaps in part a result of the nature of the evidence. Nonetheless it provides an interesting survey of what Wolfsdorf considers to be Aristotle’s shifting views on pleasure. Wolfsdorf’s Chapter 7 takes on both the Epicureans and, to some extent, the Cyrenaics. He explores these schools with a focus on their ideas about katastematic and kinetic pleasures, arguing against the traditional understanding of restorative pleasures as those which are felt while pain or distress recedes as well as those kinetic pleasures which do not involve antecedent pain, such as listening to music, or talking philosophy. Wolfsdorf argues instead that the correct way to read the evidence about kinetic pleasure is to understand it as restricted to only those pleasures which do not involve antecedent pain, and which are not kinds of restoration. In essence, he argues that “strictly speaking Epicurus does not admit restorative pleasure... he admits that restoration may involve pleasure, but that the pleasure that restoration may involve does not entail change” (160). He argues against the view that kinetic pleasure includes restoration with the claim that, since restoration cannot always involve smooth motion, it falls outside the Epicurean definition of pleasure. He further claims that, since pleasure and pain are exclusive according to his reading of Principal Doctrine 3, no pleasure can be experienced while pain of any kind is present, whether physical or psychological. But against the claim about the exclusivity of pleasure in Principal Doctrine 3, we find evidence such as Principal Doctrine 4, which supports the more mainstream understanding of Epicurean restorative pleasures, and which I would like to see Wolfsdorf consider in his discussion: “The feeling of pain does not linger continuously in the flesh; rather, the sharpest is present for the shortest time, while what merely exceeds the feeling of pleasure in the flesh lasts only a few days. And diseases which last a long time involve feelings of pleasure which exceed feelings of pain ”.1 Given this conflicting evidence, it is at least clear that more work needs to be done to establish this alternative reading. I also found it strange that Wolfsdorf does not seem to puzzle over the normative nature of this material, and who the intended audience is: much of the discussion seems premised on the idea that the Epicureans are as interested in advising the everyman as they are the Sage, which is a big assumption to make. Chapter 7 goes on to analyze and critique Cicero’s treatment of the Epicureans, and to consider the Epicurean account of wisdom, and concludes with an important discussion of attention (epibolē) and mixed pleasure. The discussion of the Old Stoics in Chapter 8 is organized around an attempt to answer the question of how the common-sense and technical conceptions of pleasure, both of which the Stoics term hedonē, are related. This lends the discussion an effective structure and motivation. The parts of the Stoic definition of soul are each discussed in turn, with Wolfsdorf providing a good analysis of the connection between the physics and psychology of pleasure and pain. The chapter concludes with a valuable philological analysis of Stoic pleasure-terms. The extended discussion in Chapter 9 surveys contemporary treatments of pleasure, first in the work of Ryle and Williams from the ’40s and ’50s onwards, then in more recent critics from the ’90s onwards. Again the focus is on their answers to the identity and kinds questions, though the flavour of the chapter is more critical than in the ancient sections, with Wolfsdorf raising objections especially in regard to the work done in the recent modern period on pleasure, intentionality and representation. Overall the discussion is detailed yet accessible, such that it makes an excellent resource, especially for the ancient specialist who wants a sense of the inherited, contemporary debate. It seems to aim to fill a gap, or at least start the work of doing so, as Wolfsdorf observes when he comments that “there are no comprehensive or even partially comprehensive works on contemporary conceptions of pleasure” (286). In his final chapter, Wolfsdorf steps back from his surveys of the ancient and modern accounts of pleasure, and specifically the identity and kinds questions, in order to draw comparisons between them. This final chapter reveals the strength of the set-up of this text, in that it allows Wolfsdorf to show how the historical perspectives on pleasure are relevant to the current debate in a philosophical, rather than purely historical sense. Having set out with a challenging brief of bridging a gap between general introductions and specialist monographs on the history of philosophical treatments of pleasure, Wolfsdorf largely succeeds in the endeavour, despite in some cases sacrificing the pursuit of interesting puzzles in favour of more generalist material. Though the more specialist reader is likely to find points of disagreement in Wolfsdorf’s interpretations, and at times to experience frustration that arguments and connections are not pursued further, this does nothing, overall, to diminish the value of the text, which includes many comprehensively researched, well-argued and important contributions to debates about the nature of pleasure as it is conceived by philosophers from antiquity to the present. Notes:
1. Principal Doctrine IV as translated in L. P. Gerson, L. P. and B. Inwood (trans. and eds.), The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 32. Emphasis mine.Arsenal are preparing to open formal talks over the next fortnight with Theo Walcott and his representatives about extending his contract.
Although Arsène Wenger, the club’s manager, has said previously that initial discussions have been held, Walcott said subsequently that talks had not begun but did stress there had been “no bust-ups” and that he was focused only on football following his return from knee surgery.
Did you know Telegraph Sport has an Arsenal Facebook page?
The situation has since moved on and talks are now likely to be scheduled to take place in the fortnight between the FA Cup semi-final against Reading on Saturday and the Premier League match against Hull on May 4. There has been no offer as yet from Arsenal to extend the deal that expires next season but equally no demands from Walcott.
His return following almost a year out has coincided with Arsenal’s run of excellent form, which has meant limited opportunities in the first team for him to establish match fitness. Wenger, though, has clearly indicated that he wants Walcott to stay and believes that he is now entering the peak years of his career.
Walcott’s pace makes him a unique threat among Arsenal’s attackers, although news emerged recently that Héctor Bellerín had narrowly beaten Walcott’s club 40-metre sprint record. Bellerin’s record time was clocked at 4.42 seconds at the training ground.
Richard Kilty, Great Britain’s world and European indoor 60m champion, on Tuesday roundly challenged the likelihood of Bellerín’s time being accurate and challenged both Arsenal players to a race.
“Media claiming @HectorBellerin can run 4.42 over 40m,” wrote Kilty. “Absolutely no way. Are these journalists complete morons! I will put £30,000 on the line to race @HectorBellerin & @theowalcott any sprint distance, any time, any place, anywhere. The race will be over very quick. So if they put their money down I will gladly show everyone they cannot sprint as fast as the media claim.”
Richard Kilty (centre) has rubbished Theo Walcott and Hector Bellerin's 40m running times
However, as Telegraph Sport reported in an interview with Bellerín last Thursday, Arsenal’s sprint tests allow players to build up speed before they start timing them, which makes Bellerín’s time believable. His effort should not be compared to the performances of sprinters in a race, given they are timed from a stationary start.
Walcott’s focus will be on helping Arsenal reach the FA Cup final and maintain their sequence of eight successive Premier League wins. Tickets for the possible title decider against Chelsea have been exchanging hands this week for almost £1,000.
The game is sold out but ticket exchange websites are still selling offers that range from about £170 for the cheapest seats in the Emirates Stadium to tickets priced at almost £1,000 in both the home and away sections. It is believed to be the highest figure for a match in England since the 2013 Champions League final between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich at Wembley.
Tickets could be sold for over £1,000 for the potential title decider between Arsenal and Chelsea
The demand has surprised even those who work in the ticketing industry, although prices are expected to dip if Chelsea beat Manchester United this weekend and go 10 points clear at the top of the Premier League. In the UK, the resale of football tickets is illegal unless the match organiser authorises it.
Tickets, however, can be sold legally by companies based abroad or by including another service as part of the transaction, such as some form of hospitality.
Tickets for the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley between Manchester United and Barcelona reached £6,000 on some websites.
Arsenal do run their own ticket exchange that allows season-ticket holders who are unable to attend a game to sell their tickets to Arsenal members or to transfer them to family or friends. One of their aims of the service is to “assist us in our objectives of eradicating the illegal sale of tickets through touts”.President Donald Trump's warnings against voter fraud stuck a chord with many Republicans, half of whom would support suspending the 2020 election until this problem is fixed.
The Washington Post surveyed over 1,000 American adults, focusing on the 650 voters who identify as or lean Republican, who were asked both about the previous presidential election and the next.
Forty-seven percent believe Trump won the popular vote.
Sixty-eight percent believe millions of illegal immigrants voted.
Seventy-three percent believe voter fraud happens somewhat or very often.
Fifty-two percent would support postponing the election.
Fifty-six percent support postponing the election if Trump and congressional Republicans called for it.
"Not surprisingly, beliefs about the 2016 election and voter fraud were correlated with support for postponement," wrote Ariel Malka of Yeshiva University and Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania for the Post.
"People who believed that Trump won the popular vote, that there were millions of illegal votes in 2016, or that voter fraud is not rare were more likely to support postponing the election. This support was also more prevalent among Republicans who were younger, were less educated, had less factual knowledge of politics and strongly identified with the party."Critics, including our very own, seemed to enjoy the first outing of “Doctor Who” for its ninth season, but viewers in the United Kingdom didn’t necessarily turn out.
“The Magician’s Apprentice” attracted 4.6 million viewers on the BBC Saturday night, compared to 6.8 million for Peter Capaldi’s debut the year before. Although BBC News cautions that alternative viewing platforms still haven’t checked in, this still starts to raise some serious eyebrows on where the franchise is going, and if the fans will follow.
The first season of the revived show pulled in 10.8 million total viewers for its premiere with Christopher Eccleston, but would go on to average of 7.9 million viewers. The first season with David Tennant at the helm averaged just about the same — 7.9 million.
There was a small dip in average viewership when Matt Smith took over, averaging 7.7 million viewers, but “Doctor Who” still remained steady.
Capaldi’s first season saw that dip continue in total viewership, dropping to just under 7.3 million.
There is a good chance that once full numbers are brought in, the premiere will end up at least a million viewers higher. However, “Doctor Who” is really going to depend on word-of-mouth for the second part of its premiere to ensure viewer support continues.
One thing to note is that scripted dramas don’t usually trend upward in viewership, especially over long periods of time. Considering the typical series goes just five seasons, the fact that “Doctor Who” has seen just a minimal decline in viewership between Season 1 and Season 8 says a lot for the strength of the franchise, especially over time.
“Doctor Who” airs Saturdays on BBC, BBC America and Space.Today we unveil the trailer for May's Doctor Who - The Ninth Doctor Chronicles...
In May, Big Finish travels into the Doctor Who New Series to bring the Ninth Doctor era to life with Doctor Who - The Ninth Doctor Chronicles, starring Camille Coduri, Nicholas Briggs and Bruno Langley in four brand new stories written by Cavan Scott, Scott Handcock, Una McCormack and James Goss, and directed by Helen Goldwyn:
1. The Bleeding Heart by Cavan Scott
Galen is a place where people come to heal. The renowned ‘planet of peace’ seems the ideal venue for talks between two warring races. But when death disrupts the diplomacy, Cosmic Nine news reporter Adriana Jarsdel uncovers a different story. Luckily, someone is there to help. A battle-weary veteran from another war. The Doctor has come to Galen – but is he looking for peace, or something else entirely?
2. The Window on the Moor by Una McCormack
Emily and her sisters once told each other fables of warring kingdoms: wicked princes, noble dukes, and their battling armies. Now she wanders the moors of her childhood alone, remembering those tales. The TARDIS arrives amid a strange civil war, with prisons made of glass and cities stalked by terrifying beasts. As windows open between worlds, stories and storyteller meet, and Rose comes face to face with Emily Brontë.
3. The Other Side by Scott Handcock
Rose has invited a new friend on board the TARDIS, against the Doctor’s better judgement. But when the Time Lord tries to take his unwelcome guest home, a temporal tsunami cuts the journey short. The travellers find the source of the disturbance inside an abandoned cinema. Will Adam Mitchell help or hinder when the Doctor and Rose discover what is lurking on the other side of the screen?
4. Retail Therapy by James Goss
Jackie Tyler is a success. Every home should have a Glubby Glub, and Jackie is star saleswoman on the Powell Estate. At last, she’s found her calling and it’s only a matter of time before she can give Rose the life she deserves. But the Doctor isn’t impressed. Jackie Tyler isn’t just filling peoples’ houses with useless clutter. He believes she’s launching an alien invasion…
Doctor Who - The Ninth Doctor Chronicles is released in May and can be pre-ordered now either on its own (for £20 on Download or £23 on CD) or as part of a Doctor Who - The Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor Chronicles bundle priced at just £55 or £66 respectively.
Any of the above titles bought on CD unlock a digital version as an exclusive to Big Finish listeners' accounts - for anyone with an Apple or Android mobile device this can combine with the free Big Finish download and playback app for listening wherever you may be!
Check out our entire range of Doctor Who New Series productions here.As a NYC’s newest homebrewing club, The Brewminaries have been fortunate to get off to a great start that has been chock full of opportunities to set them up for success. One such opportunity was presented to them by John LaPolla, co-owner of our beloved local homebrew shop Bitter & Esters. Having been asked if he wanted to brew a 5 barrel (155 gallons) batch at Rockaway Brewing Company (Long Island City, NYC) by co-founder and head brewer Marcus Burnett. John thought it would be a great idea to involve The Brewminaries i.e. the club which I am now the treasurer of, formed after coming together as the Bitter & Esters SWAP Team at NYC’s first Brewnity event on February 22, 2015. To quote John himself, “And in what is turning out to be typical Brewminary fashion, they jumped right in with gusto. We decided that they should come up with the recipe and after some wrangling and horse trading, they came up with a rye pale ale hopped with Galaxy and Mosaic hops. Ryes of the Brewminaries was born!”
On Wednesday, March 18, Brewminaries club officers Sheri Jewhurst (“Dictator”), Robert Sherrill (Events Co-Chair), and I joined Bitter & Esters owners John Lapolla and Douglas Amport and Rockaway Brewing Company co-founder and head brewer Ethan Long to brew our first club beer aka Ryes of the Brewminaries. Ethan put us to work, making sure we took part in every part of the brew day including everything from milling the grains and adding the hops to yes, you guessed it, the cleaning of the mash tun, the brew kettle, and anything else that was used to during our brew day. Surprisingly though, despite being an annoying but necessary process as a homebrewer, all of us enjoyed doing the cleaning because it helped us appreciate all the hard work that goes into brewing on a larger than 5-10 gallon scale. Especially after experiencing the ability to add a pound or more of amazing smelling Galaxy and Mosaic hops per addition.
Throughout the brew day the Rockaway staff made us feel at home. They gave us freedom to try all 8 beers that they had on tap and even ordered us pizza for lunch. Once the wort was cooled, transferred to its 5 barrel fermenter, and John pitched the yeast (Wyeast 1056) we returned to the tasting room to share some of our home-brews with Ethan, Ray (brewer and cellarman), and the tasting room staff. As a special treat I brought brownies that I baked with the my chocolate oatmeal milk stout so that everyone could pair them with samples of the beer itself. From Ethan’s positive reactions to our home-brews (he asked for seconds of my double IPA) and eagerness to help us fully understand the ins and outs of brewing on his 5 bbl system, we all could tell that he was glad to have brewed with us and is just as excited as we are to taste the final product when it’s released in the beginning of May.
On behalf of The Brewminaries I’d like to thank Ethan, Marcus, Ray, Justine and the entire Rockaway Brewing Company staff for allowing us be professional brewers for a day, being so accommodating while we brewed together, and supporting our new homebrewing club. In addition, a BIG thank you goes out to John, Douglas, and the entire Bitter & Esters staff for bringing The Brewminaries on board for this collaborative brew and for your continued support of our goals and activities.
Next up for The Brewminaries…A dry hopping schedule experiment featuring a Pliny The Elder clone recipe as its basis / inspiration.
Cheers!
AdvertisementsRowan Williams advocates a period of "gracious restraint" The Archbishop of Canterbury has expressed his concern at the election of the second openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church. Rowan Williams said the move raised "very serious questions" for both the Episcopal Church in the US and the Anglican Communion as a whole. But he noted that the election of the Reverend Mary Glasspool in the diocese of Los Angeles had yet to be confirmed. The 2003 election of the first openly gay bishop created a massive rift. Ms Glasspool was elected on Saturday as an assistant bishop in the diocese of Los Angeles. She needs a majority of national Episcopal Church heads to back her consecration. The Episcopal Church leader, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, has said she will consecrate any bishop whose election follows the rules. 'Important implications' In a statement posted on his website Dr Williams said the election "raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole". ANALYSIS Robert Pigott, BBC religious affairs correspondent Despite intense pressure to maintain a moratorium on ordaining gay bishops - the Episcopal Church's ruling convention voted in July to allow homosexual men or women to become bishops. This clarification of the Church's policy makes it all the more likely that Mary Glasspool's election will be confirmed by its bishops and a committee representing the Church's lay and clergy members. If it is confirmed, Canon Glasspool's election will set back attempts to preserve worldwide Anglicanism intact and makes it more probable that the American Church will be consigned to membership of the second of a two-tier Communion. "The process of selection however is only part complete," he said. "The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees. That decision will have very important implications." Bishops of the US Episcopal Church voted in July to overturn a three-year ban on the appointment of gay bishops. Anglican leaders had asked the Church to observe the moratorium. "The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that a period of gracious restraint in respect of actions which are contrary to the mind of the Communion is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold," said Dr Williams. Ms Glasspool, 55, has been a canon in the Diocese of Maryland for eight years, according to a statement by her on the website of the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles. It says she has been with her partner, Becki Sander, since 1988. Traditionalists have already expressed opposition to the latest election. Conservatives insist the Bible unequivocally outlaws homosexuality, while liberals believe the Bible should be reinterpreted in the light of contemporary wisdom. Conservatives were incensed by the election of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, six years ago The row led to the formation of a conservative breakaway Episcopal movement in the US - the Anglican Church in North America. As head of the worldwide Anglican community, Dr Williams has been under pressure to recognise it. The traditionalists have formed a range of new alliances, often with conservative churches in Africa.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionDozens of psychotherapists have called on Britain's biggest professional body for therapists to acknowledge that trans people are subjected to attempts to "cure" them.
Karen Pollock
More than 80 leading counsellors and psychotherapists have signed an open letter urging Britain's largest professional body for therapists to protect trans people from conversion therapy, BuzzFeed News can reveal. The letter, which was written by LGBT therapist Karen Pollock, calls on the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) to recognise that transgender people are subjected to conversion therapy, to condemn it, and to offer increased training for all therapists to ensure they respond ethically to trans clients. Currently, the BACP has only expressed opposition to conversion therapy – the attempt by some therapists to "cure" LGBT people – when carried out on lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Last year the organisation, which has more than 30,000 members, signed up to a statement called the Memorandum of Understanding, which condemned such therapy – but it left out trans people. Every major mental health body in Britain signed the memorandum. But in a recent interview by BuzzFeed News, Dominic Davies – widely regarded as the leading expert on LGBT therapy in Britain – revealed that he had resigned his fellowship of the BACP after discovering its governors were "unlikely" to sign an updated version of the statement that includes trans people. Davies said he was told by another senior member of the organisation that the governors probably will not sign the amended memorandum because "they say there’s no evidence of trans people or asexuals receiving conversion therapy". Prompted by the interview, Pollock composed the open letter to the BACP on Sunday and within 48 hours over 80 professionals from the fields of therapy and diversity had signed it. It begins: "We, the undersigned, wish to express our deep unease with the attitude of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy to issues of gender and sexual diversity. In particular it is very worrying that after a year of consultation there seems to be no movement on adding protection from conversion/reparative therapy to trans people. Nor does it seem that the BACP appreciates fully the need for training to include an understanding of gender and sexual diversity."
Karen Pollock
The letter also details a succession of studies into the experiences of trans people when accessing psychotherapy and the problems they encounter with therapists as a result of their gender identity. These include a report by the Transgender Equality Network Northern Ireland that found that "40% of trans people were discouraged from seeking crisis support or counselling by previous experiences" and Pollock's own research, which found that when suicidal, nearly a fifth of trans people are "discouraged from seeking counselling due to a fear of a counsellor being transphobic". The letter continues: "We call upon the BACP to send a clear message that in order to comply with the Ethical Framework [the therapists' good-practice guide] members must not offer conversion therapy" to trans people. This means that therapists must not attempt to enforce on trans clients the gender identity of the sex that was assigned at birth. It concludes: "There seems no logical, or ethical reason to exclude trans people from the memorandum of understanding which the BACP signed in 2015 for LGB people."
The Queerness / Karen Pollock
The governors of the BACP will meet on 4 March to |
motor units that are recruited are forced to contract continuously, time after time, until your muscles achieve a state of maximum intensity safely and effectively.
The end result is that the entire muscle matures very quickly.
Resistance band training with an isometric strategy adds additional benefits to the athlete beyond traditional isometrics.Gates can have a considerable bearing on the ambience of your home and they are often used as an effective design feature by architects and designers alike. For this reason, it is important that your gate is crafted for your exact purposes. Here at Dean Wilson Iron, we believe that your gate should reflect your own personal style and we specialise in working with our clients to develop designs that will complement the design of your home, whilst maintain uncompromising quality, durability and practicality. We work closely with you throughout the entire process to ensure that your design concept is brought to life – we encourage your input and welcome the opportunity to discuss specific points of your gate, so as to ensure that you are getting a perfectly targeted solution.
We provide a comprehensive range of gates that can account for all of your needs – whether they are security needs, designer needs, practical needs or all three. Wrought iron is renowned for its timeless and classical appearance, however this does not mean it cannot be used in contemporary circumstances. We strive to combine practicality with design and to do this we can incorporate leading edge technology into the design of your gate.Build 10 Real Life Python Applications (view) – This is the only python course that covers web, database, web scraping, data science, web visualization and image processing. This course is specially designed for developing real life python applications. During this course, you will learn to build 10 real life python applications in web, desktop, database, web scrapping, web mapping, data analysis, interactive web visualization, computer vision for image and video processing, and object oriented programming through out this course. (view full details)
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Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Group if you find this blog very helpful. Find and learn new skills of your choice here-> ViewOne of the best parts of this gig is the learning. Always a student, no matter your knowledge base…there’s always someone out there that knows more than you. In my case, there are scores of people that have forgotten more than I’ll ever know, so I count myself fortunate to be able to have the opportunity to talk with them.
Case in point, the good folks at SI-Defense. I first handled a few different rifle platforms by them a couple of months ago, and I am quite intrigued. One of the the things I alluded to in my previous blog post was that SI-Defense had partnered with PROOF Research for a unique carbon fiber-wrapped barrel that is assembled on their ambidextrous.308.
Once photos started surfacing due to marketing efforts from Reign Precision, I started getting a ton of questions about the PROOF Research barrel, and why was it so special. I do not speak on what I don’t know and I know NOTHING about long distance or precision shooting. I actually have never shot out past 200 yards before, and at that, I wasn’t very good. This deficiency is obviously something that I want to rectify, however for now; it is just a known weakness.
So instead of faking it or ignoring the questions asked of me, I was able to get in contact with the real experts from PROOF Research themselves. They could speak to their barrels and fabrication process much better than I ever could, so I would like to pass along my exchange with Chad VanBrunt, PROOF Research’s Development Engineer.
CT: How do your barrels augment/compliment the SI-Defense.308 platform?
CVB: We started our collaboration effort with SI Defense by understanding what their goals are for the platform itself and then designing the barrel to help them meet their goals. The 18” barrel we designed for the AMBI 308 came in lighter than the 16” steel barrels they were using, provided an additional 60-70fps of velocity, and had better group to group consistency (group size and group center of impact).
CT: Why carbon fiber wrap? Can you explain the wrapping process, what are the advantages/disadvantages of the carbon fiber?
CVB: Composite wrapping barrels in the way PROOF Research does, which is a CNC controlled fiber winding process, provides our barrel design team a huge number of variables to tweak to benefit our end users. Given the performance parameters of the weapon platform, we are able to bias our design to meet these goals. For advantages: Carbon fiber is much stiffer (7x) than steel by mass so we are able to maintain or improve the structure of the barrel while greatly reducing weight, faster barrel cooling vs steel barrels of same contour, and reduced point of impact shift from group to group vs steel barrels. The only real disadvantage we have found is cost due to the design and manufacturing complexity, materials, and labor.
CT: How does carbon fiber affect weight, barrel resonance, heat mitigation, etc?
CVB: By reducing the amount of steel and adding carbon fiber we greatly reduce weight (up to 64% depending on application) and decrease cooling time. Our composite wrap is a natural dampener of barrel vibration and we have near term testing planned to help us further understand and quantify how this dampening contributes to the precision of our barrels.
CT: Are there any care considerations that end-users must be aware of when it comes to carbon fiber barrel usage? I’ve been told that your barrels are designed for extreme accuracy, not for “making noise,” so where lies the balance between precision performance and durability?
CVB: We have a unique advantage in the composite barrel market in that we design and produce our own high-temperature resins, which is the material that binds the carbon fiber to the inner steel liner. Our advanced composites division (PROOF Research ACD) is a world leader in high-temperature composite materials and produces high-temp solutions for the F-35 Strike Fighter and the B-2 Stealth Bomber, in addition to driving our barrel designs. This allows us to push the envelope in terms of our barrels’ temperature operating limits. Although we have successfully tested full-auto prototypes and will be introducing those in the future, our current barrels are not rated for fully-automatic fire, but are suitable for heavy-duty use — and are in fact routinely used in 3-gun and precision rifle matches, which require high volume and cadence strings of fire. In 2014 Daniel Horner won two major 3-Gun championships with a PROOF Research composite barrel, so the proof is out there in the competition world and in military and LE duty use. Bottomline, full-auto aside, end-users should treat these barrels like they would treat a match grade steel barrel.
PROOF Research barrels really are an impressive work of art, and the craftsmanship is apparent just by observation alone. To learn more about PROOF Research, visit their website at: http://proofresearch.com/
I will hopefully have an opportunity to meet up with the folks from PROOF Research at SHOT 2015, so please post any questions or queries in the comments below, and I will try to bring them to SHOT with me.
* The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors and contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Guns & Tactics Magazine,
the administrative staff, and/or any/all contributors to this site.I guess I should start this post off with a short apology for my one week of absence.
The department I belong to in my public service held a really big festival last week and there were over 3 schools that came. I wasn’t really told about this event until 4 days prior to the festival and was abruptly thrown around the building in order to help set up for everything. It didn’t really help that I was trying to read 2 different series at the same time in order to figure out what project I wanted to pick up next.
In any case, that’s the reason why I suddenly went under for a week. I ended up staying 4 hours past my normal work time on the day of the festival. I’m actually sore all over and my ankles scream every time I take a step.
Anyway, back to the main topic. I’d like to thank everyone who left a comment on the last post. A lot of you guys were very supportive and seemed relatively fine with whatever path I ultimately chose to take. Although, I should point out a misunderstanding some of you guys seem to have.
I didn’t start out with permission to translate DD. I only got permission around the time I started to translate volume 3. I wasn’t the one who reached out to them first either, it was them who contacted me initially. They thanked me for the global popularity which I helped gain for their novel and said that I could continue.
Furthermore, the only reason I was able to quickly get permission to translate YaMA was due to the fact that the editor who works on DD also manages YaMA as well. Thus meaning, the people at NovelEngine(Publisher of DD and YaMA) are very lenient and kind towards me. But this is an incredibly, incredibly rare case that doesn’t really happen often to us translators.
I’ve been discouraged in regard to getting permission from other publishers because I’ve already been declined by two companies with big names. Some of you guys commented that I can just keep trying to get permission from other publishers, but that’s a finite number. If I’m correct, there are only 2-3 other publishing companies left that also publish Korean LNs. This is why I’ve been tempted to just do what I did when I started to translate DD. Wing it.
—∋Ο∈—
Now then, to the second part of this post.
This is a new series that I’ll probably be picking up for now. It’s from NovelEngine, the same publisher for DD and YaMA, but compared to those two series, this is a more light-hearted read. I wanted a change of pace since I’ve been translating only dark novels with twisted characters.
The title of the series is called:
〈We Should Have Slept While Only Holding Hands, And Yet!?〉.
An amazing title. I prefer to just call it “Handholding”. This is a completed series with 7 volumes +1 interlude volume.
Synopsis:
My childhood friend who lived next door since preschool, Ja Saeyeon. On the outside, she appears like an adequately pretty girl who’s like a drawing, but only her body has grown; she was a girl whose mental age was truly that of an elementary schooler. We’d spend time together from time to time, but Saeyeon’s parents, who were often not home, would pay me to take care of her, so we merely had a ‘work’ relationship. But this time her spoiled behavior was more severe for some reason. She fretfully asked for me to sleep together with her since she was afraid to sleep by herself. I even sang her a lullaby, but she thought I was going to run away so, with great care, she asked if we could sleep while holding hands. We then slept together. Really, seriously, we merely slept while only holding hands.
But the next morning⎯⎯⎯there was a young girl lying down between us?!
Yes, I know. This novel sounds a bit cliche and there are other works that are similar to this. All I can say is that this was an actually enjoyable read for me. Volume 1 was rather hard to get through since the MC was really arrogant and hard headed, but after volume 1, you can actually see the characters developing and growing up. It was a very nice experience and it seems the Korean reviewers said the series become great starting from volume 3, so just think of volume 1 and 2 as build up(I haven’t read volume 3 yet cause of my lack of time).
At any rate, I’ll start translating at the end of this week. The festival may be over, but now I’m busy trying to clean up the aftermath and preparing for the other upcoming events. Why my department has all these events during the summer and not during the spring or autumn is beyond me. I’m going to die from the heat.
See you guys in a couple of days.
AdvertisementsA few weeks after the attorney Andrew Schmidt filed a labor lawsuit against Uber and its CEO Travis Kalanick last December — one of so many legal battles that keep the ride-hailing company's legal team occupied — Schmidt's friends and colleagues began receiving calls about him from people purporting to be "profiling up-and-coming labor lawyers in the US." Other calls were made to people who knew Schmidt's client, those ones made from people claiming to be researching "up-and-coming researchers in environmental conservation." Behind these calls was a third party investigator hired by Uber to dig up dirt on Schmidt and his client.
The Verge has been looking into the ensuing, ongoing legal battle that runs parallel to the original labor case, which appears to have been first reported on by CNBC last month when a judge ruled that Schmidt had provided enough evidence to reasonably suspect Uber of fraud, "raising a serious risk of perverting the process of justice before this court."
Uber communicated through encrypted channels with Ergo, whom it appears to have paid nearly $20,000 for the investigation. When Schmidt contacted Uber to ask if they were behind the calls about him, they originally said they were not. That's a mistake that could cost them, and they later called back to clarify that they sort of were. However, "Uber took reasonable steps to ensure that Ergo complied with the law," the company wrote in a filing. "It is undisputed that Uber and Mr. Kalanick were unaware that Ergo would use misrepresentations during its investigation."
The Verge pretty naturally sees this as potentially damaging the many other cases Uber is working on right now, noting that this marks the fourth time that Uber commissioned Ergo's services. There's also a connection to be drawn between the remarks of one Uber exec, Emil Michael, who in 2014 bragged about an idea to investigate the private lives of journalists to tarnish their arguments against the company.
Related: Uber Executive Bragged About Idea To Spend $1 Million To Investigate Journalists' PrivateRed Bull Training Grounds #2 - Orlando, FL (Day 1)
Eight participating players will scrimmage in a series of round-robin matches over the course of the first two days, giving each player the opportunity to experience one another's signature tactics and evasive rebuttals. At the completion of each match, players head to the analysis booth to discuss and critique their performance, giving the audience at home a bleacher seat to the training regimes and techniques of top players, gaining strategic insight right alongside the pros. All matches in this group-play section are best of three and all three games of each will be played in full. To increase the stakes, the winner of each game in this segment of the tournament will take home an additional $100.
Day three of Red Bull Training Grounds culminates in a tournament consisting of the top four players still standing (two from each group). Reconvening for a final day of competitive play, the winner will walk away with the top prize and an invitation to a future high stakes tournament.
Site:
Thread: This event is the second installment of our Training Grounds circuit for 2013. We will be in Orlando, Florida beginning Friday July 26th and running through Sunday July 28th. Of course, we’re also upping the stakes of this showdown by featuring a prize pool of $10,000.Eight participating players will scrimmage in a series of round-robin matches over the course of the first two days, giving each player the opportunity to experience one another's signature tactics and evasive rebuttals. At the completion of each match, players head to the analysis booth to discuss and critique their performance, giving the audience at home a bleacher seat to the training regimes and techniques of top players, gaining strategic insight right alongside the pros. All matches in this group-play section are best of three and all three games of each will be played in full. To increase the stakes, the winner of each game in this segment of the tournament will take home an additional $100.Day three of Red Bull Training Grounds culminates in a tournament consisting of the top four players still standing (two from each group). Reconvening for a final day of competitive play, the winner will walk away with the top prize and an invitation to a future high stakes tournament.Site: http://www.redbull.com/us/en/esports/events/1331599649079/red-bull-training-grounds-orlando Thread: Red Bull Training Grounds #2 - Orlando, FL
(Event is finished) Event Time: 17:30 GMT 19:30 CEST 13:30 EDT 12:30 CDT 10:30 PDT Submitted by redbullESPORTSAssociated Press -
BOSTON (AP) — Public health advocates, former smokers, doctors and teenagers are heading to the Statehouse to push for legislation hiking the age of sale for tobacco products in Massachusetts from 18 to 21.
There will be a public hearing on the legislation Tuesday.
The bill would also add e-cigarettes to the existing smoke-free workplace law and prohibit health care institutions — including pharmacies — from selling tobacco products.
Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said last year he supports banning the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products to people under 21.
Similar legislation has been put into effect on the local level in nearly 150 cities and towns across Massachusetts, including Boston, Worcester and Lowell.
Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey have also supported similar legislation on the national level.The Atlanta Braves lost 95 games last season, haven’t played a game in 2016, but there’s still some confidence at the top of the organization.
Recently appointed general manager John Coppolella is happy with the rebuild thus far — and even said they’re ahead of schedule.
“I feel so much better about where we are now than I did a year ago,” said Coppolella, speaking Monday at Turner Field via the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “I knew we were on the right track, but to see where we are is exciting.”
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This has been a big offseason for the Braves, who have traded Shelby Miller and fan-favorite Andrelton Simmons in a pair of trades, bringing back top prospects in each deal.
“In a lot of the trades we made in the 2014-2015 offseason, the players were a lot further away,” Coppolella said. “With these two trades, you really got six players (big-leaguers Erick Aybar and Ender Iciarte; pitchers Aaron Blair, Sean Newcomb and Chris Ellis, plus Dansby Swanson, the No. 1 pick of last year’s draft) you could see in 2016. A lot of the deals we made last year … were more to restart the system than have major-league impact in the short term.”
In recent seasons, we’ve seen rebuilding teams make noise sooner rather than later — a quality Coppolella sees in his organization.
“We feel a lot of our best prospects are close," Coppolella said. "You can see with teams like the Houston Astros and the Cubs and the Royals that when those young players come up, they can have an immediate impact.”
One of those players to make an immediate impact would be Inciarte, who Coppolella compared defensively to Simmons.
“A great part about the Shelby Miller trade was that a lot of fans knew Dansby Swanson — he’s No. 1 overall and he’s from here. A lot of our fans knew Ender Inciarte, really good player, second in the league in runs saved. By the way, he had 29; Andrelton Simmons had 24," Coppolella said. "A lot of our fans don’t know Max Fried or Touki Toussaint. They will, but right now they don’t know those players. They think we’re trading for lottery tickets.”
If all goes according to plan, those lottery tickets will turn into winners at least by the 2017 season, when they will move into their new ballpark.UPDATE: Strip shooting suspect in custody, one victim dead Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video Video
LAS VEGAS - Metro Police say the armed suspect who barricaded himself on a bus following a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, surrendered Saturday around 3:15 p.m., and is now in police custody.
The incident on South Las Vegas Boulevard began around 10:48 a.m. in front of the Cosmopolitan.
"Everyone was actually pretty calm. The officers were on edge. You could tell that with the weapons drawn and kind of forcefully asking questions," said Mike Weix, who was having brunch at the Cosmopolitan when the shooting occurred.
Police say the suspect, described as a man in his 50's, pulled out a handgun and began firing at passengers on the second story of a two-story RTC bus.
Two people were struck in the shooting. Both people were transported to UMC Trauma. One victim died at the hospital and the other suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
The suspect barricaded himself on the bus. SWAT and crisis negotiators arrived at the scene and worked to get him out of the vehicle. However, at one point, the suspect opened fire again once they deployed robots. Police say they did not return fire.
During negotiations, police say they realized the suspect, who appears to be a local, had significant mental health issues.
Authorities say this was an isolated active shooter incident which was constrained to the RTC bus. The shooting has no apparent connection to terrorism.
"Being from Wisconsin, this wasn't exactly what I was expecting on my trip to Vegas," Weix said.
RTC released at statement Saturday evening:
This morning, a shooting occurred on an RTC transit vehicle that services the Las Vegas Strip. Our heartfelt condolences go out to the family of the rider who was fatally shot, and we also extend our sincere sympathies to the injured victim, the bus operator and the other passengers who were aboard during this tragic incident. The safety and security of our transit riders, contractors and staff is our utmost priority. We are working closely with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and remain committed to providing a safe public transportation system.
As this is an ongoing investigation, please contact the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for further inquiries and updates regarding this incident.
~ Angela Castro, Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada
Police are now looking to speak with people who saw the shooting. Witnesses are asked to call (702) 828-7777.
Las Vegas Boulevard was shut down from Flamingo Road to Harmon Avenue during the barricade situation. Northbound Las Vegas in now open.
There is no motive for the shooting at this time.Australia’s greatest Olympian, Ian Thorpe, is poised to announce his return to international swimming and a full-blown assault on next year’s London Olympics, The (Sydney) Sunday Telegraph reported.
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Thorpe, 28, has been in regular contact with Australian swimming coach Leigh Nugent, declaring he wants to swim at the March 2012 Olympic selection trials in the hope of qualifying for London in July 2012.
All that remains is for Thorpe to give his agent David Flaskas the go-ahead to register his drug-testing paperwork with Swimming Australia. He then would need to wait nine months before he could swim at an official meet.
Incredibly, the five-time Olympic gold medalist’s world-record 400m freestyle swim in Manchester in 2002 is still just 1/100th of a second behind today’s world record, achieved with the controversial and now banned bodysuit at the 2009 world championships in Rome, where almost every world record was taken apart.
Thorpe’s return centers on his appetite for competitive swimming and his desire to race again, a source close to the Thorpe camp said. The source denied the comeback is related to Thorpe’s financial difficulties.
He has been training in private to convince himself he can return to his former heights before making a formal announcement.
Thorpe’s biggest fear is that his return will turn into a media circus, denying him the privacy he has enjoyed since November 2006.WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two months before a contentious presidential campaign culminates in Election Day, Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl said bishops and priests should refrain from becoming entangled in partisan politics and emphasized their roles as teachers of the faith.
The role of the clergy, Wuerl stressed, is to help shape the consciences of laity who are called to make a difference in the public square.
In an article titled “The Problems of Priest Politicians, The Urgency of Lay Leadership,” and published in the Sept. 8 Catholic Standard newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington, Wuerl drew a clear distinction between the clergy’s role as teachers of the faith, and the laity’s role to apply their faith in the political realm “and become salt and light in our democracy.”
The archbishop of Washington – whose archdiocese includes the nation’s capital and five surrounding Maryland counties, with a flock that includes workers from all three branches of the federal government – said that the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on the proper role of clergy and the laity in the sphere of politics has been re-emphasized over the years by Saint John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
That teaching, Wuerl said, is underscored in the U.S. bishops’ related document, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” which was updated in 2015 for this election cycle. He encouraged people to read that document, which he said provides a practical guide for “moral decision making when exercising political responsibility in these challenging times.”
Warning against the pitfalls of priests endorsing candidates or parties, Wuerl wrote, “Each year in which we move toward a national election, I remind my brother priests that we are in the pulpit as proclaimers of the Gospel, not as political leaders. No one elected us as their political representative and there might be serious reason to believe they probably would not.”
“We are there to present the Word of God,” Wuerl said. “Our listeners, who come from differing political parties and have diverse ideological perspectives, have a right to hear the Gospel and the Church’s teaching on faith and morals proclaimed with fidelity, consistently and courageously and not packaged in someone’s personal, partisan political views.”
Rather than sharing their political or ideological preferences, priests are called to undertake “the very demanding and challenging role of teaching by word and example the principles of our faith,” the cardinal said. He emphasized their “efforts to preach and persuade,” and most of all, to teach, in order to help lay Catholics reflect their faith in their everyday lives.
“The clergy’s task of teaching and helping to form the consciences of the laity, as envisioned by the Council and subsequent popes, requires patience in dealing with diverse opinions, fidelity in presenting the fullness of Church teaching and perseverance in continuing to teach, to teach and to teach,” the cardinal wrote.
Wuerl said circumstances arise when Church leaders have a responsibility to speak out about “the moral and human dimensions of public issues and call for the protection of the weak and the pursuit of the common good.”
But those responsibilities, he said, “cannot substitute for the leadership of lay men and women. Pastors need to encourage, inform and assist lay women and men in their duty to bring the values of our faith into civic and public life.”
In an era when many see partisanship as contributing to congressional gridlock and an increasingly bitter political environment, the cardinal noted that priests and bishops must not fall into the trap of engaging in partisan politics or appearing to be partisan.
“For the bishop or priest to get directly involved in partisan politics is to confuse and distort the correct understanding of the distinctive and complementary role of clergy and the role of the laity,” Wuerl wrote.
“For many of the faithful and clergy, this mixing of roles – pastor/teacher and political authority/advocate – would have the unfortunate effect of diminishing the bishops’ spiritual authority and moral credibility by reducing, in the perception of many, the bishop to the role of a lobbyist or partisan.”
Noting times in history when the Church relied on secular and political authority and even military power, and sometimes used the sacraments and ecclesial penalties in an effort to enact its political will, the cardinal said such actions “did damage to both church and state.”
The cardinal recalled a debate following the Second Vatican Council, over whether priests should run for political office. “I thought it was a bad idea then, as I do now,” he said.
Wuerl pointed to the example of a parish priest who misused the “pastor’s corner” of his parish bulletin as a soapbox for his partisan political views. He countered that mentality with what Pope Francis told the Italian Episcopal Conference in 2015: “Lay people with an authentic Christian formation should not need a pilot bishop or a pilot monsignor or a clerical presence” to take on political, social, economic and legislative responsibilities.
Washington’s archbishop said the roles of clergy and laity are different but complementary when it comes to politics, and he noted that priests and bishops are called “to teach the faith, share Catholic moral and social principles, and to encourage lay men and women in their primary responsibility to take these truths and values into the economic, political and cultural world.”
He said the teaching of the Council, recent popes and the U.S. bishops’ statement on political responsibility emphasize the importance of the laity “standing up and speaking out for the values of our faith” in the world of politics.
“There is much at stake in public life: questions of life and death, war and peace, religious freedom and human dignity,” Wuerl wrote. “There is simply no substitute for informed, faithful, active and courageous lay women and men who will bring the truth of the Gospel and the wisdom of Catholic teaching into public life.”Geneva, 25 November 2015. After the successful restart of the Large Hadron Collider and its first months of data taking with proton collisions at a new energy frontier, the LHC is moving to a new phase, with the first lead-ion collisions of season 2 at an energy about twice as high as that of any previous collider experiment. Following a period of intense activity to re-configure the LHC and its chain of accelerators for heavy ion beams, CERN1’s accelerator specialists put the beams into collision for the first time in the early morning of 17 November 2015 and ‘stable beams’ were declared at 10.59am today, marking the start of a one-month run with positively charged lead ions: lead atoms stripped of electrons. The four large LHC experiments will all take data over this campaign, including LHCb, which will record this kind of collision for the first time. Colliding lead ions allows the LHC experiments to study a state of matter that existed shortly after the big bang, reaching a temperature of several trillion degrees.
Geneva, 25 November 2015. After the successful restart of the Large Hadron Collider and its first months of data taking with proton collisions at a new energy frontier, the LHC is moving to a new phase, with the first lead-ion collisions of season 2 at an energy about twice as high as that of any previous collider experiment. Following a period of intense activity to re-configure the LHC and its chain of accelerators for heavy ion beams, CERN1’s accelerator specialists put the beams into collision for the first time in the early morning of 17 November 2015 and ‘stable beams’ were declared at 10.59am today, marking the start of a one-month run with positively charged lead ions: lead atoms stripped of electrons. The four large LHC experiments will all take data over this campaign, including LHCb, which will record this kind of collision for the first time. Colliding lead ions allows the LHC experiments to study a state of matter that existed shortly after the big bang, reaching a temperature of several trillion degrees.
“It is a tradition to collide ions over one month every year as part of our diverse research programme at the LHC,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “This year however is special as we reach a new energy and will explore matter at an even earlier stage of our universe.”
Early in the life of our universe, for a few millionths of a second, matter was a very hot and very dense medium – a kind of primordial ‘soup’ of particles, mainly composed of fundamental particles known as quarks and gluons. In today’s cold Universe, the gluons “glue” quarks together into the protons and neutrons that form bulk matter, including us, as well as other kinds of particles.
“There are many very dense and very hot questions to be addressed with the ion run for which our experiment was specifically designed and further improved during the shutdown,” said ALICE collaboration spokesperson Paolo Giubellino. “For instance, we are eager to learn how the increase in energy will affect charmonium production, and to probe heavy flavour and jet quenching with higher statistics. The whole collaboration is enthusiastically preparing for a new journey of discovery.”
Collision between lead ions seen within the ALICE detector (Image: ALICE ©CERN)
Increasing the energy of collisions will increase the volume and the temperature of the quark and gluon plasma, allowing for significant advances in understanding the strongly-interacting medium formed in lead-ion collisions at the LHC. As an example, in season 1 the LHC experiments confirmed the perfect liquid nature of the quark-gluon plasma and the existence of “jet quenching” in ion collisions, a phenomenon in which generated particles lose energy through the quark-gluon plasma. The high abundance of such phenomena will provide the experiments with tools to characterize the behaviour of this quark-gluon plasma. Measurements to higher jet energies will thus allow new and more detailed characterization of this very interesting state of matter.
“The heavy-ion run will provide a great complement to the proton-proton data we've taken this year," said ATLAS collaboration spokesperson Dave Charlton. "We are looking forward to extending ATLAS' studies of how energetic objects such as jets and W and Z bosons behave in the quark gluon plasma.”
Collision between lead ions seen within the ATLAS detector (Image: ATLAS ©CERN)
The LHC detectors were substantially improved during the LHC’s first long shutdown. With higher statistics expected, physicists will be able to look deeper at the tantalising signals observed in season 1.
"Heavy flavour particles will be produced at high rate in Season 2, opening up unprecedented opportunities to study hadronic matter in extreme conditions,” said CMS collaboration spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. « CMS is ideally suited to trigger on these rare probes and to measure them with high precision. »
Collision between lead ions seen within the CMS detector (Image: CMS ©CERN)
For the very first time, the LHCb collaboration will join the club of experiments taking data with ion-ion collisions.
"This is an exciting step into the unknown for LHCb, which has very precise particle identification capabilities. Our detector will enable us to perform measurements that are highly complementary to those of our friends elsewhere around the ring,” said LHCb collaboration spokesperson Guy Wilkinson.
Collision between lead ions seen within the LHCb detector (Image: LHCb ©CERN)
For more information:
Update: LHC: A proton'reference' run to prepare for lead
1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading particle physics research laboratory. Its headquarters are in Geneva. Its Member States are currently: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession and Serbia is an Associate Member State in the Pre-stage to Membership. Pakistan and Turkey are Associate Members. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, India, Japan, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), UNESCO and the European Union have Observer status.Phase One XF 100MP Camera Systems
The Phase One XF Camera System stands alone as the state-of-the-art in medium format camera design. When compared against its closest competitor, the XF’s touch screen operation, elegant menu systems, Blue Ring lenses, Vertical grip, and Capture One workflow are light years ahead. There are two Phase One 100mp backs:
The flagship Phase One IQ3 100mp comes fully loaded with cutting edge features like built in wireless remote control/review/editing, customizable clipping indicator, long exposure calculator, and comes with a five year warranty that includes a loaner during any service.
The Phase One IQ1 100mp has the same great sensor and image quality as the IQ3 100mp, but eschews some features and package inclusions (e.g. no rolling hard case) in pursuit of a lower cost of entry, and widening the range of our 100mp offerings.You may feel compelled to fight every chance you get - this, however, may end up being your downfall.
Defiant Development delves back into the RPG genre with Hand of Fate 2. A sequel to the original game, it presents a new adventure for players.
The first Hand of Fate offered players a fresh take on the roguelike and deck-building genres. A mysterious and untrustworthy narrator guided you through a journey ripe with trials and tribulations.
Acting as a sort of Dungeon-Master, the cloak-faced ‘Dealer’, provided a charm and iconicity that left a solid impression |
a teammate, a fan, or a member of the media. Pena has now been playing at the major league level for a decade, spending time with four teams, but whether it's been a year or four, he still appreciates the opportunity every team has given him, and now, what he's able to do for others.
Pena spent just one season with the Detroit Tigers but he remains a fan favorite, and it's easy to see why. Back in Detroit for the first time since going to the Cincinnati Reds through free agency in 2014, Pena didn't start the first of the short two-game series between the Tigers and Reds. He was in the game on Tuesday. But if you didn't look at the lineup card, no one would have known the difference by Pena's demeanor. Many of the players that Pena played with while in Detroit are no longer with the Tigers, but for Pena, it was just "awesome" being back.
"I had a blast (playing with the Tigers)," Pena said. "Every time that I have the opportunity to see you guys play or see anything from the city or related to the Tigers, it brings such great memories. It was great here. But especially the playoffs, I thank God when we had the chance to be in the playoffs, that's something that always is gonna stay in your heart because it's something special."
★★★
As much as the Tigers meant to Pena, mentioning the fans quickly followed. Highly active on Twitter, Pena doesn't just post a comment once in a while or reply to a random fan -- it's hard to get him off social media. And that's not a bad thing. He loves interacting with the fans, regardless of the team. For Pena, though, he doesn't just use social media for the fun of it. There's a purpose behind the why.
Yes, it's been 10 years since Pena entered the big leagues. Yet, the freedom that Pena enjoys through living in the United States, it's something he treasures. His ability to use Twitter as a platform to speak for those who can't, or give recognition for those who risk their lives for freedom, that's something Pena cares a great deal about. For him, it's not just something to do to pass time. And perhaps, that's why fans, and fellow players (present and former), find Pena to be one of the most uplifting, and upbeat players they've come across.
"Remember, I come from Cuba, and in Cuba there was no free speech," Pena remarked. "And here in America, that's everything about America. Whatever is on your mind, you can say it. I do have the opportunity to tell people how much I appreciate what they do and their support, but especially, I just never take nothing for granted, and I want people to know that."
★★★
Like, for example, catching some of the best starting pitchers in the game, such as Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Anibal Sanchez. Pena looked back on that year as an incredibly unique opportunity, not just to catch great starters, but to learn from them every time he got behind the dish. Looking back on his time as a member of the Kansas City Royals, Pena learned how to conduct himself, go about his business, and prepare for a game through then-Royals starter Zack Greinke.
It enabled Pena to carry that experience into his time with the Tigers. Seeing the Tigers starters on a daily basis, their level of confidence was what stood out the most, for Pena. Catching pitchers like Verlander and Scherzer isn't an everyday opportunity, and Pena was fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of that experience -- literally.
"It doesn't matter if I'm not with the Tigers anymore, I still get a lot of positive tweets and emails and stuff like that from Tigers fans."
Pena's favorite memory as a Tiger: the 2013 playoffs. And while the roster has almost entirely turned over in the two seasons since, seeing players like Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Alex Avila again was special. Even as a Red, Pena still has a strong following from Tigers fans, fans who still miss Pena being in a Tigers uniform, and still notice what he does for a team they don't cheer for.
"The fans, man, the fans were great, and they still are," Pena said. "(Tigers fans) still appreciate my time here and what I did for the team. The fan base is very strong, and very loyal.... It doesn't matter if I'm not with the Tigers anymore, I still get a lot of positive tweets and emails and stuff like that from Tigers fans. It shows a lot of loyalty and shows how much they appreciate how I handled myself here on and off the field. And I'm thankful for that."
★★★
It's a level of loyalty that Pena can relate to among fellow Cubans. Players like current Tigers Yoenis Cespedes and Jose Iglesias. Players who, in hopes of a better life through the pursuit of baseball, can also never return home due to the ongoing situation in Cuba. A situation that, while getting incrementally better, still has its difficulties.
It's also provided Pena with an opportunity to mentor other Cuban players who come to the United States. And seeing players like Iglesias and Cespedes play at such a high level, and with such skill through hard work and dedication, Pena sees that as a representation of the Cuban people. That both players are in what Pena believes to be one of the best clubhouses in the league, through support and the overall environment, makes it increasingly special.
During the offseason, Pena and fellow Cubans get together. They talk about the U.S.-Cuban situation, those they left behind, what it means to be an example for those who don't share the freedoms they currently enjoy. Enjoying Cuban traditions like playing dominoes and sharing a traditional Cuban pork meal -- forming a special bond and mentoring younger players who continue to come to the states in the hopes of a better life.
"We talk about it, exactly what we represent, not just Latin players but Cuban players because everybody knows what we have to go through to get here to the states," Pena said. "Defection, taking rafts, taking boats, and not being able to go back to your country and to see your family again God knows when, it's something we've always done together. It's something that it's kind of like a family for us. We kind of have this special bond because we're not allowed to go back to our country."
★★★
Pena, now 33 and in his final season of a two-year contract with the Reds, is more than a positive example for fellow players. He's a representation of how to play the game with a thankful and an exuberant attitude -- and see every day as a chance to affect the lives of others, on and off the field. Pena noted the importance of players being a positive role model to fans, especially the younger generation. Not only by respecting the game and other players, but the fans, as well, one of the few things a player can control.
"I had a blast (playing with the Tigers)"
The MLB All-Star lineup may be a heavily debated topic and out of the players' control, but the actual All-Star Game, hosted at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, is an event that Pena is thrilled to see. Not only for the city and the players, but for the fans of a team that has been through an up and down season so far.
"Oh, man, it's unbelievable," Pena beamed. "The atmosphere down there is beautiful. Hopefully you guys can go out there and see. The Cincinnati Reds fans, they're unbelievable. They're so excited about the All-Star week, and our front office people have been doing such a great job, especially our PR people, that they deserve a lot of credit. Everywhere you go in Cincinnati, people are talking about it and people are so excited. They can't wait to have the festivities. Everybody's very pleased and hopefully some of our players can represent us."
Whether Pena remains with the Reds after this season is a discussion for another day. What he focuses on is what he can control in the present, playing the game he loves every day, in the country that gave him the freedom he cherishes. It doesn't matter if he's 0-for-4 or reaches base in every at-bat during a game, Pena is a joy to watch. And while some things change with time, Pena's outlook on life and his approach to the game, never has.Remember when Obama told America that he "refused to let Detroit go bankrupt"?
While the president was talking about the GM and Chrysler bailouts of 2008 and 2009 when he made the statement, conservative blog The Blaze posted the video (from October 2012) when the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy on Thursday afternoon.
Detroit is the largest city in American history to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. A city once boasting more than 2 million residents now has slightly more than 700,000 calling it home. In comparison, the publicly financed bailout of GM and Chrysler may have saved an estimated 1.5 million jobs, as well as a huge sector of America's manufacturing and trade economy. GM and Chrysler, being profit-generating companies, were also able to begin paying back their loans and buying back stock from the U.S. government.
The Washington Examiner, which also posted the video, commented that the city's bankruptcy filing gave Obama's line about saving the U.S. domestic auto industry "new meaning."
White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage told the Associated Press Thursday that Obama and his senior advisers are monitoring the situation in Michigan, but she also pointed out that Michigan leaders and the city's creditors understand their responsibility to solve Detroit's financial problems. The White House will "continue to partner with Detroit as it tries to recover and maintain its status as one of America's great cities," she said.
In early April, Detroit's Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr met with senior White House officials, including adviser Valerie Jarrett. Orr spokesman Bill Nowling has said that the emergency manager never formally requested a bailout from Obama's staff -- and no offer from Washington was ever on the table.
"There was never a formal ask," Nowling told The Detroit News, "but I think the way it was portrayed to me that it was pretty clear there was going to be no bailout... akin to what we saw in scope and intent for the autos or for Wall Street.”
The president didn't respond in December when Councilwoman Jo Ann Watson, who has opposed all forms of state intervention into Detroit's finances, instead called on Obama to send the city some "bacon" in the form of federal relief funds.
"Our people in an overwhelming way supported the reelection of this president, and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that," she argued. "Of course, not just that, but why not?"
While Detroit will most likely be compared with other recent bankruptcies, like Jefferson County, Ala., and Stockton, Calif., the federal government memorably bailed out New York City when it faced a $12 billion deficit in 1975.President Trump singled out a female journalist during a phone call with the new Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, on Tuesday, telling Varadkar, “She has a nice smile on her face. So I bet she treats you well.”
The journalist in question was Caitriona Perry, who has been the Washington correspondent for Irish state broadcaster Raidio Teilifis Eireann (RTE) since 2014.
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Trump’s comment about Perry drew some adverse reaction on social media. But she appeared to take the exchange in good humor and can be heard laughing in a video clip of the exchange.
Trump told Varadkar, “We have a lot of your Irish press watching us,” referring to several Irish reporters who were present in the Oval Office for the call.
In video posted to Twitter by RTE, he turns to Perry and says, “And where are you from? Go ahead, come here, come here. Where are you from? We have all of this beautiful Irish press.”
It is not the first time Trump's interactions with female reporters have raised eyebrows.
He famously tangled with Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News Channel, during his campaign for the White House. He also singled out NBC News’s Katy Tur, whom he would sometimes refer to as “Little Katy” during campaign rallies.
Trump told Varadkar that he was calling to congratulate him on his “great victory.”
Varadkar became prime minister, or Taoiseach, earlier this month after winning a party leadership election following the resignation of Enda Kenny.
During the call with Varadkar, Trump also acknowledged the influence of the Irish-American community in the U.S.Fresh out of Google's I/O Conference comes a cautious step into the world of living-room gaming. Razer is best known for its work on high-end gaming PCs, laptops and tablets, and it just announced a micro-console, along the lines of the Amazon Fire TV under Google's substantial aegis. The console will run Android TV, giving it a full suite of streaming capabilities, and that's about all we know right now.
Given the fact that Google is working with Razer on this, we can assume that there's going to be a decent focus on gaming. Razer has become quite good at cramming high-end graphics capability into a small form factor, so it will be interesting to see the specs on this new machine when they're announced. The company has promised that the device will be affordable.
"This is a console of the future," Min-Liang Tan, Razer co-founder and CEO said in a statement. "Built on Google's incredible Android TV platform, the Razer micro-console incorporates not only hardcore and casual gaming, but music, movies and other entertainment and social applications, all on an affordable system."
Even as the PS4 and Xbox One duke it out for dominance in what we'll now call the "high-end game console" space (formerly just the "console" space), smaller competitors from big companies are jumping into the ring. First we had Amazon Fire TV, now this, and we can assume that the next version of Apple TV will include some sort of gaming capability. There's also the Ouya, but...well...poor Ouya.
The basic idea of the micro-console is this: people like video games, but many just aren't into spending the amount of money required to stay current with consoles. They also like streaming video, so that makes a gaming component an excellent feature for selling your streaming box. It won't be able to run the fanciest new games, but these companies are banking on most people not caring. Essentially, these companies are hoping that there is an entirely new device category that sits somewhere between a Roku and a PS4, with customers that like a little of both.
I'm a little skeptical about how well the game mechanics here will hit the right market -- obviously the best way to combine streaming video with games is to play Candy Crush while watching Law and Order -- but I'd guess that Google is going to go for a slightly heavier gaming focus than Amazon did with the Fire TV. Razer is a well respected brand in the gaming community, and choosing a company with that kind of cred isn't a coincidence. We'll see if Razer can segue that reputation into building a microconsole that gamers can get behind.
via GizmodoImage copyright PA Image caption Thousands turned up each day for the Homeless World Cup staged in George Square, Glasgow
Mexico celebrated double success at the 14th Homeless World Cup in Glasgow after both their men's and women's teams retained their titles.
Mexico's women overcame challengers Kyrgyzstan in a 5-0 thriller to lift the trophy.
The men's team also put in a powerful performance to see off Brazil 6-1, and keep the silverware.
More than 500 men and women from 52 countries around the world competed in four-a-side matches over several days.
Nearly 100,000 spectators watched the free-to-watch games, which were staged in George Square in the heart of Glasgow.
Organisers said two million people also watched the tournament online.
Image copyright Homeless World Cup Image caption Mexico's men's team celebrated as they retained their trophy with a 6-1 win over Brazil
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who attended the event, said the Homeless World Cup would energise and engage people who, for whatever reason, had become socially excluded.
The event was set up by the International Network of Street Papers and Mel Young, founder of the Big Issue in Scotland.
Mr Young said: "We promised that George Square would be the most inspiring place on the planet for the duration of this tournament, that so it has been.
"The people of Glasgow have taken our players to their hearts, and made this such a very special tournament in the history of the Homeless World Cup.
Image copyright Homeless World Cup Image caption Mexico overcame challengers Kyrgyzstan 5-0 to lift the women's trophy
"As our players head back to their countries, we wish them every success as they look to build on this experience, and create a life they would want for themselves.
"Rightly, they should stand tall. We can genuinely say: you are all winners."
Scottish Minister for Sport Aileen Campbell said: "The Homeless World Cup has been a fantastic and exciting tournament that all of Scotland has got behind.
"It's been great to see George Square busy every day and is a perfect example of how the power of sport can both transform lives and change perceptions for the better."
The next Homeless World Cup will be held in Oslo in the summer of 2017.SINKING FEELING: Blues flanker Steven Luatua sets off on the ill-fated kayaking trip to Rangitoto Island.
The Blues rugby team needed rescuing from Auckland Harbour today when their kayaks capsized during a pre-season excursion.
The fitness activity went belly up when three Waka submerged on the way from Takapuna Beach to Rangitoto Island.
The team had planned to kayak across and then run over the volcano in the Hauraki Gulf but needed assistance from emergency services to return safely.
Blues coach Sir John Kirwan issued a statement to explain the unexpected turn of events.
"The Blues rugby team undertook a fitness event with a waka-ama paddle to Rangitoto and a planned run to the top and then return," Kirwan said.
"This was managed by experienced waka-ama personnel who briefed the players who had previous experience with the craft in their recent training camp in Northland.
"Two of the waka took on water – and the safety procedures were put in place. The safety support boat moved in and craft from a yachting event nearby were asked to assist getting players to shore.
"Coastguard and the police boat then arrived to assist.
"At no stage were any of the players were in any danger and thanked those who assisted."
Coastguard spokeswoman Georgie Smith described the incident as a "mass rescue", saying more than 30 people had been plucked from the water.
"We were advised by a phone informant that people were in the water halfway between Takapuna and Rangitoto," she said.
"Coastguard pulled people from the water and delivered them at the beach. Everyone is accounted for and safe and dry on shore."
She didn't know how the capsize happened.Why You Can't Take the FCC's ISP Transparency Pledge Seriously
They've Let ISPs Abuse Below-The-Line Fees for a Decade
While Verizon's legal victory over the FCC did gut the agency's net neutrality rules, it kept some of the FCC's authority over ISPs intact -- specifically the agency's transparency rules -- which require that ISPs be straightforward about the "network management practices, performance, and commercial terms" of their broadband services.
In a statement issued today, the FCC "reminded" wireline and wireless ISPs alike that those rules are still intact and need to be adhered to, lest the agency lightly slap a wrist or two -- maybe.
"Consumers deserve to get the broadband service they pay for," FCC boss Tom Wheeler said in a statement. "After today, no broadband provider can claim they didn’t know we were watching to see that they disclose accurate information about the services they provide."
"We expect providers to be fully transparent about the details of their services, and we will hold them accountable if they fall down on this obligation to consumers," continues Wheeler.
Will they? The transparency rules Wheeler mentions are also supposed to govern pricing, requiring that ISPs are transparent about monthly pricing and various fees tacked on to user broadband bills.
Yet as I've noted numerous times over the last decade, ISPs consistently are allowed to bury all manner of nonsensical fees below the line, allowing them to covertly jack up consumer broadband bills while leaving the advertised price the same. This is technically false advertising, but I've never seen the FCC (or any other regulator) seriously address the practice.
The practice not only fools consumers into paying more for service, it skews telecom policy debate and discussion. Most international and domestic price analysis comparisons use the advertised price. The United States already has some of the most expensive broadband in the world (OECD data); imagine how we rank were one to include fees?
These days of course there's numerous activation, installation, router and modem rental fees, fees for paying your bill in person, fees for paying your bill via credit card over the phone, etc. These fees, usually communicated "transparently" via mouseprint, are all used to jack up the already-high price of US broadband and television services, but at least some of them are tied to actual costs incurred by the ISP. There's numerous other fees charged that involve companies doing absolutely nothing, and exist solely to pad the advertised price post sale.
CenturyLink, for example, charges millions of its users a $1 Internet Cost Recovery Fee and a $1-2 Non Telecom Surcharge that involve the company doing absolutely nothing.
For years, ISPs have also charged users "regulatory cost recovery fees," claiming these non-government mandated fees offset the cost of ambiguous, unspecified regulation (you're to ignore the fact the telecom industry has been massively deregulated over the last decade).
Most cable operators have also started charging something called a "broadcast TV surcharge" to counter soaring retransmission increases, despite the fact users are already supposed to be paying for programming hikes as part of their already-skyrocketing overall TV bill. Verizon covertly jacks up the price of voice service via an "FDV Administrative Charge" to bury programming hikes below the line and keep advertised rates the same. AT&T takes things even further, charging U-Verse users two completely different fees for this same purpose.
Is letting these kinds of fees continue for a decade the kind of tough enforcement the FCC and Tom Wheeler are talking about? Before anybody can take FCC threats of tough transparency enforcement seriously, they'll need to address the fact they've let ISPs engage in aggressive false advertising on price for almost as long as broadband and television have existed.
Want things to change sometime over thedecade? Tell the FCC you consider sneaky fees to be false advertising.Leonard Susskind (; born 1940)[2][3] is an American physicist, who is professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology.[1] He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US,[4] and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[5] an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,[6] and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.[7]
Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory.[8] He was the first to give a precise string-theory interpretation of the holographic principle in 1995[9] and the first to introduce the idea of the string theory landscape in 2003.[10][11]
Susskind was awarded the 1998 J. J. Sakurai Prize[12], and the 2018 Oskar Klein Medal[13].
Early life and education [ edit ]
Leonard Susskind was born to a Jewish family from the South Bronx section of New York City[14]. He began working as a plumber at the age of 16, taking over from his father who had become ill.[14] Later, he enrolled in the City College of New York as an engineering student, graduating with a B.S. in physics in 1962.[5] In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Susskind recalls the moment he discussed with his father this change in career path: "When I told my father I wanted to be a physicist, he said: ‘Hell no, you ain’t going to work in a drug store’. I said, "No, not a pharmacist." I said, ‘Like Einstein.’ He poked me in the chest with a piece of plumbing pipe. ‘You ain’t going to be no engineer’, he said. ‘You’re going to be Einstein.’"[14] Susskind then studied at Cornell University under Peter A. Carruthers where he earned his Ph.D. in 1965.
Career [ edit ]
Susskind was an assistant professor of physics, then an associate professor at Yeshiva University (1966–1970), after which he went for a year to the Tel Aviv University (1971–72), returning to Yeshiva to become a professor of physics (1970–1979). Since 1979 he has been professor of physics at Stanford University,[1] and since 2000 has held the Felix Bloch professorship of physics.
Susskind was awarded the 1998 J. J. Sakurai Prize for his "pioneering contributions to hadronic string models, lattice gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics, and dynamical symmetry breaking". Susskind's hallmark, according to colleagues, has been the application of "brilliant imagination and originality to the theoretical study of the nature of the elementary particles and forces that make up the physical world".[12]
In 2007, Susskind joined the faculty of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, as an associate member. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a distinguished professor at Korea Institute for Advanced Study.[15]
Scientific career [ edit ]
Susskind was one of at least three physicists, alongside Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen, who independently discovered during or around 1970 that the Veneziano dual resonance model of strong interactions could be described by a quantum mechanical model of oscillating strings,[16] and was the first to propose the idea of the string theory landscape. Susskind has also made important contributions in the following areas of physics:
Books [ edit ]
Susskind is the author of several popular science books.
The Cosmic Landscape [ edit ]
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is Susskind's first popular science book, published by Little, Brown and Company on December 12, 2005.[26] It is Susskind's attempt to bring his idea of the anthropic landscape of string theory to the general public. In the book, Susskind describes how the string theory landscape was an almost inevitable consequence of several factors, one of which was Steven Weinberg's prediction of the cosmological constant in 1987. The question addressed here is why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Susskind explains that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist.
The Black Hole War [ edit ]
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is Susskind's second popular science book, published by Little, Brown, and Company on July 7, 2008.[27] The book is his most famous work and explains what he thinks would happen to the information and matter stored in a black hole when it evaporates. The book sparked from a debate that started in 1981, when there was a meeting of physicists to try to decode some of the mysteries about how particles of particular elemental compounds function. During this discussion Stephen Hawking stated that the information inside a black hole is lost forever as the black hole evaporates. It took 28 years for Leonard Susskind to formulate his theory that would prove Hawking wrong. He then published his theory in his book, The Black Hole War. Like The Cosmic Landscape, The Black Hole War is aimed at the lay reader. He writes: "The real tools for understanding the quantum universe are abstract mathematics: infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces, projection operators, unitary matrices and a lot of other advanced principles that take a few years to learn. But let's see how we do in just a few pages".
The Theoretical Minimum book series [ edit ]
Susskind co-authored a series of companion books to his lecture series The Theoretical Minimum. The first of these, The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics[28], was published in 2013 and presents the modern formulations of classical mechanics. The second of these, Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum[29], was published in February 2014. The third book, Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum (September 26, 2017)[30], introduces readers to Einstein's special relativity and Maxwell's classical field theory.
The Theoretical Minimum lecture series [ edit ]
Susskind teaches a series of Stanford Continuing Studies courses about modern physics referred to as The Theoretical Minimum. The title of the series is a clear reference to the Landau's famous comprehensive exam called the "Theoretical Minimum" which students were expected to pass before admission to his school. The Theoretical Minimum lectures later formed the basis for the books of the same name.[31] The goal of the courses is to teach the basic but rigorous theoretical foundations required to study certain areas of physics. The sequence covers classical mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and cosmology, including the physics of black holes.[32]
These courses are available on The Theoretical Minimum website, on iTunes, and on YouTube. The courses are intended for the mathematically literate[33] public as well as physical science/mathematics students. Susskind aims the courses at people with prior exposure to algebra, calculus,[34] vectors, differential calculus, integrals, and perhaps differential operators, matrices, and linear equations. Homework and study outside of class is otherwise unnecessary. Susskind explains most of the mathematics used, which form the basis of the lectures.
Cornell Messenger Lectures [ edit ]
Susskind gave 3 lectures "The Birth of the Universe and the Origin of Laws of Physics" April 28-May 1, 2014 in the Cornell Messenger Lecture series which are posted on a Cornell website.[35]
Smolin–Susskind debate [ edit ]
The Smolin–Susskind debate refers to the series of intense postings in 2004 between Lee Smolin and Susskind, concerning Smolin’s argument that the "anthropic principle cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science."[36] It began on July 26, 2004, with Smolin's publication of "Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle". Smolin e-mailed Susskind asking for a comment. Having not had the chance to read the paper, Susskind requested a summarization of his arguments. Smolin obliged, and on July 28, 2004, Susskind responded, saying that the logic Smolin followed "can lead to ridiculous conclusions".[36] The next day, Smolin responded, saying that "If a large body of our colleagues feels comfortable believing a theory that cannot be proved wrong, then the progress of science could get stuck, leading to a situation in which false, but unfalsifiable theories dominate the attention of our field." This was followed by another paper by Susskind which made a few comments about Smolin's theory of "cosmic natural selection".[37] The Smolin-Susskind debate finally ended with each of them agreeing to write a final letter which would be posted on the edge.org website, with three conditions attached: (1) No more than one letter each; (2) Neither sees the other's letter in advance; (3) No changes after the fact.
Personal life [ edit ]
He has been married twice, first in 1960,[5] and has four children. Susskind is a great-grandfather.[38]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]It started as a joke.
Brandon Bird was just kidding when he tweeted his idea to paint Shia LaBeouf as The Doctor from Doctor Who, but the artist's Twitter followers demanded it.
How angry would people be if I drew Shia LaBeouf dressed as The Doctor. — Brandon Bird (@Brandon_Bird) September 15, 2014
That settles it, going to do a takeoff of the "every Doctor" poster every artist at a comic con does, but with Shia LaBeouf as each Doctor. — Brandon Bird (@Brandon_Bird) September 15, 2014
Bird tells Mashable that painting LaBeouf as the 13 different actors who have played The Doctor was an experiment with mashups.
"I've seen mashups go from being weird and unexpected to a kind of lazy 'thing you like + other thing you like' formula," he said in an email. "So I liked the idea of flipping that around and doing 'thing lots of people love (Doctor Who) + thing a lot of people kind of hate (Shia LaBeouf).'"
Oddly enough, Bird and LaBeouf were once neighbors. Though he does feel a special attachment to the actor, he says it wasn't an inspiration for the project.
"I was renting a cool loft space that I couldn't really afford and he bought a unit right down the hall," he said. "He did a curtsey once to let me off the elevator."
You can check out Bird's eclectic pop culture art on his website or look out for more insincere pitches-turned-projects on his Twitter.Revealed: How Citigroup hackers broke in 'through the front door' using bank's website
Hacked: The personal details of more than 200,000 Citigroup customers were stolen in a 'brazen' attack (posed picture)
Hackers who stole the personal details of more than 200,000 Citigroup customers 'broke in through the front door' using an extremely simple technique.
It has been called 'one of the most brazen bank hacking attacks' in recent years.
And for the first time it has been revealed how the sophisticated cyber criminals made off with the staggering bounty of names, account numbers, email addresses and transaction histories.
They simply logged on to the part of the group's site reserved for credit card customers - and substituted their account numbers which appeared in the browser's address bar with other numbers.
It allowed them to leapfrog into the accounts of other customers - with an automatic computer programme letting them repeat the trick tens of thousands of times.
The security breach, which was only spotted in May during a routine check, follows the high profile and embarrassing hacking of Sony's Playstation network.
Security experts said it also showed the threat posed by the rising demand for private financial information from the world of foreign hackers. It was also a'sign of things to come', they said.
One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.'
It is not known how much the incident is going to cost Citigroup and its customers.
Spokesman Sean Kevelighan declined to comment as it was an 'ongoing criminal investigation'.
But in a statement he said Citigroup discovered the breach in early May and the problem was'rectified immediately'.
He also said the bank had initiated internal fraud alerts and stepped up its account monitoring.
Breach: Citigroup discovered the attack in May and immediately stepped up its account monitoring
Law enforcement officials said the expertise behind the attack was a'sign of what is likely to be a wave of more and more sophisticated breaches' by high-tech thieves.
This is because, according to a report by Verizon and the Secret Service, the demand for data is on the rise.
In 2008 the underground market for data was flooded with more than 360 million stolen personal records, compared to just 3.8 million in 2010.
As the credit cards, whose numbers were stolen in 2008, expire, there is a rush to find new accounts.
It could see the price for basic credit card information rise from their current level of only pennies to several dollars.
Bryan Sartin, forensic investigator for Verizon's consulting arm, said: 'If you think financially motivated breaches are huge now, just wait another year.'
The hackers which targeted Citigroup did not gain expiration dates or the three-digit security code on the back of the card.Hillary Clinton speaks at McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota on Dec. 15, 2015. Hillary Clinton speaks at McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota on Dec. 15, 2015.
As Super Tuesday gets closer, candidates are getting in their last bid for Texas votes. Here in Austin, longtime friends and supporters of Hillary Clinton held a rally today for the Democratic candidate.
Clinton is getting some star power as Ted Danson. Mary Steenburgen, and America Ferrera spoke out for Clinton at a restaurant this evening.
It didn't take long to get the crowd going once the three actors walked in the door.
The "Austin for Hillary" group put this event together here at Scholz Garten. Danson, Steenburgen, and "Ugly Betty" actress America Ferrera took the stage and spoke about their personal backgrounds and beliefs about Clinton.
Ferrera told her story of being from an immigrant family who came from the Honduras. She talked about how Clinton's stance is a powerful one for women.
Danson and Steenburgen elaborated on their longtime relationship with the Clinton family that dates back 38-years for Steenburgen and 22-years for Danson.
“I’ve known her the last 22 years of my life. I've never met anyone more trustworthy who says she will do something, and she does it,” Danson said.
“We have just fought a lot of battle for people together. She obviously has done way more for the world than I have, but I've always been inspired by her,” Steenburgen said.
Clinton has a busy schedule over the next few days leading up to the election. She is set to be in Birmingham, Alabama Saturday.Apple appears to be gearing up for a big marketing push for the Apple Watch ahead of its April launch, featuring the device on several magazine covers. |
The Avengers. He’s being trained by Captain America and Black Widow, and may have just met a new ally. While guarding the Avengers’ new hideout, he encountered Ant-Man, a hero who can shrink, and the Falcon is currently looking for Ant-Man. Next appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
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Scarlet Witch - The Scarlet Witch lost her brother, Quicksilver, while battling Ultron, but she won’t let his death be in vain. She’s now a member of the Avengers, fighting alongside Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon, Vision and War Machine. Next appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
War Machine - He wanted some action, and now he’s got it. After working with the government in one of Tony Stark’s suits, War Machine has gone from the sidelines to a full-fledged member of the Avengers. Next appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
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Ant-Man - The newest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe tried to keep a low profile as he saved the world from the Yellowjacket. However, he got on the radar of the Avengers, and now The Falcon is looking for him. He’ll join the team soon and—if rumor holds—figure out that his suit can do more than just shrink. Next appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
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Thanos - Probably the baddest man in the galaxy, Thanos first made an appearance at the end of Phase One. He next appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy, still on the hunt for some Infinity Stones. Then, at the end of Age of Ultron, he said he’s going to “do it himself.” That suggests he’s finished with being a puppetmaster and is going to take more direct action. Next appearance: Unknown. Likely Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, maybe Thor Ragnarok, or possibly not until Avengers: Infinity War.
The Winter Soldier - Formerly Captain America’s best friend, Bucky, this genetically modified super soldier was on the run at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He’s briefly alluded to in Age of Ultron with Falcon being on the case and then, at the end of Ant-Man, we see that he’s in Cap’s custody. We’ll find how he ended up in Steve Rogers’ clutches, and where his allegiances lie, soon. Next appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
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Nick Fury - The man who put all of this together was a helpful, but minor, player in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Curiously, Samuel L. Jackson has said he’s not in Captain America: Civil War, so where or what Fury’s doing is a mystery. Next appearance: Unknown.
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Black Panther - Chadwick Boseman has been cast as the Wakandan superhero who, as of now, has only been tangentially referred to the films. His country is the source of vibranium, the strongest metal in the world, which is found in Cap’s shield, the Vision’s body, and Ultron’s city floating creation. As for the Panther himself, what he’s like and what his alliances are, we don’t know. We just know we’ll meet him soon. First appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
The Wasp - As Ant-Man ended, Hope Van Dyne was given an advanced prototype suit that will make her the Wasp. She’ll, eventually, join in all this fun—but as it stands now, we have no idea when. Next appearance: Unknown, possibly Avengers: Infinity War Part 1.
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Doctor Strange - The Sorcerer Supreme was briefly name-dropped in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as someone HYDRA knew was a potential threat. Benedict Cumberbatch will play the role, but we know very little of his overall connection. First appearance: Doctor Strange.
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Spider-Man - Everyone’s favorite Web-slinger is finally coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Phase Three, as played by actor Tom Holland. This is a full reboot from the Andrew Garfield films, and he’ll appear with the rest of the gang before showing up in his own movie, so how the whole story gets handled is a mystery. But it’s extremely exciting nonetheless. First appearance: Captain America: Civil War.
Infinity Stones - Not a character—but these have long been a crucial part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are six stones in total, and whoever can get all of them will have unlimited power. So far in the MCU, we’ve only seen four. There’s the Blue Space Stone (currently on Asgard, as seen in The Avengers), the Yellow Mind stone (currently on Earth with Vision, as seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron), the Red Reality Stone (currently with The Collector, as seen in Thor: The Dark World) and the Purple Power Stone (currently on Xandar, as seen in Guardians of the Galaxy.) At the end of Age of Ultron, Thanos was seen with an Infinity Gauntlet with six empty slots. The above image is from a teaser trailer for 2018 and 2019’s Avengers: Infinity War Parts 1 and 2.
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Tom Holland photo: Anthony Harvey/Getty ImagesHalifax Regional Police are asking for the public's help to find a man who tried to coax an 11-year-old girl into his car in Bedford today.
The girl told police she was walking through a parking lot in the area of Southgate Drive and Larry Uteck Boulevard around 11:45 a.m. Friday when a man in a grey sedan drove up to her and motioned for her to come over to his car.
The girl continued to walk through the parking lot and crossed the street. The man pulled up to her a second time. He spoke to her and gestured for her to approach his car.
She then ran away and called police.
The driver is described as a white man between the ages of 25 and 30 years old with shaggy, curly brown hair. She said he was wearing a brown coat.
Police are asking anyone with information to contact them or Crime Stoppers.Spoiler alert: It is very depressing.
A season changes and another month passes, which means we likely had more confirmation that the Wii U is not selling well. With very few, if any, releases, the expectations from month-to-month are dismal. But exactly how bad? According to analyst David Gibson, a little more than 70,000 Wii Us were sold in March 2014. That means the Wii U was thoroughly outclassed by the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which both posted sales numbers in the 300,000 range. That’s not a competition; that’s a slaughter.
Here’s the full rundown of what we know for each system (most are approximate numbers, not exact):
PS4 - More than 311,000 Xbox One - 311,000 3DS - 159,000 Xbox 360 - 111,000 Wii U - 70,000 Wii - 28,000 Vita - 10,000
Yes, the Xbox 360 is still beating the Wii U monthly. It’s not like the Wii U had much to offer this month (I defy you to name a notable release in March), but still: a nearly 9-year-old system is beating Nintendo’s latest console handily.
Let’s have some more fun with numbers. Let’s go back to comparable moments for each of Nintendo’s recent systems. Here are the sales from the Wii U, Wii, and GameCube from their second March on the market:
Wii U (March 2014) - 70,000
Wii (March 2008) - 721,000
GameCube (March 2003) - 165,000
Taking it a step further, here’s where each of those three systems were at sales-wise overall at those same points:
Wii U - Between 5 and 6 million units worldwide as of March 2014
Wii - About 25 million units worldwide as of March 2008
GameCube - About 9.5 million units worldwide as of March 2003 (Update: We originally had 14.5 million units for GameCube but we were mistaken. Thanks to all who pointed out the correction.)
People keep comparing the Wii U to the GameCube, but look at those numbers. They are not comparable. The Wii U is selling about half as much as the GameCube. And the GameCube is still a year away from its swift and quick collapse. The GameCube might have been in third place in its generation, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the complete and total bomb that the Wii U is.
It’s a broken record at this point, but the Wii U continues to underwhelm. With indie games getting delayed, little-to-no third-party support, and a swiss cheese-like first-party calendar, things don’t look like they’re going to get better. An optimistic goal is for the Wii U to maybe cross 10 million sold worldwide, which would put it on par with the Sega Saturn and the TurboGrafx-16. With that depressing news, the best bet might be to enjoy Mario Kart and Smash Bros. and join me in asking the stars “When’s Quality of Life coming out? Can I play Mario on that?”Hope everyone likes their planet warm and unpredictable, because that's what we're on track to get: An 11 degree Fahrenheit global temperature increase by 2100. The finding comes from the typically conservative International Energy Agency, which revealed a new analysis of global energy consumption at this year's COP17 climate talks in Durban. If we continue consuming energy in the same fossil fuels-heavy manner, it notes, the world will become a hot, more unpleasant, and potentially hazardous place.
A place hot enough to "spell catastrophe for all of us."
"...heat-trapping emissions from the world’s energy infrastructure will lead to a 2-degree Celsius increase in the Earth’s temperature that, as more capacity is added to the system, will climb to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Unless there is a shift away from some of the fossil fuel energy now used for electricity generation and transportation, Birol said, “the world is perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius increase in temperature. Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,” he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Those are the words of the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol, who addressed world leaders and climate negotiators yesterday. The Washington Post has more:Upon hearing this dire news, Republicans in the US Congress (until now the number one impediment to forging a global climate treaty) reportedly rushed to convene an emergency session on how best to transition from our reliance on fossil fuels and embrace renewable energy sources.
Not.
Instead, they most likely thumbed their noses at the allegation, and went about entertaining oil industry lobbyists in their mahogany-laden offices: 'Climate change. Can't believe that every top scientific institution, nearly every world government, indeed, almost everyone else on the planet fell for that hogwash. What dupes.'
Sad, but true. If the world is to collectively act to combat the advance of climate change, the United States, the largest historic greenhouse gas polluter, is going to have to play a leading role. And it won't, not so as long as one of its two major political parties does not believe that climate change exists.Jimmy Wales In Favor Of Wikipedia Blackout: Community Must Decide
from the speak-up dept
I'm all in favor of it, and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I'd like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that's a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea. But that means we need to move forward quickly on a concrete proposal and vote - we don't have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what's exactly the best possible thing to do. As I understand it, the Foundation is talking to people about how we can geolocate and guide people to their Congressperson, etc. Geoff will know about that. Our task is to decide to do it with a thumbs up / thumbs down vote.
While there have been some previous discussions about whether or not Wikipedia would black out its site to protest SOPA/PIPA -- and the community's consensus was to do so -- it appeared that they had agreed that the trigger for a black out would beof the bill. That's a little late. However, now, with Reddit's plan to black out its site next Wednesday being joined by lots of other sites, some have been demanding that Wikipedia join them. Jimmy Wales has now spoken out saying he supports a blackout on Wednesday with Reddit, but would like the community to come to agreement first:So, speak up, Wikipedians...
Filed Under: blackout, censorship, copyright, jimmy wales, pipa, protect ip, sopa, wikpedia
Companies: wikipediaA group of hunters near Igloolik, Nunavut, had a harrowing experience when they were attacked by a polar bear that was with her cubs.
The bear died after the hunters shot it.
On Wednesday, five men went out to retrieve their cache of Igunaq, or aged walrus meat, when the bear attacked them.
John Arnatsiaq, 58, squared off against the bear after it went after his friend.
"All of a sudden the bear was right there. But it wasn't going for me – it was going for the other guy," said Arnatsiaq.
Arnatsiaq jumped in between the two and shoved a hammer in the bear's mouth.
The group was out near Igloolik, Nunavut, Wednesday to get their cache of Igunaq, or aged walrus meat. (The Canadian Press)
"What I did was poke the bear with the hammer and put the hammer in its mouth and pull to make him angry so it will go after me instead of going after that guy. Because I knew that guy had bullets in his pocket and that his rifle was not loaded," said Arnatsiaq.
Arnatsiaq said the bear kept going for his friend and swatted Arnatsiaq away. Arnatsiaq grabbed the bear's fur and kept swinging the hammer.
"And then we were fighting for a few minutes and then I missed my footing and almost fell. That's when the bear was going for my shoulder," he said.
The bear bit into his hand which was covering his shoulder. At that point, the other hunters were finally able to shoot the bear and the cubs, which had joined in the fight.
"It could have been worse, I'm fine, I'm ok," he said.
Arnatsiaq said the bear was hungry and wanted the walrus meat.
Arnatsiaq didn’t escape unscathed – the bear also bit his face, requiring him to get five stitches in his lip. He said his body is also sore.
Arnatsiaq has had close polar bear encounters before. In the past, he smashed a bear on the nose with his camera.
"First time with a camera, this time with a hammer. Probably no more next time," he said.
Polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores on the planet. Adult female bears can weigh up to 295 kilograms and can grow to nearly 1.5 metres in length.Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless, The Associated Press
LONDON -- Britain's plans to leave the European Union hit a large speed bump Thursday, as the High Court ruled that the government can't start exit negotiations without a vote in Parliament.
The judgment deepened Britain's divide over Europe, raising hopes among pro-EU politicians that they can soften the terms of the U.K.'s withdrawal from the bloc. "Leave" campaigners say any attempt to do that would be a betrayal of voters' decision.
The government immediately said it would ask the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. The Court has set aside time in early December to hear the case.
Thursday's ruling could delay government plans to start talks on Britain's EU exit, or Brexit, within weeks, and opens a major constitutional battle over the balance of power between Parliament and the government.
Brexit Secretary David Davis said Britain's June 23 vote to leave the EU "must be respected."
"The people want us to get on with it, and that is what we are going to do," he said.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will use centuries-old powers known as royal prerogative to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty, which launches two years of exit negotiations, by the end of March.
The powers -- traditionally held by the monarch but now used by politicians -- enable decisions about international treaties and other issues to be made without a vote of Parliament.
Several claimants, including a hairdresser and a financial entrepreneur, challenged May's right to act. They argued that leaving the EU will remove rights, including free movement within the bloc, and that it couldn't be done without Parliament's approval.
Three senior judges agreed, ruling that "the government does not have the power under the Crown's prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 for the U.K. to withdraw from the European Union."
The judges backed the claimants' argument that the government could not remove Britons' legal rights "unless Parliament had conferred upon the Crown authority to do so."
The ruling infuriated pro-Brexit campaigners, who see the lawsuit as an attempt to block or delay Britain's EU exit.
U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who helped lead the campaign to leave the EU, tweeted: "I worry that a betrayal may be near at hand."
"I now fear that every attempt will be made to block or delay the triggering of Article 50," Farage said. "If this is so, they have no idea of the level of public anger they will provoke."
It's unlikely the ruling will stop Britain leaving the EU eventually. Most lawmakers accept that voters' decision must be respected -- but they differ widely on what form Brexit should take and how close a relationship Britain should keep with the EU.
A majority of members of Parliament backed the "remain" side in the referendum, but could be willing to support the start of exit talks if it's clear that the government won't seek a "hard Brexit," in which Britain leaves the EU's single market.
Pro-EU legislators hope the ruling will force the government to set out its plans for exit negotiations before triggering Article 50, something May has previously ruled out.
"Of course there is a mandate for leaving the EU, and we have to accept and respect the result of the referendum," the opposition Labour Party's Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer, told the BBC. "But the terms, and how we leave the EU, are vitally important."
Financial entrepreneur Gina Miller, a lead claimant in the case, said the lawsuit wasn't an attempt to stop Brexit -- just to ensure that Parliament is sovereign.
"I hope the MPs (members of Parliament) will do their job and debate this in a sober, grown up way," she said.
David Greene, lawyer for hairdresser Deir Santos, another claimant, said "democracy has been reaffirmed and now very much needs to show it is alive and kicking."
The pound, which has lost about a fifth of its value since the June 23 decision to leave the EU, shot back up on the verdict, rising about 1.5 per cent to $1.2493. The ruling boosted the hopes of the financial sector, which is largely opposed to Brexit, that its effects may be mitigated by Parliament.
The case is considered the most important constitutional matter in a generation, pitting the rights of Parliament against those of the executive.
Nick Barber, associate professor of constitutional law at Oxford University, said the court had ruled decisively that "you can't use executive power to overturn statutory rights."
Jeff King, professor of law at University College London, said the government's Supreme Court appeal "would be unlikely to succeed under the circumstances."
He said the High Court judges "gave a comprehensive ruling on many points, many of which could cause the government's argument to fail."
If the government loses, it will be forced to let the House of Commons and the House of Lords have a vote. It's unclear whether that would be done with a simple motion to trigger Article 50, or would need a full Act of Parliament.
Passing legislation can take months of debate, argument and amendment, so that might see the government's timetable for Brexit slipping even further.
There is a chance the Supreme Court could refer the case to the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court, if it thinks a legal principle needs clarification.
That would be an ironic outcome given Britain's vote to leave the EU, but Barber said it's extremely unlikely.
"I think all sides would agree that would be a mess," he said.NO USERNAME 9228
Quote
Owl Pharaoh (Unofficial Deluxe + KTT Edit)
(NOTE: This is not an official Travi$ Scott re-release, it is a edited version of Owl Pharaoh with 2 bonus tracks)
Description
Owl Pharaoh was released as a free mixtape (later classified as a EP), and I found there was an interlude in a song (Drive) that needed to be split from the actual track, and the intro also needed to be split into 2 tracks (Bad Mood) (**** on You). In addition, I added one of Pusha's verses to Blocka La Flame to make the mixtape a little longer. I've also included the extended version of Blocka La Flame with both of Travi$'s verses and both of Pusha's verses. I also edited the songs to remove unnecessary silence at the end of most of the tracks and changed the EQ of a few songs.
Info
Title: Owl Pharaoh (Deluxe)
Artist(s): Travi$ Scott
Featured Artist(s): T.I., 2 Chainz, Toro Y Moi, A$AP Ferg, Pusha T, Popcaan, Justin Vernon, Theophilus London, Paul Wall, James Fauntleroy, Wale, Meek Mill, Migos
Composer(s): Multiple
Grouping: Hustle Gang, G.O.O.D Music
Tracks: 17
Discs: 1
Length: 1 Hour, 2 Minutes (62 Minutes)
Genre: Hip-Hop/Rap
Official Release: Re-Release
Release Date: N/A
Type: Re-Release
Average Quality: 256 kbps
Format(s): M4A
Note: If you want a different format let me know in the thread.
Tagged: Yes
Copyright: ℗ 2013 Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment
iTunes View:
Tracklist
1. Meadow Creek (Intro)
2. Bad Mood
3. **** on You
4. Upper Echelon (feat. T.I. & 2 Chainz)
5. Chaz (Interlude) [feat. Toro Y Moi]
6. Uptown (feat. A$AP Ferg)
7. Hell of a Night
8. Blocka La Flame (feat. Pusha T & Popcaan)
9. Naked (feat. Justin Vernon)
10. Dance on the Moon (feat. Theophilus London & Paul Wall)
11. M.I.A.
12. 10-201 (Interlude)
13. Drive (feat. James Fauntleroy)
14. Quintana (feat. Wale)
15. Bandz (feat. Meek Mill)
16. Quintana (Remix) [feat. Migos] [Bonus Track]
17. Blocka (Extended Version) [feat. Pusha T] [Bonus Track]
Download Links
http://goo.gl/JfFwbI
Note To Mods:
All tracks have been and can be obtained legally. Please let me know of any problems so that I can remove the infringing track(s) ASAP.
Want to see a compilation/unreleased mixtape of your favorite artist? Message me.
1. Meadow Creek (Intro)2. Bad Mood3. **** on You4. Upper Echelon (feat. T.I. & 2 Chainz)5. Chaz (Interlude) [feat. Toro Y Moi]6. Uptown (feat. A$AP Ferg)7. Hell of a Night8. Blocka La Flame (feat. Pusha T & Popcaan)9. Naked (feat. Justin Vernon)10. Dance on the Moon (feat. Theophilus London & Paul Wall)11. M.I.A.12. 10-201 (Interlude)13. Drive (feat. James Fauntleroy)14. Quintana (feat. Wale)15. Bandz (feat. Meek Mill)16. Quintana (Remix) [feat. Migos] [Bonus Track]17. Blocka (Extended Version) [feat. Pusha T] [Bonus Track]All tracks have been and can be obtained legally. Please let me know of any problems so that I can remove the infringing track(s) ASAP. This isan official Travi$ Scott re-release, it is a edited version of Owl Pharaoh with 2 bonus tracks)Owl Pharaoh was released as a free mixtape (later classified as a EP), and I found there was an interlude in a song (Drive) that needed to be split from the actual track, and the intro also needed to be split into 2 tracks (Bad Mood) (**** on You). In addition, I added one of Pusha's verses to Blocka La Flame to make the mixtape a little longer. I've also included the extended version of Blocka La Flame with both of Travi$'s verses and both of Pusha's verses. I also edited the songs to remove unnecessary silence at the end of most of the tracks and changed the EQ of a few songs.Owl Pharaoh (Deluxe)Travi$ ScottT.I., 2 Chainz, Toro Y Moi, A$AP Ferg, Pusha T, Popcaan, Justin Vernon, Theophilus London, Paul Wall, James Fauntleroy, Wale, Meek Mill, MigosMultipleHustle Gang, G.O.O.D Music171 Hour, 2 Minutes (62 Minutes)Hip-Hop/RapRe-ReleaseN/ARe-Release256 kbpsM4ANote: If you want a different format let me know in the thread.Yes℗ 2013 Epic Records, a division of Sony Music EntertainmentSocial venture CommitChange has developed a new fundraising platform for nonprofits that doesn't rely on collecting a percentage of funds raised, potentially netting nonprofits with a higher percentage of total donations.
The venture has garnered investments from power investors Mark Cuban, Tim Draper, Adam Draper and 500 Startups. Chris Sinton, co-founder of Network for Good and board chair of StartOut, has also invested and joined the board.
"We've decided to make all of our core technology available for free to help bolster charitable giving in the United States. We are also eliminating donation skimming as a business model and we will never profit by taking a percentage of donations," said Roderick Campbell, CEO and Co-Founder of CommitChange.
Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said "a non-profit without CommitChange risks becoming a dinosaur."
On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 at 7:00 Eastern, Sinton and Campbell will join me for a live conversation about serving the nonprofit fundraising community. Tune in here then to watch the live interview.
More about CommitChange:
CommitChange provides nonprofits with a full suite of integrated fundraising tools, which can be managed from a single platform. This tightly integrated solution eliminates the need for data consolidation, significantly reduces labor costs, and can provide an unprecedented level of understanding about a nonprofit’s supporters. CommitChange significantly reduces the time it takes to perform common tasks and eliminates the 2-3 weeks of training required to operate competing systems. CommitChange also requires no setup or customization, and can be deployed in minutes.
More about Network for Good:Shaman Shaman Basics Want to Discuss the Shaman?
Visit the Shaman Forum.
Looking for Class Guides?
Click here.
haman are the spiritual leaders of their tribes and clans. They communicate with spirits, have visions of the future, and guide their people through the darkest of times. Many mistake their wisdom and serenity for a pacifist nature. When challenged, though, shaman have a range of powers available for dealing with threats to the natural order. The Shaman is a secondary Healing class (to the Priest) with a fun assortment of spells and options. The Shaman is especially liked by party members for its Healing and beneficial totems. The Shaman has up to four types of totems: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. An important part of playing the Shaman is figuring out which totem is best to use in each situation. The Shaman is similar to a Paladin without as much armor. Information Class Role
The old phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" is an excellent way to describe the Shaman; they are the only real "hybrid" class in World of Warcraft. While they do not excel at any one aspect of their repertoire, they function passing well when performing most tasked called upon by a party. Need a support healer? Looking for a secondary tank? After another damage-dealer? Have an empty slot that needs someone to support the group in general? The Shaman can provide. They have a number of utility spells as well that help make life easier for any party. The old phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" is an excellent way to describe the Shaman; they are the only real "hybrid" class in World of Warcraft. While they do not excel at any one aspect of their repertoire, they function passing well when performing most tasked called upon by a party. Need a support healer? Looking for a secondary tank? After another damage-dealer? Have an empty slot that needs someone to support the group in general? The Shaman can provide. They have a number of utility spells as well that help make life easier for any party. Strengths Weaknesses Can heal themselves and resurrect other players after battle Most totems are easily destroyed when attacked directly Can transform into a Ghost Wolf, allowing for fast travel High dependence on mana pool for offense and survivability Can use totems of earth, air, fire and water No long duration party buffs available Can walk on water Instant cast damage spells Challenges Learning how to be a good healer
Learning how to use Totems properly, learning all spells, and learning how to use everything in combat Allowable Races: Orc, Tauren, Troll Standard Bars: Health/Mana Allowable Equipment: Cloth, Leather, Shields, Mail (with training)
Allowable Weapons: One-Handed Maces, Staves, Fist Weapons, One-Handed Axes (with training), Daggers (with training), Two-Handed Axes (with talents), Two-Handed Maces (with talents) Starting Stats Race Strength Agility Stamina Intellect Spirit Armor Health Mana Orc 24 17 23 18 25 48 77 73 Tauren 25 18 23 16 24 44 81 71 Troll 22 22 22 17 23 58 67 72 Racial Traits
Check out the racial traits before deciding which race you are going to pick. Related LinksInsurers accused of making PTSD worse by placing former cops under surveillance
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Brendon Bullock describes his battle with PTSD and surveillance from insurers (ABC News)
A former police officer was subjected to extensive physical and video surveillance by an insurance company, even after its psychiatrist diagnosed him as "badly depressed, if not at risk of suicide" and struggling with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Key points: Former police officers spied on by private eyes working for insurance firms
Psychiatrist warns surveillance can make PTSD worse
Lawyer says such actions could in fact be illegal
The distressing encounters which Brendon Bullock and other police officers suffering from PTSD have had with insurers and private investigators are detailed in tonight's Four Corners program, Insult to Injury.
The surveillance includes intrusive monitoring of social media accounts and other online activity. In the case of one former officer with PTSD, investigators downloaded 13,427 items.
A former general duties officer, terrorism investigator and undercover operative for the Australian Crime Commission, Mr Bullock witnessed many traumatic events in the course of his duties — car accidents, suicides, homicides and other extreme acts of violence.
The final trigger for his mental illness was attending the scene of a murder where he found the killer and his badly mutilated victim.
Mr Bullock left the police force in 2011 and submitted a compensation claim for his illness under a scheme offered by New South Wales Police Force's superannuation fund and managed by insurer MetLife.
In December 2012, a psychiatrist selected by the insurer assessed him as having a "total and permanent" disability because of his acute PTSD. The report was given to MetLife, although not to Mr Bullock when he asked for it.
Despite the report, and entreaties from his lawyers for the surveillance to stop, MetLife employed investigators to watch him on another 10 occasions over the next seven months. On four of those occasions they videoed him as well.
"He spiralled downwards after [the surveillance] started to happen over that period, unbelievably rapidly," said Mr Bullock's father Bruce. "He was in a really, really, bad way."
"At that particular time I was in a state of self-destruction," Brendon recalls.
"I was drinking heavily, I was heavily medicated. I was hyper-vigilant, very aware that I was being watched, yet couldn't understand why this surveillance was continuing."
In November 2013, Mr Bullock attempted suicide, his depression exacerbated by the surveillance and news that MetLife would no longer handle his claim and another insurer, TAL, would take over. He was found comatose by his wife and daughters.
One in five officers at'significant risk' of mental illness
Psychiatrist Sandy McFarlane, from the University of Adelaide's Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies, said surveillance worsens an officer's PTSD.
"If a person is being followed it very clearly can make them significantly worse because they perceive this threat in their environment that brings back very real things that have happened to them in their career," he said.
The surveillance especially unnerved Mr Bullock because he twice received death threats when he was a policeman.
Professor McFarlane estimates one in five police officers are at "significant risk" of mental illness due to the stress of their work.
He said insurers should not view PTSD as "simply a problem of compensation".
In response to queries from Four Corners, MetLife announced it had changed its procedures and "now no longer use surveillance in the assessment of claims related to mental illness".
Email, social media use reveals 'hobbies': investigators
Another former police officer diagnosed with PTSD, who asked to be identified only as Greg, was placed under lengthy surveillance by private investigators hired by another insurer, Employers Mutual.
Their work included what is known in the industry as a "desktop" investigation — trawling through the internet activity of claimants.
Investigators scoured Greg's social media accounts and downloaded 13,427 items in less than a month.
In a report compiled by Lee Kelly Commercial Investigations on Greg's internet activity, which was obtained by Four Corners, the investigator says they were able to mask their visits to social media sites.
"Our collections of monitored accounts are passive and do not announce 'follows' to target accounts as is the case when regular approaches are employed," it said.
Greg's online conversations with his lawyer and frequent posting on sites related to police officers' mental health were viewed suspiciously by the investigator who considered them "inconsistent with assertions made by the claimant". The investigator said the activity showed he had "concentration and persistence", as well as "interests and hobbies".
When Greg changed his Facebook picture to a monkey smoking a cigarette, the investigators reported that it appeared to be "an attempt at humour and to thwart surveillance".
Investigators acting illegally, lawyer says
Lawyer John Cox said the online investigation technique had become popular in the past 18 months.
"[It is] not only intrusive but, in my opinion, the actions of some of these investigators are illegal," Mr Cox said.
"Social media is important for many ex-police. It is the only way that they socialise," he added.
"The law says [in] Section 308H [of the NSW Crimes Act] that anyone who breaches a security setting on a computer system is committing an offence."
Greg said his Facebook account had the highest privacy setting when the investigators began their probe in April 2015. "It could only be viewed by friends," he said.
Lee Kelly Commercial Investigations said in its report it did not breach privacy legislation when collecting data, but declined to comment on any breach of Section 308H when contacted by the ABC.
Employers Mutual also declined to comment, referring inquiries to the NSW Workcover authority, now known as Insurance & Care NSW, or icare.
In a statement, it said insurance fraud was a "serious issue" and it had been "advised that all information in relation to [Greg's] claim was obtained from publicly available information".
Surveillance logs obtained by Greg show he was followed for 80 hours by private detectives, who took video and photos of him with his family at the shops and walking along a beach.
It was, says Greg, "absolutely humiliating".
Watch Four Corners: Insult to Injury at 8:30pm on ABC TV
Topics: mental-health, health, police, law-crime-and-justice, australia
First postedIt’s been three years since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) came out with its comprehensive look at vaccine safety. That’s enough time to generate dozens more studies investigating side effects and risk of conditions such as autism and cancer that keep some parents from vaccinating their children against potentially lethal diseases like mumps, measles and pertussis.
Since 2011, when the IOM issued its report, 67 new studies that included proper follow up periods and control groups have emerged. So the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality requested an updated review of the data on vaccine safety, this time including data on previously unstudied immunizations against pneumococcus, rotavirus, Hib and inactivated polio virus vaccines in addition to the well-studied ones.
MORE: How Safe Are Vaccines?
Overall, the researchers, led by Margaret Maglione at the RAND Corporation, report in the journal Pediatrics that most of the childhood immunizations are safe, with only a few associated with rare adverse effects. The group found that the MMR vaccine, which some parents believe raise the risk of autism, does not increase the risk of the developmental disorder. They did find moderate evidence that rotavirus vaccination can cause twisting of the bowels in a small number of children, but the condition can be treated.
“We need to keep doing this,” says Dr. Carol Baker, executive director of the center for vaccine awareness and research at Texas Children’s Hospital, of the study updates. “ |
traveling party worth of Texas' friends, too. But that was not a Texas-to-the-ACC rumor.
In some alternate dimension, we're watching the country's richest and most advantaged program play football at Wake Forest, Syracuse, and Duke in the same season.
Including a writeup by CBS Sports' Tony Barnhart, who defended to Paul Finebaum the fact that he participated in planned PR for a conference by saying, "I was asked about Missouri in a what-if. No one gave me inside information."
Nobody really cared. CBS is the SEC.
7. Baylor did work.
Work of questionable impact and work meant to benefit absolutely nobody but Baylor, but work.
The Bears are dedicated at litigation and politics and such. They used political ties to beat TCU and SMU into the Big 12 in the first place, but then tried to beat Colorado into the Pac-12, lobbied against anyone (including Colorado) leaving, lobbied against Oklahoma and Texas A&M leaving, and essentially threatened to sue the SEC.
Somebody made a shirt at some point:
And five months later, followed through.
9. Rutgers controls invisible New York City.
I probably read this once a month.
10. The realignment expert Blogspot: bumper crop!
Source very close to the situation at West Virginia says the Big Ten has its hand on UConn's fanny and is engaging Project: Squeeze. It's a done deal.
Done. Deal. Ink is in the inkplace.
Over on my Twitter feed, which you can follow, I've been engaging with some folks from the ACC camp, who feel Oklahoma State is set to pop. Too soon. If you follow me, you know it's the wrong OSU being discussed, based on my knowledge of the inner workings at West Virginia. Follow me to learn what O stands for. I'll show you if you follow me.
D. O. N. E. Get married yesterday.
This is the big one. Plugged-in West Virginia booster says the SEC is joining the Big 12.
Fait accompli. I swear upon the souls of my descendants through the year 3131.
Hang on. Situation changing. Emerging intel from West Virginia. RSS me for more on Louisville.
It got even weirder on message boards. You can only imagine.
In the end, the only teams to newly go it alone were BYU, Idaho, and New Mexico State, with varying degrees of intent.
12. Virginia Tech has publicly denied SEC rumors at least five times.
Four here, plus this.
This ranks as one of the four or so most frequently denied conference realignment things, along with the Big 12 on more than 10 teams, the SEC on expanding from 13 to 14, and WILD CARD.
Goodbye, Carolina Bias!
— Univ of Maryland (@UofMaryland) November 18, 2012
14. The Big 12 and Big East considered a merger, as did the Mountain West and Conference USA.
Oh, you forgot about that first one? Elsewhere, the MOUNT USA dream lasted many months, but it never worked out.
15. Charlotte, Georgia State, Old Dominion, and UTSA joined the FBS.
They've won a combined 61 games since 1932* and happen to play in or near large cities with many televisions.
* ODU had a program decades ago, which it restarted in 2009.
16. All of this forced my friend Martin Rickman to lose his mind.
SB Nation's own has spent about a year now dwelling in a Twitter world of desperately friendly good vibes and earnest assertions of ACC kinship and warmth. Here was his manifesto, released just after Notre Dame sort of joined the ACC and sort of didn't.
You should follow him because he is a neat and funny guy.
17. Official conference websites lost track of which team was where.
This was just one example of the phenomenon:
Geographically, sure, though the Tigers have one of the country's worst football programs and would open zero TV markets. I was looking up some figures to throw at you about just how bad Memphis football has been, but then I just re-read the title of this section and became very sad or happy all over again; feelings are hard right now.
Also, Hawaii made its case for the Pac-12.
Also, SMU pitched the Big 12.
Also, there was a Houston Big 12 rumor.
Also, there was a NIU-to-the-Big 12 movement.
Also, Air Force counts the Big 12 among the many conferences it reportedly almost joined.
Make up a Big 12 rumor: it probably happened.
See?
20. The Big East accepted the aforementioned Memphis and Tulane.
The pinnacle of pandering to television markets was a BCS conference swinging for the city of New Orleans by adding Tulane athletics. This was among the last snips that split the conference in two and completely broke open any remaining notion of any of this making sense.
Forget that earlier tweet that #SouthernMiss fans should be patient... Tulane goes to the Big East... go crazy folks — Patrick Magee (@Patrick_Magee) November 27, 2012
21. Notre Dame football still never joined a conference.
But Navy, which has been independent for even longer, will.
22. Florida State fans remain angry.
Did you know only one conference in all of college sports includes a team that is more popular than the rest of its conference rivals? It's true. It's not at all true, but please humor Florida State fans.
The FSU-to-the Big 12 debate consumed like all of May and June 2012 after this happened.
23. Approximately one person didn't lie to you.
A year before being fired, LSU president John Lombardi said, "Once an athletic conference is expanded by the addition of athletically effective institutions with strong television markets, then the members talk about the relative wonderfulness of their members' academic profiles."
24. The Big Ten started all this more or less on purpose.
Then ended up with Rutgers and Maryland.
In December 2009, the Big Ten announced it would expand in the next year or so. Announced! This served as a lesson on how not to realign, as programs began openly pleading for a spot. The next time the Big Ten grew, it did so in total silence, dropping the bombs in the middle of a college football Saturday.
Big 12 members reacted to the Big Ten's declaration, with Nebraska's exit cracking the seal. The SEC and Pac-12 capitalized, also taking on Big 12 members. The ACC gobbled up some more of the Big East because big membership numbers are bigger than little membership numbers and the ACC likes to do things. The Big 12 restocked from the Big East, technically. The Big East digested Conference USA. The Mountain West and others killed the WAC because it was there. The Big Ten went all MEDIA MARKETS. The ACC added a good athletics program, to everyone's wonder. The Big East kept doing its thing. Conference USA stomped on the Sun Belt. The shockwaves reached into FCS, where the SoCon surrendered the subdivision's two best historic programs.
The MAC merrily chugged along all by itself, whistling a zippy little tune.
25. Rivals got too mad at each other to play sports.
No matter how much Texas AD DeLoss Dodds likes the sound of his own sass, Texas will play Texas A&M some day. Kansas will play Missouri, just as Pitt will play West Virginia. I don't know if they'll ever again play every year. We salvage what we can.
We lost some things, but it could've been far worse.
What's your favorite memory from this stupid era, and what dumb thing do you think will happen next?Think Klout Isn’t Using your Facebook stats? Think Again…
Last week I was doing some housecleaning of sorts with Google+. I had moved from the gmail.com account to using my Google domain account. As a result I noticed that my Klout score took a slight dip:
No, not the big dip you see…the smaller dip just to the left. Turns out that the number of +1’s, shares, and comments to the old G+ account had an effect on my Klout score, dropping it 0.94 points in one day. Being the inquisitive type of person (and knowing that there is no real value to Klout anyway but I will save that for a different post) I decided to do an experiment.
On my Klout page there is a section for Facebook statistics. Unfortunately for the past year or so all it has ever said is “Facebook activity statistics are coming soon.” I am fairly certain the Mayans are coming faster than these statistics.
Anyway, I decided to remove the connection to Facebook since it didn’t appear to matter anyway. So I did, and the result is the rather large drop in my Klout score by 2.69 points.
Have you ever read the Klout page that explains how they do their scoring? I have. Here is the pertinent part I want you to pay attention to:
“Influence is built over time
In most instances, your influence should not radically change from one day to the next. The Klout Score is based on a rolling 90-day window, with recent activity being weighted more than older activity. So being inactive over the weekend or taking short break won’t have a major impact on your Score, but if you’re inactive for longer periods your Score will decrease gradually.”
Really? I don’t see how that can be true. And I reconnected my Facebook account the next day and then saw a jump by 2.81 points. Hey…wait a second…I gained.12 points and all I did was disconnect and reconnect one network? Hmmm….I wonder if I can keep doing that and inch my way towards 60? And now I wonder why I would ever care (sorry, that is a different blog post).
What I do believe this means is that we should be able to disconnect a network, measure the drop, reconnect, then repeat with a different network. The idea is that we should be able to see just how important each of the networks are for your overall score. This means you could then get an idea as to which network you should focus on in order to increase your Klout score. Is it Flickr? Instagram? YouTube?
Go ahead and try unplugging one network at a time and see where the data takes you.Here's what's happening on the DW store! View this email in your browser NEW RELEASES BURN
"Last Great Sea" EP
Shortly before the demise of Burn in 1992, the band recorded three songs which were never released. These recordings became highly sought after by fans and tenth generation dubs have been circulating the underground scene for years. BUY NOW PRISON HIT
"Stray Dog" EP
Prison Hit come back to follow up their demo with two new songs "Stray Dog" and "Wish You Wouldn't" that are more focused in the vein of late Anti-Cimex and Motorhead. This is the second release on the BBB Subsidiary label, Frigid Misery. BUY NOW MALICE AT THE PALACE
"Self Titled" LP/TAPE
Debut 12" from Florida's MALICE AT THE PALACE. Side A features a brand new recording and Side B features their full live set from This Is Hardcore 2015. Shipping now from Six Feet Under Records. BUY NOW PRE-ORDER NOW PRAISE
"Leave It All Behind" LP
This seven song EP marks a decidedly more tuneful tendency and exhibits a strength of songwriting that only comes from playing together for all these years. This EP undeniably feels like something fresh and exciting. PRE-ORDER NAILS
"You Will Never Be One Of Us" LP/TAPE
The third full-length album from Nails to be released 6/17 on Nuclear Blast Records. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Kurt Ballou of Converge with artwork by Jef Whitehead of Leviathan. PRE-ORDER NOMADS
Love It Or Leave It" LP
From start to finish, Love It or Leave It is an album of storm-like sonic power and lyrical realness. "It's about completely disliking the reality we wake up to everyday. So you want to escape by getting high or dying. Or both." PRE-ORDERThe UK is the largest host of fentanyl sales on the darknet in Europe, with 1,000 trades being made in the last few months, research shows.
Experts at the Oxford Internet Institute said the UK was a “significant player” in the trade of the synthetic opioid, a controlled class A drug that can be up to 100 times stronger than heroin. They warned that the drug was increasingly appearing on illicit websites.
It follows repeated warnings from the National Crime Agency for people to be “vigilant about fentanyl to protect themselves and their loved ones”, following at least 60 deaths linked to the substance.
A team at the institute has been scraping the world’s largest darknet marketplaces since April 2017. It found that the US accounts for almost 40% of global darknet trade, followed by Canada (15%) and Australia (12%). The largest seller in Europe is the UK (9%), followed by Germany, accounting for 5% of sales.
Joss Wright, a research fellow at the institute, said: “Why is the UK a significant player? … It’s because we have a relatively strong tech sector and users of the web, but also geographically the UK is quite well placed for trade coming from the US.”
He said that since data gathering began in April, there had been 4,850 trades in the US and about 1,000 in the UK.
Darknet markets or cryptomarkets have been operating since the launch of Silk Road in February 2011. On the darknet, those selling substances are able to remain relatively anonymous as their IP addresses are masked. People buy drugs using the online currency bitcoin.
Mark Graham, a professor of internet geography at the institute, said: “Many of the sellers in places like the US, Canada, and western Europe are likely intermediaries rather than producers themselves. While darknet marketplaces can, in theory, be accessed from anywhere in the world, our data suggests that there is often a local geography of trading. In other words, buyers tend to buy from domestic rather than international sellers.”
Two men were jailed last month for importing fentanyl and other class A drugs before selling them on the darknet. Ross Brennan, 29, from York, was sentenced to more than 13 years after making hundreds of thousands of pounds with 27-year-old Aarron Gledhill from Huddersfield, who was sentenced to just under four years for his part in the crime.
In what has been described as the first case of its kind in the UK because of their sophisticated use of technology, police searched Brennan’s property and found drugs with a street value of tens of thousands of pounds. They also seized a Chemistry for Dummies book, address labels, bags of cutting powder, a mixing machine, a microscope, a set of scales and packages from around the world.
The offences took place between 2013 and 2016. Between June and September 2015 alone, Brennan made 225 transactions using a dark website called AlphaBay, which has since been shut down.
Wright said fentanyl was appearing “more and more” on the dark web. “There has been a rise in the number of sales of that product … the darknet is a good place to buy things with extra guarantees of security and there is increasing trade there,” he said.
In response, some darknet marketplaces – including the drug market Hansa, which was shut down in July – had started banning fentanyl sales amid concerns it would attract too much attention from law enforcement, he said.
Judith Aldridge, a criminologist at the University of Manchester, said she would be surprised if sales of fentanyl did not increase. “Interestingly, over the past 12 months we’ve seen a demonisation of fentanyl, with many in the darknet community opposed to their sales on crypto-markets.”
Dr Andres Baravalle, from the University of East London, said research showed that 398 of 36,000 darknet adverts had mentioned fentanyl so far in 2017.
The Global Drug Survey 2017 said: “Despite disruptions from law enforcement efforts and scams, the size and scale of darknet markets for drugs continues to grow. At the time of the report there were over 20 functioning markets, according to dnstats.net.”
Graham, from the institute, said this had not deterred dealers. “Our research so far shows that shutting down these marketplaces has not reduced the total amount of trade. It’s a whack-a-mole game, so it is not reducing demand and supply … when you shut down one website another pops up. There is no indication it’s radically reducing demand or supply on these markets.”Lucky number three seems to be attached to the Music Midtown festival.
It’s the third year for the mega-popular event (since returning from a lengthy hiatus in the mid-2000s). This year’s attraction will still take place over two days, but music will be performed on an added third stage. And hey, it’s 2013, so that counts, right?
Here is who will strum, rock, croon and bash around during the musical soiree at Piedmont Park.
On Friday, Sept. 20:
Journey
Jane’s Addiction
2 Chainz
Phoenix
Cake
North Mississippi Allstars
The Mowgli’s
Drivin N Cryin
On Saturday, Sept. 21:
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Queens of the Stone Age
Imagine Dragons
Weezer
Kendrick Lamar
Arctic Monkeys
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Tegan and Sara
The Black Lips
Reignwolf
The Neighbourhood
ZZ Ward
Mona
Capital Cities
Tickets for Music Midtown 2013 are $40 for Sept. 20, $65 for Sept. 21 and $90 for a two-day ticket. After Aug. 1, prices will increase to $50 for Sept. 20, $75 for Sept. 21 and $110 for a two-day ticket. Fans can purchase beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday through all Ticketmaster outlets.
“It’s a great value,” said Peter Conlon, president of Live Nation Atlanta, which produces the event. “The average ticket price (at) 1998’s (festival) was $45. We want people to come to expose them to more music. You might come for three acts, but hopefully you’ll discover more while you’re there.”
While the past two years of the resurrected Music Midtown have unfolded with minimal issues (last year’s biggest, the ATMs running out of cash, should be rectified this year with the use of a new vendor), Conlon is always looking to make improvements.
“We said from day one that we were going to expand the stages. If we did two days, two stages, it would be the same festival. We needed to add more to the experience,” he said last week.
The third stage, at Oak Hill, will be erected near the entrance to the festival, fronting 10th Street.
Music Midtown 2012 expanded from one day to two, and headliners Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam helped draw sellout crowds of more than 50,000.
Considering that gates had to be shuttered midway through the Saturday concerts last year — hours before Pearl Jam’s closing set — since the area would have otherwise breached a comfortable capacity, conventional wisdom will tell you to plan early.
“Everyone I talked to seemed to enjoy themselves. That always breeds more interest,” Conlon said. “I had people grab me all year and say, ‘I couldn’t get into your festival.’ I think the word is out that it makes sense to buy (tickets) early.”
Conlon commented that he isn’t looking to increase capacity this year, but wants there to be more space for attendees to stroll among the stages, food and beer trucks and arts market.
Another complaint from some last year was a perceived shortage of portable toilets, but, as Conlon reminded, they were in ample supply — people simply tended to follow the crowd and congregated in certain areas.
“You can’t put them all in one spot or you’ll have nothing but rows of port-a-lets,” he said. “There were more than plenty. You just needed to take an extra few steps.”
But let’s not forget the essence of Music Midtown — the music.
As has become routine, Conlon worked throughout the year to cull a lineup that would highlight newbies and veterans, indie rock and rap, and acts with longtime local ties.
“We’re trying to be more diverse this year,” Conlon said. “I’m going back to the mentality of the old Music Midtown, where it was a diverse gathering of acts. Rather than having one or two big acts driving everything, you’ll see more diversity now with three stages.”
And the lucky number appears again.Refuting the likes of Fox News’ popular talk-show host Bill O’Reilly and the razor-tongued television pundit and spewer-out of bestsellers Ann Coulter may seem pointless. They say the same things time and again to Fox’s mostly white, badly informed audience which is in danger of dying off; the median age of O’Reilly’s viewers is seventy-two. However, when it comes to religion, much of what they say reflects tacit anti-rationalist assumptions shared by far too many people from all walks of life – assumptions that must be challenged and refuted.
A case in point: on April 2, O’Reilly opened his show with a segment entitled “The War on Christianity Getting Even Worse.” In it, he provides a distressing video overview of recent terrorist attacks against and executions of Christians in Africa and Pakistan, and declares that “Christians are being slaughtered all over the place.” He segues to the United States, where “verbal attacks against Christians are the headline,” and “some far-left people... are smearing Americans who oppose things like abortion and gay marriage,” from which he concludes that “it is open season on Christians.”
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The evidence? “Well-known religion hater” Bill Maher (shown calling religions “stupid and dangerous”) has a “free pass to bash people of faith,” with his “vicious behavior toward Christianity largely ignored in the press.”
O’Reilly presents results from an Associated Press - Gallup poll according to which 57 percent of Americans favor letting “wedding-related businesses with religious objections” opt out of serving gay marriages, as well as a Public Religion Research Institute survey showing that 54 percent of Americans believe their religious liberty is under threat. “Most Americans get” what’s going on, he says. Nevertheless, “secular progressives have succeeded in putting people of faith on the defensive,” with a prime example of this being the pizzeria in Walkerton, Indiana, which, in a report aired by a local television channel, declared it would refuse to bake pizzas for a gay wedding.
(The shop’s owner added that “We’re not discriminating against anyone. It’s just that’s our belief, and everybody has the right to believe anything.” Her internally inconsistent statement went unchallenged by the reporter.)
O’Reilly informs us that “all hell descended on the store, as secular zealots threatened all kinds of things.” He then flashes a clip of Newt Gingrich denouncing “lynch mobs.” (No “lynch mobs” besieged the pizzeria, which, following its homophobic proclamation, managed to rake in donations of more than $50,000 from supporters. O’Reilly omits mentioning this.) Who’s to blame for the mounting perils Christianity faces in America? Religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, for failing to “push back” against the secular onslaught.
It hardly takes a journalistic sleuth to ferret out the simultaneously ludicrous and lamentable false equivalency that O’Reilly has drawn here between the horrific, all-too-real massacres of Christians underway in countries afflicted with terrorism abroad, and the barbs, criticisms, and, yes, insults about religion coming from some vocal atheists, including Maher, in the United States. The death toll from the former stands in the hundreds; from the latter: zero. I’m unaware of a single atheist who, motivated by his or her nonbelief, has called for or committed acts of violence against Christians anywhere, at any time. Obviously, nonbelievers possess no “sacred text” with which they could justify harming anyone, let alone people of faith. (NB to those who will take to the comments section and rant about Stalin and Mao. Murderous dictators both, they ordered their atrocities not on account of their atheism, but to “defend the revolution” and secure their power.)
But facts rarely hinder O’Reilly. To deepen his audience’s (mis)understanding of the (non-existent) war on Christianity, he then turns to Ann Coulter. As one might expect, Coulter blames the liberal media and progressives for “hating on” the Christians.
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“It’s Christianity that the Left hates most of all,” she says, “because that is the foundation of our country... and all of our freedoms come from that, freedom of association, freedom of speech.” In this, “the most consequential nation on earth,” she says, Christians would prefer to change “the bedpans of Ebola patients in Nigeria rather than stand up to the New York Times and stand up against abortion and fight against these bullies.” The dastardly liberals and their media are trying to “tear down the heart of this country by going directly at the heart of America, which is Christianity.”
Where to start here? Nigeria suffered only a handful of Ebola cases and has been free of the hemorrhagic fever for almost six months now; the worst-hit countries have been to its west. Religion as the source of free speech? The three Abrahamic faiths, with their “revealed” truths against which “blasphemy” (that is, any behavior supposedly disrespectful of God) is forbidden (and punishable by death in the Bible), have historically fought against free speech, the most lethal opponent of their bizarre, improbable doctrines. Few need reminding that the Vatican formalized the suppression of free speech with its infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books), which included the works of the Enlightenment’s key luminaries and many other intellectual giants, and which was abolished only in 1966.
And Christianity as the “foundation of our country?” Coulter, formerly a constitutional lawyer, could knowingly pronounce such a monstrous untruth only to mislead further the already historically illiterate – that is, Fox’s audience, dumbed-down by watching shows such as O’Reilly’s and taking them seriously. That Christian zealots initiated the mass European migration to North America no one disputes. They did not, however, found the country; the secularist Founding Fathers, who mostly regarded religion with deep suspicion, did. Check no further than Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” and, obviously, the Constitution’s First Amendment (which protects free speech from faith by forbidding Congress from establishing a state religion), as well as the more obscure Article VI, which declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” If Christianity really were the “foundation of our country,” by Coulter’s logic the Founding Fathers would have included an amendment making Bible study mandatory for all aspirants to public office.
O’Reilly then asks Coulter how it is that the 80 percent of Americans who consider themselves Christians “are getting thumped, they’re losing.... How did that happen?”
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For Coulter, the answer lies in pusillanimous Christian leaders (abetted by spineless Republicans). Their cowardice is, she says, “ridiculous,” because “the one thing every Christian should have is courage. The most important thing in your life, eternity, is already taken care of. Go out and fight. You’re afraid of being sneered at by the New York Times?”
The two banter for a couple of minutes more, during which O’Reilly complains about the lack of Catholic clerics willing “to put themselves out to defend the Christian faith” (something Coulter disputes) while “all these pressure groups” (lobbies for gay, reproductive, and abortion rights) are striving to undermine it. Coulter incriminates the media again. “The ad hominem attacks thrown at Christians in this country” are mostly charges of racism and homophobia, she says, before calling on her fellows in faith to “be courageous and fight for the most consequential nation on earth.” Finis.
All in all, rationalists should applaud O’Reilly and Coulter for having the courage to so boldly air their mendacity, mischaracterizations, and lopsided analogies, which are in fact illuminating. Namely, they both argue from a premise so widely accepted that they leave it unstated: that those who believe, without proof, fantastical, far-reaching propositions about the nature of our cosmos and how we should live our lives have nothing to explain, nothing to account for, while those of us who value convictions based on evidence, reasoned solutions, and rules for living deriving from consensus must ceaselessly justify ourselves and genuflect apologetically for voicing disagreement.
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Beneath this unstated premise lies another more insidious notion: that there are two kinds of truth – religious and otherwise. That, say, the assertion that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh might not be literally true, but it merits respect as “religious truth” (or, as Reza Aslan puts it, “sacred history”), as a metaphor for some ethereal verity, one so transcendental that boneheaded rationalists obsessed with superfluities like evidence cannot grasp it.
This is sophistry of the most contemptible variety. By such unscrupulous subterfuge the faithful (and their apologists) commit treason against reason, betray honest discourse, and hope to render their (preposterous) dogmas immune to disproof and open to limitless interpretation, depending on their needs of the moment. Either an objective proposition (say, that Jesus was the son of God, or that the Prophet Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse) is true or it is untrue. It cannot be whatever the one advancing it says it is; much less, true for some, but not for others.
O’Reilly himself clings to this New-Age idea that we all have a right to our personal, customized truths. In his 2006 interview with Richard Dawkins, O’Reilly admits that he’s “not positive that Jesus was God,” but he’s “throwin’ in with Jesus, rather than throwin’ in with you guys [atheists], because you guys can’t tell me how it all got here.” A minute or so later, he announces that he’s “stickin’ with Judeo-Christian philosophy and my religion, Roman Catholicism, because it helps me as a person.”
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That doesn’t mean it’s true, replies Dawkins.
“Well, it’s true for me,” says O’Reilly. “See, I believe it.”
“You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else?... Something’s either got to be true or not.”
O’Reilly’s “reasoning” would fail to pass muster in a nursery-school yard, yet he presents it shamelessly to an adult audience on national television. He knows most people tend to avoid outright expression of disbelief (and certainly suppress belly laughs) when others begin disclosing their religious beliefs.
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Such timidity must stop.
Let me be clear: I’m not denying anyone’s (constitutionally protected) right to profess or practice his or her religion. (Nor am I denying the magnificent literary, artistic, and musical heritage religion has inspired.) What I am contesting is the hushed silence with which many nonbelievers respond to the faith-tainted eructations of the religious, who enjoy undeserved exemptions from ground rules we observe for all other kinds of discourse. If someone were to claim he was Napoleon Bonaparte, we would either assume he was joking, or, if not, dial the insane asylum and request urgent outpatient service. What we would not do is simply nod in assent and move on to another topic. “This is just my religion and I believe in it!” is a frequently stated position, but it offers no valid argument of any kind, and we should give no one a pass on the basis of it.
Why not? Our silence when confronted by religious nonsensicalities (especially in front of children) only helps foster their continuation, and does great damage to our politics. Though atheism is spreading, with a third of all Americans under thirty professing no religious affiliation, eight out of ten do call themselves Christians; what a sizable majority, even a shrinking one, believes has to matter to us all. The very issues Coulter and O’Reilly cite (gay marriage and abortion) would not even be controversial were it not for the malign influence faith has on politics. Examine the intractable problems in our society – and the world as a whole – and you will espy the ghastly gargoyle of religion rearing its misshapen head behind many, if not most, of them. In view of this, speaking out against religion becomes a moral obligation.
That O’Reilly’s faith helps him feel good has no bearing on its truth and certainly cannot stand as an argument in its favor. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw summed it up memorably: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
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Consolations based on a false religious premise pose their own problem: what happens when they are exposed as unfounded? The believer, having never matured, having never really advanced beyond the childhood realm of wishful thinking, is suddenly rendered defenseless before the challenges -- the terrors, even -- of mortal life.
What really flabbergasts O’Reilly and Coulter is that nonbelievers are no longer keeping mum about the rank stupidity embodied in Christianity. A virgin birth? A rib-cum-woman? A man walking on water? The vicarious redemption of “sin” through a cruel and unusual act of human sacrifice? All these fantasticalities offend thinking, sane individuals. No one should expect us to accept the truth of such fantasticalities or to allow dogma arising from them to determine discourse on how we live, which laws pass, and whom we marry, without fierce resistance.
The one thing both O’Reilly and Coulter do get right is that there is a war going on, but it’s not between hapless Christians and “vicious” atheists. It is between rationalists who seek to live in ways they reason to be best, and the faithful cleaving to fatuous fables and Paleolithic preachments inscribed in ancient books that should be pulped, or at best preserved as exhibits for future students majoring in anthropology, with minors in mental derangement.
O’Reilly and Coulter, we who care about doing all we can to make this life better for humanity will continue to speak up against the unreason you propagate.
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The gloves are now off.Qadri Jamil (Arabic: قدري جميل) is a Syrian politician, media editor and economist. He is one of the top leaders of the People's Will Party and the Popular Front for Change and Liberation,[1][2] and a former member of the Assad government, having been dismissed from the post of deputy prime minister for economic affairs; minister of internal trade and consumer Protection on 29 October 2013. During a visit to Russia on 21 August 2012 Jamil said that President Bashar Assad's resignation might be considered if the opposition agreed to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the Syrian revolution.[3][4][5]
Background [ edit ]
Jamil graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in the Science of Economics. He went on to become a professor in the State Institute for Socio-Economic Development Planning in Damascus.[6] Jamil was married to the daughter of Khalid Bakdash, a Syrian politician who was the Secretary-General of the Syrian Communist Party and the first communist to be an elected member of an Arab parliament in 1954. In 2000, shortly after the convention of the 9th Congress of the Syrian Communist Party, Jamil and 80% of the membership of Damascus organization of the Party were expelled. As this illegitimate procedure, as described by those affected, was widened to cover more party organizations all over Syria, Jamil and his comrades formed the National Committee for the Unity of the Syrian Communists, which published the Qassioun (also Kassioun) newspaper. Unlike the two other communist factions, the new communist current was not part of the National Progressive Front which brought together the ruling Ba'ath Party and the other "legal" parties. Qadri Jamil is originally from a Kurdish family (Jamil Pasha, from Diyarbakir), that immigrated to Syria escaping from the Ottoman rulers.
Political activity [ edit ]
It took the communist group more than a decade, actually in 2012, to form and declare an officially registered party known as the People's Will Party, that convened its 10th Periodical, 1st after registration, Congress in June 2013. The party ran independent candidates in the parliamentary elections in 2003 and 2007 but failed to win any seats. Nonetheless, in the parliamentary elections of 2012, the Front took 5 seats. The Party joined the demonstrations at the start of the 2011 Syrian uprising, and a number of its activists in Damascus, Homs and DerEzzour lost their lives at the hands of police and other services, while others were detained or arrested in other Syrian governorates. As the Syrian popular movement turned armed and violent, the PWP continued with its humanitarian aids and mediation efforts in some conflict zones. The PWP says it seeks a comprehensive, radical and democratic change of the government as a whole, not only the removal of President Bashar al-Assad.[7] He called on the government to release all political detainees.[8] He has stated that "The slogan 'the overthrow of the regime' is unpractical, unrealistic and useless",[9] and has advocated a "complete change in the regime... under the leadership of the President".[10] He described any western interference in Syrian affairs as an "occupation" and said that dialogue was the only way to settle the crisis.[8] Economically, the party called for a reversal of the liberalisation reforms that started in 2005 and for the creation of a strong national economy.[11] Jamil "thanked" Russia for vetoing a UN Security Council Resolution in December 2011 that would have condemned the Syrian government.[12] The Friends of Syria Group he criticised |
you mirror your iPhone onto an Apple TV. It’s basically a projector.
I found that this combination worked fairly well on the bike, as you could get the data right above your eye since your wrist is out of view. Unlike some heads up display units I’ve tried, this doesn’t block your peripheral vision since it sits above your eye. Other companies have products that wrap around from the side, which blocks things quite a bit.
I’d point out that using Varia Vision while riding is approximately one million times better than while running with Varia Vision and the FR735XT. That combination just about made me seasick. Plus, it kinda made my nose sore and left a mark. Note that when combined with the Varia Radar, you get the cars also shown on the heads up display.
Next, to briefly talk about HR re-broadcasting with the FR735XT. The unit contains the ability to take your optical HR sensor data and re-broadcast it over ANT+ to allow other devices (like a Garmin Edge) to record your HR. To enable this you’ll go to the HR widget (up/down arrows), and then hold down the up arrow button, which shows you the HR broadcasting screen.
At which point you’ll select ‘Broadcast Heart Rate’ and it’ll start broadcasting over ANT+:
You can then see it on other devices, like an Edge series unit, or perhaps on a trainer app like TrainerRoad:
The one challenge here though is that you can’t enable the broadcasting mode while in an activity (like you used to be able to on other Garmin devices). This kinda sucks, because it means you can’t record that activity too. Why would you want to do this? Well trainer apps like TrainerRoad and Zwift are perfect examples. In those cases you want your HR data shown/displayed on the big screen, but you might also want it recorded on your Garmin device as part of a bike workout that’s uploaded to Garmin Connect. You can’t do that now. And that’s stupid. [Update – Aug 14th, 2016: Now you can with the new firmware update released this weekend. Woot!]
Lastly, when in cycling mode you’ve got automatic FTP (Functional Threshold Power) detection when used with a power meter. You can also do a manual test if you’d like.
I’ve found that the numbers using the automatic test are a fair bit off of what Xert has me at, which is 302w (about right), and that’s in the same ballpark as WKO4 has had me in as well. Though I suppose there’s likely a bit more logic built into the online platforms than what is in the watch today. And, if it’s like other algorithms, it may take a longer time period for it to stabilize on a number. Also, it depends quite a bit on your type of workouts.
Overall within cycling the unit mostly works fine, minus the reality of using a watch in a competitive bike event. For me, I just prefer something on my handlebars to glance down at. Note that I’ll cover accuracy of the optical HR while riding in my section dedicated to that.
Swimming:
When it comes to aquatic adventures, the FR735XT specialized in swimming two different ways: In the pool, and in openwater. Oh, it can also do rowing and other Boaty McBoatface adventures, but more on that later.
The FR735XT divides up swimming into the two aforementioned categories. One uses the GPS for distance (openwater), while the other just uses an accelerometer (pools). When openwater swimming it’ll also use the accelerometer for stroke recognition too.
Starting with pools, you’ll need to set your pool length. The minimum is 17m/18y, and the maximum is 150m/y. If you’re in Chile with that crazy long kilometer pool, you’ll need to use the openwater swim mode. And if you have an infinity pool, you’ll need to go to a real pool. Infinity pools won’t work here.
Once that’s done, you’re ready to jump in the pool. The watch will remember your setting, so the next time you select the pool mode it’ll automatically use the pool distance. The reason it needs a pool distance is because it’s effectively just detecting your flip/open turns each length and then doing simple math to give you distance/pace/etc…
All of this information is displayed on your watch in real-time using the data fields you’ve configured:
With the FR735XT, Garmin also introduced the ability to create structured swim workouts. You’d create your workout structure online with Garmin Connect and then sync your watch to download it. It allows you to forgo having printed paper copies of the workout poolside.
Once in the water you can select that workout and it’ll iterate through the steps, just as it would for running or cycling. This capability was also rolled out to other Garmin tri watches like the FR920XT & Fenix3/Fenix3HR. You’ve also got the drill log, which is useful anytime you’re doing drills that don’t involve moving your arms (i.e. kickboard). This then enables you to manually enter a total distance for that drill set.
Overall, through multiple swims I haven’t seen any issues with swim recognition of distance. Perhaps once per 2-3 swims I’ll get a false lap, but it often figures it out on the next lap. And in 99.99% of the cases, said failure to properly count a single length is usually caused by one of the other 18 people in my single lap lane stopping for no logical reason on earth.
Note that pool swimming applies whether you’re indoors or outdoors. If it’s a pool under the maximum length, you’ll use the pool mode.
Next up, openwater swimming. This is simply for any body of water like a lake, pond, ocean, stream, or that giant Chilean pool.
With this mode it’s going to use GPS to determine distance and pace. The accelerometer meanwhile will track stroke rate and such in the water.
The trick with openwater swim mode is that it has an algorithm to deal with the continual loss of GPS satellite visibility each time your wrist goes under the water (every second). Not all watches have this, and is a key difference between a triathlon/openwater capable watch and just a watch that might be used for running.
When it comes to accuracy in openwater swimming, I found the plots were actually pretty darn good. I overlaid them a few different times with other GPS devices (including a reference device on a swim buoy that was attached to me). Because of the algorithms, it’s never going to be exactly perfect, but it should get you within 5-10%, and in my case that was certainly true.
For example, in a local triathlon, the course is a straight point to point in a rowing basin. Thus it’s actually one of the easiest to measure (many openwater swim courses are inaccurate). The FR735XT came in at 1,463m – while the course was officially 1,500m. The Suunto Ambit3 Peak on the other wrist was at 1,630m.
There’s more of these map examples later in my GPS accuracy section.
Finally, note that when in swimming mode the FR735XT will disable the use of the optical HR sensor for capturing workout HR data (it does though capture occasional data points for 24×7 HR data). The reason is that Garmin hasn’t seen enough accuracy yet with the optical HR sensor underwater to enable it. Instead, if you want HR data while underwater you’ll need to use the HRM-TRI or HRM-SWIM straps. I’ve got an entire review on those straps and how they work here, so go swing over to that page for glorious details (and pretty beach pics).
I did use the HRM-TRI on a number of openwater swim occasions with the FR735XT without any issue at all. You can see it in the links above/below. Also, it’s what I used in my triathlon races.
Other Sports & Battery Life:
I wanted to briefly cover the other sport modes available on the FR735XT, and then dive into battery life a bit. This category is basically two things I didn’t know where else to stick – so they got lumped together.
I’ve no doubt covered swim/bike/run fairly well, but the unit is capable of other sports as well. Plus, you can download apps from Connect IQ, which extends it further if there’s something specific you’re looking for. The sport-modes included in-box are:
– Run
– Run Indoors
– Bike
– Bike Indoors
– Pool Swim
– Openwater Swim
– Triathlon
– Multisport (customizable)
– Stand-up Paddleboarding
– Rowing
– Hiking
– XC Skiing
– Strength
– Cardio
– Other
Note that in the event you don’t have a sport mode on the watch, you can always change the sport type once online on Garmin Connect (i.e. in-line skating). Also, you can make variations of existing sport modes and tweak them a bit.
Also some folks have asked why the FR735XT lacks the ski/snowboard mode found on other watches in the same price range. That’s because it lacks the barometric altimeter that’s used to automatically recognize when you’re skiing versus when you’re on a chairlift. The mode works exceptionally well on other units, but won’t work here since it does not have the right hardware.
So what about battery life?
Well that’s the semi-controversial point on the FR735XT. Officially it’s spec’d at 14 hours, which is too short for middle and back of the pack triathletes trying to complete an Ironman. For front of the pack folks, it won’t be an issue. The battery spec in that case was assuming GPS was enabled and that optical HR is also enabled. Those being the two components that drain the battery the most (well, aside from enabling the backlight).
So if you’re a triathlete that might be above the threshold, could you bridge the gap with a HR strap (or just by disabling the optical HR sensor)? I set out to find out. The best way I know how is to plop the unit on my rooftop and let it record till it dies. So I did that:
And it came back with a whopping 19 hours (or, 16 seconds short of 19 hours). Well above spec, so pretty darn good!
But wait, was it?
See, in this case it was using smart recording (which has no impact on battery either way), but more than that – it didn’t have anything else sensor-wise to force it to update and poll more frequently. So there were very few data points. So I decided to fix that issue.
I went about and connected up the ANT+ simulator to it, which would simulate ANT+ sensor data as if you were really riding/running/etc… In this case, I simulated cycling, since it has the most sensor types. I connected an ANT+ power meter (with power/speed/cadence), as well as an ANT+ heart rate strap.
Then I put it back on the roof again. This time it lasted 15 hours – with Garmin Connect showing 15:01:01.
Pretty darn good!
Now I don’t have a good way to determine exactly how long I could go with GPS on and optical HR enabled. The reason (aside from not planning any races that take me more than 14 hours), is that if I were to just wear it around the house with GPS on it wouldn’t be a good test. The GPS will increase power draw substantially in tougher conditions (i.e. under a roof), so that’d contort the results.
Either way – I think the results give you a range to look at, and some options to work within if you really want to use this watch over the Fenix3 or FR920XT (which have longer battery life). Alternatively, if you’re walking the marathon on an Ironman, you could use UltraTrac for just the run portion, which would easily take care of battery concerns. It samples for a portion of every minute, but not the entire time. While running the data isn’t good enough, but if you’re finishing closer to 17 hours on an Ironman, than that realistically means you’re walking the marathon. In which case it’ll connect the dots just fine and you are unlikely to lose much data/distance at all.
Daily Activity & Sleep Tracking:
Like all recent Garmin wearables, the FR735XT tracks steps, sleep and general laziness levels. Yet oddly unlike Garmin wearables that are $100 (the Vivofit3), the FR735XT doesn’t have Move IQ, which automatically recognizes and tracks sport activities such as a bike commute or a walk about town. So it’s kinda backwards that way.
Still, for regular steps it tracks that just fine. You can see those at any time by pressing the up/down buttons on the side of the watch to get to the step screen. It’s here you’ll be shown your current steps for the day as well as progress towards the dynamically changing step goal.
You’ll also see your distance total for the day as well as calories burned. If you were back on the time screen, you may see a red bar. That’s the inactivity bar and reminds you to move when you get lazy. You’ll need to move about 100-150m per hour (walking) in order to clear the bar. Oddly, Garmin still doesn’t allow you to count swimming or cycling towards the inactivity bar.
If you press enter on the main steps page you’ll get a brief overview of your steps for the past 7 days:
Note that because the FR735XT lacks a barometric altimeter, it means it won’t track stairs. Which is another example where cheaper Garmin units have more capabilities than more expensive units.
If we move away from steps, but still on the daily activity front is the 24×7 HR monitoring. In this case Garmin uses their Elevate optical HR sensor to continually measure your HR and record it. And by ‘continually’, I mean, when it remembers to. In general if you’re active and moving around it’ll do so every few minutes. But if you’re sitting around still at your desk or on a couch, then it could go a very long time (30+ minutes to hours) between readings. A serious difference between competitors like Fitbit that measure every second.
You can quickly glance at your 24×7 HR by tapping the up/down button and looking at the HR screen:
Note, I’ve written an entire post on 24×7 HR and how to use it, check that out here.
You can then hit the enter button to look at your 7 day resting HR values. Of course, this is still incorrect – as it was a few weeks ago when I wrote about it within my Vivoactive HR review. You might remember how I pointed out that I could be sitting with a HR showing below the RHR value, which should be an impossibility. Also, I’d see cases where the ‘low’ value was below the ‘RHR’, which again, shouldn’t be the case.
Garmin agrees there’s some wonkiness there, but notes that the RHR value is showing the minimum for a 1-minute average. That’s logical…until you remember that the vast majority of the time the sensor is off – so it rarely stays on for a minute anyway if I’m not active.
Finally, sleep. No, not for me, but rather that the unit tracks it automatically. You need not press any button to start sleep tracking, as it’ll determine it and log it accordingly. The only thing you’ll do is set a very broad range on the app as to when you typically fall asleep, but it my experience it makes no difference in terms of actual sleep tracking. I’ve fallen asleep before/after those hours without issue.
The sleep information is available on the Garmin Connect mobile app, as well as the Garmin Connect website. You’ll see the time you fell asleep, as well as different sleep states (deep/light/awake). Plus the total time you were asleep.
When it comes to the accuracy of this, about the only thing I can really judge is whether or not the times I fell asleep are correct. And indeed it seems to nail that all the time – no issues there.
As for the sleep states, I’ve compared it in past recent reviews and found they vaguely correlate with the Withings Aura and EmFit sleep systems, which have additional sleep sensors to determine sleep states. By vaguely I mean there’s correlation about 50-75% of the time. So for now, I’d just focus on the total time asleep, which it seems to do quite well.
Optical HR Sensor Accuracy:
The FR735XT includes Garmin’s Elevate optical HR sensor built into the bottom of it, which I used both in workouts as well as in 24×7 continual HR monitoring mode. Garmin introduced this sensor this past fall, after previously using optical HR sensors from Mio. While initially it was a bit rough in other products, subsequent firmware updates have significantly improved accuracy. These updates have largely been applied to existing Garmin products using the sensor (i.e. Vivosmart HR, Fenix3 HR, FR235, Vivoactive HR, etc…).
With each subsequent new unit released I re-visit sensor accuracy. While it’s the same physical hardware, one can see the impact that firmware updates make. Additionally, each watch has a slightly different form factor (exterior design), which can impact accuracy in terms of external light getting into the sensor area (which degrades accuracy of optical HR sensors).
Before we move on to the test results, note that optical HR sensor accuracy is rather varied from individual to individual. Aspects such as skin color, hair density, and position can impact accuracy. Position and how the band is worn are *the most important* pieces. A unit with an optical HR sensor should be snug. It doesn’t need to leave marks, but you shouldn’t be able to slide a finger under the band (at least during workouts). You can wear it a tiny bit looser the rest of the day.
Ok, so in my testing I simply use the watch throughout my normal workouts. Those workouts include a wide variety of intensities and conditions, making them great for accuracy testing. I’ve got long/steady runs, hard interval workouts on both bike and running, as well as tempo runs. Night and day runs, rain and sun runs.
For each test I’m wearing additional devices, usually 3-4, which capture data from other sensors. Typically I’d wear a chest strap (usually the HRM-TRI), as well as another optical HR sensor made by Scosche and the Mio Fuse optical wrist sensor. I generally consider that Mio and Scosche sensors to be the most accurate optical HR sensors for fitness/workouts today. Note that the numbers you see in the upper right corner are *not* the averages, but rather just the exact point my mouse is sitting over.
Let’s start right out with an interval run from a couple days ago (June 8th). In this case I started with a 10-minute warm-up, and then I slowly increased intensity for 5 minutes. After which I did a simple 4x800m workout, plus some 4×30” sprints at the end. Note I’m mentioning the exact date of each file so you can dig into them in the charts later on.
You see here that there was some minor disagreement at the start between the three units, something I often see. The FR735XT had a brief diversion, while the Mio Fuse has a slightly longer diversion at the start. However, after that time period, the three tracked quite well until a bit later. You’ll notice on the 3rd and 4th interval the FR735XT seemed to struggle a bit at the higher intensities, not quite reaching my max. Same goes for some delays on the 1st and 4th 30” intervals.
However what is noteworthy is that it handles the recovery portion very well, which no delays. That’s definitely an improvement within the Garmin Elevate sensor algorithms compared to the past.
Here’s a bit of a more boring plot, with a simple 45 minute run on June 5th. This was just a shake-out run so not much variation in my pace/HR, except towards the end. During the last few minutes you’ll see those four bumps. I simply pushed up the pace a bit and then slowed it down. You’ll note on the 3rd pace-pushing bump the FR735XT did briefly struggle to correctly identify the higher HR, though caught back on afterwards.
Below is a longer run from May 14th, about 80 minutes long. In this case I was running at a steady-state paces, but I was increasing my cadence for each section. This is notable because a common error point on HR sensors (optical and strap) can be locking onto your cadence.
You see here that the first few minutes are a bit of a mess. Really nobody agrees, though the HR strap seems to offer the most logical HR values (a slow adaptation). After that point though the units track very well for the vast majority of the run. It’s only at the end of the run when I do some brief 30” sprints that we see a bit of disagreement, this time coming from the Vivoactive HR. The FR735XT seems to handle this very well.
Finally, a simple brick run on May 21st. This is interesting because in this case I was coming off the bike, so I was both warmed up and the units had a chance to correctly understand my HR. The green line is the Scosche Rhythm+, and the teal is the HRM-TRI. The purple is the FR735XT. This is interesting because it actually shows a case where the Scosche nailed the HR even when the HRM-TRI strap stumbled a bit. It didn’t take 3 minutes for me to reach my higher level HR. The FR735XT stumbled for the first 30-45 seconds, and then immediately matched my correct HR along with the Scosche.
I think a lot of people often forget the challenges with HR straps that we’ve had for years, especially in either very dry conditions, or oddly the opposite (when you’re drenched and pooling sweat). The second being the case where coming out of an indoor trainer session.
Speaking of indoor trainer sessions, let’s look at cycling. Here’s one that was relatively straight forward from May 17th. You’ll see a warm-up, and then a steady build towards a harder intensity. In this case the FR735XT tracked perfectly, with no issues at all.
Here’s another one from May 26th, where again it handles largely without issue on the trainer. You do see a bit of an oddity at the very beginning, which I’d attribute to trying to get a video up and running on my laptop while warming up, so your bending your wrist in weird ways which seems to impact the optical HR sensor. It’s a small pattern I’ve seen when on trainers, particularly during the warm-up phase when the HR is low. It seems more susceptible to minor errors then.
Finally, let’s zip outside for some riding. Here’s a June 6th ride. This ride took me across town (city riding) for the first 25 minutes, then I did loops for about 45-60 minutes, before coming riding back. The loops were largely steady-state, though there was some higher intensity work here and there.
So at a quick glance, looking at the full 1hr 40min workout, you might say things looked good.
But it’s important to dive into the different sections. To begin, let’s start with the cross-town journey. Here I’ve taken a few minute snippet out, showing a bit of stop and go. This section also has some nice cobblestones in it.
You’ll notice the two HR chest straps I’m wearing largely agree, some slight differences, but the pretty much match. However, the FR735XT just floats its way through the middle of this mess – never really being right. Just sorta being in the average. Like a lost boat. The Mio Fuse also struggles briefly in one section, briefly locking right back on again. This pattern for all these units was common during the cross-town portions, and is very common to what I’ve seen on the Garmin Elevate sensor while riding outdoors.
Next, let’s look at the steady-state sections. This being where I was on smooth pavement and basically just going round and round the loops. In this case during those steady and even portions the unit tracked my HR spot-on. Simply put: It had enough time to figure out my HR before I changed it. But you can see that sprint mid-way through, in that case it failed to capture that and was significantly delayed there in catching up. It basically missed the show.
And the above graph completely summarizes my experience with the Elevate sensor while outdoors. It’s perfectly fine if you’re doing relatively steady-state intensities (as most triathletes tend to do). But if you’re doing sprints and and lots of short changes of intensity, then it’s not great.
Meanwhile, as I showed during running – it’s largely pretty good, but often struggles briefly at the beginning of runs, and in some cases at very high intensities. Note that in all these cases I waited quite a bit at the start of a run prior to actually running, well past the point in which the sensor said it was locked/ready.
Here’s all my data from the above workouts that you’re welcome to dig through. The charts allow you to look at any of the data seen above, plus plenty more. Do note the ‘notes’ section at the bottom of each analysis page for any items relevant to data for that workout. There are obviously many more below than in the chart snippets I’ve noted above. Some better, some worse, some on par. I tried above to capture the general gist of things. But I include below for those that want to spend time digging around.
FR735XT Data Sets
Date Workout Type Data Type Comparison Link 14-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 15-May Openwater Swim GPS Analyze 17-May Trainer HR Analyze 17-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 18-May Swimming Just pool N/A 19-May Trainer HR Analyze 19-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 21-May Trainer HR Analyze 21-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 22-May Triathlon Race GPS Analyze 24-May Trainer Just one device N/A 25-May Swimming Just pool N/A 26-May Trainer HR Analyze 26-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 27-May Swimming Just pool N/A 28-May Trainer HR Analyze 28-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 29-May Triathlon Race GPS Analyze 31-May Trainer Just one device N/A 4-Jun Cycling GPS/HR Analyze 5-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze 6-Jun Cycling GPS/HR Analyze 8-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze 9-Jun Trainer HR Analyze 9-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze
Note that I use this same set of data below in the next section for the GPS & Barometric altimeter.
(Note: All of the charts in these accuracy sections were created using the DCR Analyzer tool. It allows you to compare power meters/trainers, heart rate, cadence, speed/pace, GPS tracks and plenty more. You can use it as well, more details here.)
GPS & Altimeter Accuracy:
Now that we’ve covered the optical HR sensor’s accuracy, let’s talk about GPS and barometric altimeter accuracy. First we’ll go with GPS.
In the case of the FR735XT it contains a GPS chipset capable of GLONASS. For virtually all of my tests I used it with GLONASS enabled, which assists in increasing the number of satellites available. That helps in situations that might be more challenging. Though, it does come with a 10-20% hit on battery life.
Note that in my accuracy testing I prefer to simply swim/bike/run like normal and see how the watch handles. That means that one day I could be in the woods, another day in the city, and another day in the countryside. I’m taking a multitude of units along on each activity (usually 2-5 additional units), so you can compare them side by side on that day. I prefer this method because I think it’s more realistic than just using a single 400-800m long stretch over and over again.
In most cases, for my FR735XT tests I was also using at the same time a Polar V800, Suunto Ambit3 Peak and a Garmin FR920XT. I’d also occasionally use a Suunto Ambit3 Vertical, Garmin Edge 520, Suunto Traverse, and Garmin FR630.
I’m going to briefly cover some highlights/lowlights of my GPS testing, and then there’s a table that you can dive into and look at the original comparative data all you’d like. You can zoom in, poke around, or even download the original.FIT files and do your own analysis. It’s the same table as above since it’s the same data.
First up let’s look at a 45 minute run from June 5th. Nothing special, just a run down along the river, through a denser building area, and then back again. Technically all of it would be ‘city running’, but this would be pretty easy running. Here’s the high level overview before we dig into some sections.
Things are actually pretty normal across the entire run, though I did want to briefly call out this section here towards the beginning. It’s a few hundred meters long and there’s really nothing blocking satellites. The FR735XT & FR920XT handled it well, while the Ambit3 Peak oddly stumbled quite a bit and went and visited the university.
Though all units briefly struggled in a section in between two tall buildings on a narrow street:
Later on in the run when I hit the buildings, the FR735XT matches the FR920XT and both track reasonably well given the tall buildings and running next to them.
Up until this point I’ve been using the map mode because the contrast is easier for this post. But in reality you should almost always use satellite mode when actually comparing tracks to where something went, as the drawn maps are rarely exactly perfect to real world GPS coordinates. Satellite maps almost always match perfectly. The bridge is a great example of that. All three units correctly captured my position on the bridge, and when I changed sides.
Moving along to another run, here’s my interval run from June 8th. At the high level, things seem pretty good.
But I want to look at how well things did on the loops. Loops are great for testing because assuming you ran the exact track each time, it allows you to see if there’s any GPS drift, or other oddities, as those tracks stick out. In the case of the below, we don’t see any of that from the FR735XT. Its tracks are tightly aligned and thus they pretty much disappear into the multitude of loops (what you want).
Finally, here’s a run from May 14th. I wanted to show this bridge, because it often causes issues for units. Specifically the turn onto the bridge, where units may cut the corner. Here though, the FR735XT handles it perfectly.
I could keep posting screenshots over and over again, but at this point, there’s just not GPS accuracy issues that I’m seeing in the routes I’ve run.
Instead, let’s turn to the GPS altimeter. Now remember the FR735XT doesn’t have a barometric altimeter (which would use air pressure), but rather instead uses a GPS based altimeter. I talk about how that works here. In the vast majority of cases, I’ve seen GPS altimeter accuracy be pretty satisfactory for most users need. But in this case I’ve seen pretty non-awesome performance with the FR735XT for the altimeter.
Keep in mind that normally if you upload to Garmin Connect (or almost any 3rd party platform), then it will automatically correct your elevation data for you. You’ll see that shown on the right side of each activity for example:
But that doesn’t help you mid-activity, if you wanted to look at elevation data then. Take for example this run from May 14th. It’s pretty darn flat, just keep on eye on the scale. Now I like to let watches figure out the initial elevation themselves, just like any other user would. Unless you’re hiking in the mountains and there’s an elevation marker, most of us don’t have those nearby. As a result, each one has slightly different elevation tracks – but they’re all consistent. Except one: The FR735XT. It looks like a drunk 2 year old (it’s in purple).
Here, another theoretically flat run on May 17th, and again, the FR735XT is lost in space. Though, at least unlike the Polar V800 it showed being above ground level.
I started to wonder if the unit was defective. So I brought another FR735XT along with me on this May 19th, now two FR735XT’s! And yet, both are completely nuts. They don’t even match each other.
Or this interval run from earlier this week on June 8th. Seriously, WTF chuck?
Perhaps Garmin can fix this, perhaps not. As I noted earlier, if you don’t use elevation fields during an activity to visually look at, then quite frankly this won’t bug you. But if you do – then this is pretty rough.
Here’s the table of all my activities on the FR735XT. Note that some are indoor activities, so they don’t have GPS data obviously (but do have HR data). Since it’s the same table as in the HR section it’s a mixture of everything. I’ve made it easy to know which is which.
FR735XT Data Sets
Date Workout Type Data Type Comparison Link 14-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 15-May Openwater Swim GPS Analyze 17-May Trainer HR Analyze 17-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 18-May Swimming Just pool N/A 19-May Trainer HR Analyze 19-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 21-May Trainer HR Analyze 21-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 22-May Triathlon Race GPS Analyze 24-May Trainer Just one device N/A 25-May Swimming Just pool N/A 26-May Trainer HR Analyze 26-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 27-May Swimming Just pool N/A 28-May Trainer HR Analyze 28-May Running GPS/HR Analyze 29-May Triathlon Race GPS Analyze 31-May Trainer Just one device N/A 4-Jun Cycling GPS/HR Analyze 5-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze 6-Jun Cycling GPS/HR Analyze 8-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze 9-Jun Trainer HR Analyze 9-Jun Running GPS/HR Analyze
Again, you can download each set’s worth of data after you click on the given link for that set towards the bottom. The sets are well labeled, which should make it easy to understand which devices I’m using.
Smartphone Integration:
The FR735XT integrates with your smartphone, like virtually all fitness watches these days. In the case of the Garmin lineup, it’s compatible with iOS, Android, and Windows smartphone devices. To get started you’ll install the Garmin Connect Mobile app and then pair up the watch via Bluetooth Smart.
The app will automatically sync with your phone in the background via that Bluetooth Smart connectivity. This is a low-power protocol, so there’s negligible battery life impact on your phone or the watch. Note that this is the only time the watch uses Bluetooth Smart, as it doesn’t connect to Bluetooth Smart sensors.
The app will be syncing both your workouts as well as your 24×7 activity data (steps, sleep, continuous HR measurements). It can also be used to send structured workouts to the watch and sync some settings. Lastly, it can also be used for audio cue paces, which allows you to receive pace markers/alerts during your run if you’re wearing headphones connected to your phone. Said differently: The phone is the middleman, the watch can’t directly connect to headphones.
In addition to the sync of activity data, the Bluetooth Smart channel is used for smartphone notifications as well as some Garmin Connect IQ apps/widgets.
For example, when a new text message or notification comes into my phone, the watch will display it instantly. I can go ahead and clear the notification from the watch (and thus my phone), as well as open up the notification to read the whole thing. There’s been some minor improvements here (at least on iOS) that now make this experience a bit cleaner than in the past. You still can’t respond to messages like you can on the Apple Watch, but it’s definitely more improved (for example, it doesn’t usually duplicate-notify you on both devices).
Unlike Fitbit, the Garmin platform allows you to use any smartphone notification that hits your phone’s notification center. So it’s not just texts/calls/calendar alerts, but anything from Snapchat to WhatsApp, Instagram and more.
Overall the smartphone integration piece has worked well for me (on iOS with an iPhone 6), and I’ve pretty much had no issues in that realm. Sync is quick, and most of the times my workout is sync’d to Strava in the background (via Garmin Connect) well before I finish putting away my bike.
Bugs and Quirks:
While the FR735XT is pretty solid, there are definitely a few little quirks. Most are minor, though one or two drive me crazy. Some are technical bugs (i.e., broken things), while others are what the software industry calls ‘by design’, which means I’m going to try and change someone’s mind. Hopefully for your sake, I succeed.
Note that all bugs/thoughts are as of the most current firmware version on June 9th, 2016, which is v3.20. I’ll cross things off down the road if/when they change.
Bug: I’ve seen once where it didn’t pickup my power meter during the bike portion of a triathlon race. Another unit did correctly pick it up, which validates the power meter was transmitting fine. Additionally, after the race the FR735XT then picked it up again. So it just failed to do so during that one leg. I haven’t seen this occur any other time, though one reader has seen it happen once as well.
Bug: Elevation data sucks. I wrote an entire section on this.
Bugish: While GPS-on battery life has definitely exceeded expectations, I don’t think 24×7 mode has. I seem to be getting barely 3-5 days in between charges. And that’s accounting for a roughly 1hr GPS workout each day (some days longer, some days shorter, but that’s a safe average). The spec 24×7 battery is 11 days (assuming no GPS). So it perhaps seems just a touch low to me if I’m getting 3-4 days in some cases, where 5-6 days seems more normal.
Quirk: You can’t broadcast your HR while in an activity. This limits being able to use the function, especially with trainer apps (where the optical HR sensor actually works fairly well |
with more than 4,000 foreign businessmen. He also enlisted Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1971, as one of the company’s main international advisors. Rong facilitated investment by building infrastructure in the free trade zones and helping foreign firms set up operations. Philip Wong, a Hong Kong delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, told the China Daily on October 28: “If not for his [Rong’s] ability and vision in setting up CITIC, the pace of economic development in China would not have been so fast.” By 1992, Rong’s CITIC had become a business empire, involved in shipping, power generation and construction. Today, CITIC has 200 enterprises around the world and total assets of $US6.3 billion. As CITIC developed, so did Rong’s private businesses. In 1979, he sent his son, Larry Rong, to Hong Kong to manage his investments there. In 2005, Larry Rong was named by Forbes magazine as China’s richest man, with a fortune of $1.64 billion.”
Billion with a ‘b’…
“Rong senior also played a key role in the further opening up of the Chinese economy after the suppression of the anti-government protests in May and June of 1989. Deng Xiaoping justified the massacre of workers and students in Tiananmen Square on the grounds that it was necessary to defend the ‘socialist system’. In reality, it was aimed at crushing the opposition of the working class to the impact of the regime’s free market policies.”
‘Free market’, yes, an interesting little bit of propaganda snuck in there.
“In 1993, Rong was promoted to Vice President of China, as a symbol of Beijing’s determination to accelerate “market reform”. As the obituary to Rong in the British Financial Times noted: “The post was mainly ceremonial, but it sent a clear message: China’s new blend of communist politics and market economics was here to stay. And it was the ‘Red Capitalist’ who had shown the way.” The same year, China received $111 billion of contracted foreign direct investment—nearly four times the amount that had been invested in the entire 10-year period from 1979 to 1989.” (Source: The death of China’s “red capitalist” and the 1949 revolution | Time Reference: 38:52)
A very interesting character and you will notice the little bits of propaganda and the little bits of the narrative that are already being inserted into this, in very, very subtle but very powerful ways. For example it’s the free-trade, it’s the capitalist aspects of this CITIC and these types of organizations that are to blame for the incredible oppression and political oppression that we saw at Tiananmen Square and that we’ve seen in various other contexts from Beijing, that’s somehow to do with the free market system with capitalism, because of course when we’re talking about these Eight Immortals and their progeny controlling hundreds of billions – trillions of dollars ultimately if we include the Chinese reserves – in all of these various corporations – the state-controlled corporations – this is somehow free-market, this is somehow the example of capitalism.
So you’ll see the way that certain pieces of the narrative are inserted here to try to create false paradigms, that are again at that two-dimensional stage, it’s ‘capitalism versus socialism’ and they butt heads and ‘oh look what results’. And there are other aspects of this that I think are worth highlighting, for example when Heinz Kissinger himself poses something that I think is also becoming another ‘idea’ that is pushed in this ‘China versus the US’ narrative, which is that ‘Well, you know, when you think about militarily from the perspective of empire, the Chinese are kind of the good guys.’.
HENRY KISSINGER: “The Chinese believe in the superiority of their culture, the uniqueness of their culture, and they are delighted and proud if you respect it. But there’s no way you can become a Chinese. If you are not part of the Chinese culture, born into the Chinese culture, you can not become one, so it’s hard to imagine Chinese armies intervening somewhere to make Chinese culture (inaudible) Chinese governing principles. That is not a Chinese way of thinking. The Chinese way of thinking is that the majesty of the Chinese conduct and the achievements of Chinese society will inspire respect which leads to a cooperative action, but it’s not one that they have historically attempted to bring about by military force. They’ll use military force if they feel themselves threatened, and ruthlessly, but it’s hard for me to visualize a Chinese military strategy designed to back up a Chinese World Government, even in the name of universal peace.” (Source: CSIS Special Book Discussion: “On China,” with Henry Kissinger | Time Reference: 42:56)
And so here’s the narrative that becomes kind of the counter-narrative to the mainstream narrative which is propagated in the West, which of course is that the US and NATO are the ‘good guys’ in this Cold War scenario. Well of course there has to be a counter-narrative – an alternative narrative – that is subtly injected into the conversation by people like Kissinger, who have been intimately involved with the creation of this ‘Red Capitalist’ system since it’s inception, as we’ve already detailed in various ways and which we will continue to detail, but he gets to insert certain things that become part of the counter-narrative as well ‘Oh well China – they don’t go out and militarily invade other countries, they’re the ‘good’ side of the New World Order’ and I so I think that’s another thing that we and the alternative media really have to be careful about, is ‘What counter-narratives are we propagating and are they truly counter to the system that is being established, are they truly counter to the megabillionaire financial elite interests that are puppeteering this butting of heads of the capitalist and socialist system?’.
Well let’s continue,what specifically resulted from these increasing ties through organizations like CITIC which very attentive listeners of this podcast will remember from our examination of the Power Corporation and the Demaree family in Canada (Time reference 46:00), which managed to get an interest in and ultimately sat on the board of CITIC Pacific which was a Hong Kong subsidiary of CITIC which is the same CITIC which was Rong Yiren working with Rockefeller and everyone at Chase Manhattan and the 300 US corporations to establish this US-China tie.
So again the layers are so deep, there are so many different facets to this story, but they interlock and they are fascinating when you start going down this rabbit hole. Let’s take a look at some more specific examples of what actually eventuated from this, and in order to do that we can look, for example, at even what is bragged about openly by the Beijing government itself. Literally the government of Beijing specifically which has a post on their website eBeijingGov.cn, ‘Fortune 500: Important engine driving Beijing’s CBD economic development’ (Time reference – 46:46)
And there are copious notes with links to all of the documents that we’re talking about so that you can start to piece the pieces of this very interesting puzzle together for yourself.
But let’s turn to again this Fortune 500 ‘Important engine driving Beijing’s CBD economic development” on the Beijing government website which notes that there has been an exceptional increase in Fortune 500 investment in China over the past decades and then in the 1990s we have the Fortune 500 enterprises setting up investment companies in Beijing, and it goes through the history of that and then after 2000 they set up regional headquarters in Beijing.
So you’re getting the idea, we have the gradual build-up of the financial, the economic, the productive, even the investment capacity of foreign Fortune 500, which we should read as ‘The Corporate Member’s Roster of the Council On Foreign Relations’ for example, that’s all interlocking. It’s growing steadily throughout the 1970s, the ‘opening up’ in the 1980s and 1990s and then the 2000-to-present region.
So we, of course, are looking at China generally from 2000 on, with its remarkable 10-15 percent GDP growth rate, just it’s blistering pace of economic growth over the past decade, and as if that sprang out of nowhere and was not the concerted and and deliberate product of a very regimented agenda that has been at work for decades now and that has been rigorously planned out from behind the scenes by the crony capitalists and ‘The ‘Immortals’ in China and their progeny.
So again, there’s an interesting little graph that shows some of the examples, for example just charting the progress of various Fortune 500 enterprises, at the beginning of the opening up in the 1970s:
“HP and Matsushita set up offices in 1979 in the neighborhood of the Beijing embassy; HP China Ltd was established in Beijing in 1985 and Beijing Matsushita Color CRT Company Ltd was established in ’87; HP China Investment Company was established in 1995 and Matsushita China Ltd. in 1994; HP bought HP Building in Beijing CBD in 1998 and moved several branches to the building; In 2002 Matsushita Ltd was transferred to a regional headquarters.”
So, again we get the sense there is this buildup and there’s just a couple of examples of some of the companies that are involved in this, but there are many, many, many more, as detailed in an article that I wrote earlier this year and it’s available on corbettreport.com, of course again a link in the show notes, to an article I wrote called ‘The Great Decoupling: How the West is Engineering its Own Downfall‘. (Time Reference 49:56)
Again more about this idea of this sort of phony Cold War and how it’s being used for political purposes to engineer a new world order, a one-world system, which notes quote:
The Chinese industrial juggernaut did not just spring up overnight; the infrastructure for China’s economic marvel of the last decade was laid in the decade before. In the seven years from 1994 to 2001 alone, direct investment of US-based multinational corporations in China quadrupled from $2.6 billion to $10.5 billion.
In the same period, China rose from the 30th-largest target of US R&D investment to the 11th on the back of a doubling of US affiliates in the country. The list of companies that started major R&D activities or facilities in China in the 1990s reads like a ‘Who’s who?’ of the CFR-nested Fortune 500 set: DuPont, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Motorola, and Rohm and Haas all had a significant stake in China by the beginning of the 21st century.
…and then the economic boom suddenly springs out of nowhere, right?
An interesting part of all of this is the fact that it was, of course, framed as ‘the offshoring of productive capacity’, of course we’re using China for their cheap labor, that’s why all these companies went to China. But the part of this that doesn’t make sense is the incredible boom in R&D (research and development) funding that began in the 1990s and continued through the 2000s period. Why was there all this investment in R&D in China? That’s different from the productive sort of menial labor which one can understand, you’re going to pay basically slave labor to do menial tasks, like Foxconn or whatever, but why R&D specifically, outsourcing that to China? And there’s an interesting report that I uncovered that deals with this problem specifically, ‘Drivers of Foreign Investment in China and the new R&D Models‘ from uta.edu, and that’s a fascinating report for a lot of different ways including the way that it tries to deal with that idea – why were these foreign companies suddenly investing in R&D in China, and it concludes for example:
“As can be seen, a great deal of research has focused on China and how global companies have moved much of their production capability to that country. However, this research has overlooked the growing amount of Research and Development that these same firms have undertaken in China. In fact, China has seen the development of new models of R&D by foreign corporations.
So again this R&D investment did not spring out of nowhere, it was again a part of a coordinated agenda that involved some of the largest corporations on the planet, and this report also lists some of the countries that heavily invested in R&D in the 1990s, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, IBM, Microsoft, GM, Samsung, Nortel, GE, JVC, Intel, P&G, DuPont, Ericsson, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Lucent, Bell and AT&T to name a few, all have R&D facilities in China. Microsoft for instance invested a hundred and thirty million dollars to establish its research institute Microsoft Asian Technology Center in China. Motorola established 18 R&D centers in China by the end of 2000. This included an initial 300 million dollar investment and 1060 research personnel, etcetera, etcetera.” (Source: Drivers of Foreign Investment in China and the New R&D Models | Time Reference: 51:46)
Again, this economic marvel of China over the past decade did not spring out of nowhere. It is the end result of what has been happening for decades, as part of agreements that were reached decades before that, so we have to understand this deeper level of what’s going on to understand what’s happening at the surface level, and that I think gives further bolstering to our argument, that what’s happening is not the 2D surface reality of nation states pitted against each other but the 3D hierarchical reality of the ‘super gophers’ at the top, puppeteering the system whereby they can play nation states against each other to create a global governmental system that will ultimately be this merger of capitalism and socialism, this ‘Red Capitalism’ or whatever they want to call it–of course it will not be called ‘Red Capitalism’, it will not be called anything like that–but we’re seeing the merger of these systems in various ways. But again there’s so much to be said here.
Well let’s talk about another key aspect of what Antony C Sutton talked about when he was talking about the Western backing of the Bolsheviks or the Nazis. It was not just financial support, it was not just the development of industry it was also technology transfers. In fact that was the specific focus of Sutton’s early work at the Hoover Institute, the technological transfers that enabled the rise of the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower from its basically feudal society before the Bolsheviks took over, and in that regard it was Sutton’s argument that without the US technological transfer and technological support, the Bolsheviks couldn’t have accomplished what they ultimately did, and similarly the Nazis couldn’t have built up their war machine without the synthetic oil that was provided under specific agreements that Standard Oil had with their German counterparts to provide the technology to create the synthetic oil that fueled the German Nazi war machine that again could not have functioned without that.
So is there technology transfer going on in China? The short answer is yes. There are technology transfers from the West to China that have enabled certain specific military capabilities that the Chinese now have. The question is how deep does this go and how many layers there are.
I will provide just one layer–because this is already a huge investigation and it’s only going to expand in scope from here–but a fascinating one that developed in the 1990s, which was a series of stories about basically the transfer of nuclear technologies – technologies that helped aid China’s space program, its missile technologies, its nuclear technologies – including the transfer of microchips and things that happened in the Clinton administration so it was framed in that left/right debate, as if this was some sort of leftist agenda as opposed to, again, the Bushes supporting the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Clintons supporting with technology transfers. It’s left, right, blue, red, fork, spoon, it makes no difference, the agenda is the same and it’s being forwarded by the Rockefellers and the Kissingers and people on that level, not the political puppets who are paraded in front of us as the shadows on Plato’s cave wall.
Let’s take a look at this in more detail, this story, and we can get this from first of all, a good place to go would be the official report ‘U.S. Commercial Technology Transfers to the Peoples Republic of China‘ from ‘The Bureau of Export Administration Office of Strategic Industry and Economic Security Defense Market Research Report’, which is a fascinating report about how this technology transfer occurred, the executive summary of which reads:
“The phenomenal economic growth witnessed in China since Deng Xiaoping first declared China’s “A Open Door” policy in 1978 has led many to predict China’s certain emergence as an economic superpower in the early 21st Century. Indeed, China has followed a structured path toward gradual market reform of its still largely state-owned industrial sector, which has been transfused with increasing amounts of foreign capital and technology. There have been numerous reports over the last several years, however, of US companies being “forced” to transfer technology to China in exchange for access to this enormous market. The purpose of his study is to assess the extent to which US commercial technology is being, in effect, “coerced” from US companies engaged in normal business practices and joint ventures in China in exchange for access to China’s markets. The cumulative effect these transfers may have on China’s efforts to modernize its economy as well as its industrial and military base is also examined. Finally, this study addresses the impact of US technology transfers to China on the issues of long-term US global competitiveness and broad economic and national security interests. …Although it is not possible to make a clear determination of the US national security implications of commercial US technology transfers to China, the continuation of the trends identified in this study could pose long-term challenges to US national security interests. This study does not identify any specific Chinese military advances made as a result of US commercial technology transfers, but does suggest that continued pressures on foreign high-tech firms to transfer advanced commercial technologies, if successful, could indirectly benefit China’s efforts to modernize its military.” (Source: U.S. Commercial Technology Transfers to the People’s Republic of China | Time Reference: 56:38)
This report was written in 1999. So before the Chinese economic juggernaut got underway in earnest it was already well known that these corporations–which were flocking to China to set up their R&D centers and to move and set up their corporate headquarters and all of these other major investments that were taking place–were being done on agreement that this would include technology transfers to the People’s Republic of China, that maybe could be used to build up China’s military base and now, lo-and-behold, wouldn’t you know it, China is modernizing its military at an exceptionally rapid pace with aircraft carriers coming online, the latest aircraft carrier killer missiles that they’ve developed, the drones technology that now is fast approaching that of the United States.
Again it’s a military juggernaut that’s still in the process of building up, but it is being built up, and how so. Again this type of report gives us a window into a process, a process that again could not take place without the active support of the very financial and corporate oligarchy that has been wedded to the Chinese ‘Immortals’ and the Chinese regime that’s been in place at least since the death of Mao.
Fascinating stuff I hope you will agree. Some more specifics we can get on for example the Chinese military missile allegations – the allegations of specific technology transfers regarding missile technologies – there’s a Washington Post series of articles from the 1990’s (Time Reference: 1:00:10) on this that I’ll throw a link into. It’s an interesting compendium of dozens of reports that were compiled and filed in the 1998 time period. I have a report ‘China Possible Military Technology Transfers from US Satellite Export Policy Actions in Chronology‘ (Time Reference: 1:00:25) from au.af.mil. US, this is interesting one, ‘Bush’s Brother Has Contract to Help Chinese Chip Maker‘ (Time Reference: 1:00:37), talking about Bush’s younger brother Neil and his intimate ties to a Chinese chip maker and the brouhaha that caused for George W who was in power at the time. Also it was Neil Bush who, also just a couple of years ago made headlines for this: ‘Neil Bush Communist Photo Makes A Scene On Chinese Social Media Site Weibo‘ (Time Reference: 1:01:01) and it’s Neil Bush wearing Communist Chinese regalia saying “Am I doing it right?” basically. You know, it’s all funny, it’s all fun and games to these people.
That again is just the taste of the idea of what we’re really trying to drill down to which is the specifics that Antony Sutton drew out in the Soviet or Nazi paradigms. We want to construct the same case for what’s happening with Communist China because again, this is about the creation of the One World Governmental system and that cannot take place without:
A) the nation-state systems warring and ruining each other and ‘oh please save us, oh luckily there’s this model, this structure, that’s already been put in place that can come and save us, some sort of UN-type structure that will function like the Red Capitalists of China or something of that sort and
B) this also cannot take place without the active cooperation and the financial, the corporate infrastructure that has been carefully laid out for decades now in agreements between people like Rong Yiren and CITIC and those types of groups, with such things as the US-China Business Council and other extremely fascinatingly interesting groups.
Now as you can imagine, just sorting today’s episode out into what I’ve presented so far has been a mind-boggling event and I’ve had to leave out all sorts of different things that would have sent us in different directions. This podcast could probably be split into ten different podcasts, a series, and I suppose it will be, and that’s what I’m going to call on all of you out there now to help engage in this task – of following these different cookie-crumb trails and going down the various rabbit holes and digging up what you can find.
I’m calling on the Corbett Report members, the community that is developing at the Corbett Report Open Source Intelligence News Community to help assemble some of these facts and:
– Get some of these names,
– Follow some of these leads,
– Follow the careers of some of these characters,
– Follow the various dealings that they’ve done.
…to help flesh out this picture that we’re painting here because it is an exceptionally important one, that tells a very different story to what we’re being asked to believe – that there is a US-China rivalry and that there’s going to be some war because they’re so at each others throats. That is taking place at the surface level but there is a much deeper level of what’s taking place in the third dimension that is much more important in the overall game plan.
Do not get caught up in choosing sides as if choosing a nation state or a NATO vs. Shanghai Cooperation Organization or one of these phony controlled organizations is going to make a difference. At the end it’s a dialectic and it’s going to smash these two seemingly opposed systems into each other and what’s going to result is going to be horrific on the scale of what Chairman Mao instituted in his ‘Great Leap Forward’.
So, it couldn’t be more important with what’s happening right now and I think this is the perspective from which we have to view such things as what’s going on in Hong Kong right now, where people are upset at the Beijing government. Now there is all sorts of manipulations that happen and things that are taking place in the two-dimensional nation state system version of NED?? and all of these usual players getting involved in this conflict, but this is part of the conflict that is planned. We have to see it at a deeper level and support the people against these various government and corporate manipulations that have been designed and are taking place.
So this is the level of analysis that we have to get into if you really want to understand what’s taking place with China in this current day and age and this is where I’m going to call on you for help.
I have some various things that are just suggested starting points, obviously take this anyway you want but here are some suggested starting points for where we need to go from here.
First we need more information on technology transfers. You could start using some of the articles that I’ve cited, you can look for your own, but I want more specifics about technology transfers that have taken place from the west to China that have enabled, specifically Chinese military technology I find that interesting, but also the Chinese cyber capabilities – the fact that they have the most controlled internet on the planet – which again is a very complicated thing to do and something that I don’t think could have been done without the active support and collusion of technology companies for example. So there’s some starting points for the investigation.
I want to find out more about the financial interlocks between specific Fortune 500 corporations and the ‘Red Capitalists’, and in that regard I think it would be extremely important to follow up on that Bloomberg article and the eight ‘Immortals’ – those eight families and their descendants – and where they’ve gone and how they populate and connect with other people.
There’s an interesting article I saw that connects so many of these different characters that it was a bit mind-boggling to even glance through, that I’ll include in the show notes at this precise time index so you can go and find that article and start sorting through some of those leads.
I want to look at specific organizations like, not only the WTO and IMF and other organizations that China’s a part of that are clearly part of this global governmental order, but some others that are less scrutinized but I think no less important, like the US China Business Council (Time Reference: 1:06:16) which changed its name to the National Council for US China Trade.
It still exists today, it was set up 40 years ago. In my preliminary research for this podcast I could find barely any information about the historical founding of this group and who was actually its board members and when it was founded and who specifically founded it and in what way, anything to do with the history of this group. I know that a Rockefeller has been an adviser to this group. I know Kissinger has been lauded and given awards by this group (Time Reference: 1:06:47)
But specifically there have been allegations that I’ve read that this group was founded by the likes of Rockefeller and Kissinger. If there is more information on that, more solid leads that we can take this to that would be great.
How about thinking about this in terms of global monetary order which is going to come out of this merging of the systems? And in that regard we can look at the interlock between the Bank for International Settlements – the Central Bank of central banks – identified by Carol Quigley as the absolute apex of the financial pyramid, and the PBOC – the People’s Bank of China, and I’ll throw in some links to some various articles that I think are interesting with regards to, for example, some sort of symposium that took place recently, the People’s Bank of China BIS Research Conference (Time Reference: 1:07:35) that I think will be interesting, as well as some comments that have been made in recent years by various PBOC officials about how basically what is needed is to add the Yuan to the IMF currency basket (Time Reference: 1:07:50) for the Special Drawing Rights – the SDR – which many people speculate is the instrument that is going to take over the US dollar as the world reserve currency. Some interesting leads.
Again I’ll throw those links in the show notes so you can follow through with that.
A fascinating looking debate that I haven’t had the chance to watch yet. Again I would love to have the time to have watched this but we’ve got to put this podcast up at some point, so it was a Munk Debate which takes place in Canada. It’s always an interesting debate from a propaganda perspective, you have to look through the propaganda but it’s interesting, and this debate was ‘Will the 21st century belong to China?‘ (Time Reference: 1:08:28). On the pro side: Niall Ferguson and David Daokui Li. On the con side: Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria, so a CFR-Bilderberg-globalist-Super-gopher tag team there. And they ended up winning the debate, incidentally, making the argument that China will not be the power of the 21st century. Make of that what you will.
(Alternative Source: ‘Does The 21st Century Belong To China? – ebook)
So all of those leads, again there are so many more than we can take, this is obviously just the first report in what will be an ongoing research investigation into this. I don’t know what form it will take – more podcasts, more interviews, more articles, I’m sure will result from all of this research. But it is up to you guys out there, please help me out in this, compile the links if you are a Corbett Report member, please sign in to the website and leave your comments on this post so that we can start compiling this research into a more fleshed-out, detailed schematic of what we are talking about.
Again I hope I’ve placed some of these pieces on the board in a way that the picture comes into view and that you see that this is a system that’s being puppeteered in a three-dimensional reality not the 2D nation state system fight that we’re being asked to believe that it is.
I will leave you on one final note, again going back to Antony C Sutton who wrote in 1984 in America’s Secret Establishment: “By about the year 2000 communist China will be a super-power built by American technology and skill.”
How did Antony C Sutton know that? Was he clairvoyant? Was he a psychic? Could he read the future? Was he informed about history? Was he in effect an armchair quarterback, who, like any good armchair quarterback knows the opposing team’s playbook so well that he can reliably predict their plays.
We will leave you there for today…I hope I’ve left you a lot to chew on so Corbett Report members please start contributing in this Open Source investigation of China and the New World Order.
Once again I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com, looking forward very much to talking to you again in the very near future. Thank you for your time.
(Outro Music: Applying to join the Chinese Communist Party – music video | Time Reference: 1:11:15)
Filed in: ArticlesMIEV – a proposal for next-generation electric vehicles that utilizes to maximum effect the environmental technology Mitsubishi Motors has developed over the years. The offspring of a marriage between such environmental technology and Mitsubishi Motors’ sporty characteristics, Lancer Evolution MIEV delivers a totally new experience in driving pleasure.
Lancer Evolution MIEV derives from the Lancer Evolution IX. Utilizing the advantages offered by the electric powertrain to craft smooth and slippery, low-drag body lines, the styling imparts an aggressive wind-cleaving look to the body. Riding on large wheels and tires, Lancer Evolution MIEV projects a tempting taste of its potent new-age sport driving potential.
The wheels are driven by four outer-rotor in-wheel motors. Requiring no speed reducer, these high-efficiency direct drive motors fit neatly into the 20-inch wheels. Each in-wheel motor produces 50 kW of power and 518 Nm torque. With a motor in each wheel, this brings maximum output up to 268.2 bhp (200 kw). And because this drive system allows precise regulation of power at each individual wheel, it opens the door to creating a vehicle dynamics control system in its ultimate evolutionary form – one that could be dubbed Super All Wheel Control (S-AWC).
The in-wheel motors and the lithium-ion battery system, which is located under the floor to reduce the center of gravity, accelerate Lancer Evolution MIEV from 0 km/h to 100 km/h in less than 8 seconds and up to a maximum speed of 180 km/h. This is a level of motive performance that leaves today’s EV’s standing.
The foremost feature of the in-wheel motor is that it allows drive torque and braking force to be regulated with high precision on an individual wheel basis without requiring transmission, drive shafts, differential gears or other complex and heavy components. Housing the drive system in the wheels also gives greater freedom in designing the layout. This will facilitate the conversion of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles into hybrid vehicles without requiring the introduction of complex hybrid power systems. It will also make it easier to provide room for space-consuming components such as fuel cell stacks and hydrogen tanks in fuel cell vehicles. The space-saving benefits of the in-wheel motor also offer exciting possibilities in terms of body design.
The major shortcoming of the EV to date has been its limited cruising range. This is now well on the way to being overcome with recent improvements in battery performance. MIEV uses a lithium-ion storage cell for its main power source, this offers advantages in terms of energy density and life over other types of secondary or rechargeable battery.
Story by MitsubishiSunday, May 5, 2013
MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University scientists helped discover new details about an intricate process in cells. Their finding may advance treatments for cancer and neurological diseases.
Kansas State University researchers Jeroen Roelofs, assistant professor, and Chingakham Ranjit Singh, research assistant professor -- both in the Division of Biology -- led part of the study. Both also are research affiliates with the university's Johnson Cancer Research Center. They worked with colleagues at Harvard Medical School, the University of California-San Francisco and the University of Kansas. The scientific journal Nature recently published the team's observations, titled "Reconfiguration of the proteasome during chaperone-mediated assembly."
The research focused on proteasomes, protein complexes inside the cells of humans and other organisms that help keep the cells healthy.
"The proteasome is a large, molecular machine in the cell that degrades other proteins," Roelofs said. "It's important for protein quality control as well as for the cell's ability quickly remove specific proteins, thereby ensuring the cell's health and proper function."
The goal was to better understand how the various particles inside proteasomes work together to make the proteasomes function -- think the gears and components needed, and in what order, to build a working machine. Scientists believe that disruption of two key particles -- and consequently a proteasome's ability to work correctly -- has implications for cancers as well as various neurological degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.
The Nature study built on research that Roelofs made as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in 2009. He found that proteins called chaperones play a key role in the assembly process of two particles that when connected, gives proteasomes the ability to scrub unwanted proteins from cells. Chaperones act as a foreman for the two particles.
One of the findings in the new study is that in addition to acting as a molecular foreman for the two particles, chaperones also control when those two particles come together. Similarly, the scientists found more about the two particles.
The core particle has seven pockets while the regulatory particle has six tails that tuck into those pockets. When docked together, they turn on the proteasome's functionality.
"In the assembly process there is only one tail that actually determines how the core particle and regulatory particle bind together," Roelofs said. "That's surprising because there are six tails, but only one is needed to give specificity, and the docking into the pocket is controlled by the chaperone."
Roelofs believes that the findings may reveal new targets for anticancer drugs, as a chaperone in the human genes is involved in liver cancer. The proteasome inhibitor Bortezomib is used in the treatment of current cancers. Additionally, the information may advance cancer and neurological research by giving scientists new pathways to study and manipulate.
"This is pretty basic research," Roelofs said. "Understanding the basic mechanics can often lead to new pathways for improvement, which is essential when it comes to human health."
Scientists made the findings through a combination of techniques, including Cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, yeast genetics, biochemical reconstitution assays and proteasome activity measurements. These techniques helped researchers observe the submicroscopic tails and complex tail-to-pocket binding process, as well as study the role of the chaperones in the core and regulatory particle process.
The study was largely funded by the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence Protein Structure and Function, or COBRE-psf, support center at the University of Kansas -- a multidisciplinary, biomedical research program funded by the National Institute of Health; the Johnson Cancer Research Center at Kansas State University; and the Kansas IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, or K-INBRE.Introduction
I have decided, after mulling over it for some years now, to discontinue identifying myself with what has come to be called the federal vision. It used to be that when I was asked if I held to the federal vision, I would say something like “yes, if by that you mean...” Now my intention will be to simply say no. I don’t.
This obviously requires explanation, which I hope to provide here. This post is simply an attempt at a more careful qualification of terms, but must itself be carefully qualified. Most of all, I am trying to find a spot where all appropriate qualifications will be heard—by all parties.
In what follows, I will offer observations about what this means, and in addition to that, I will try to add some careful statements on what it does not mean.
It is never possible to say everything that needs to be said at one time, but on the essentials of this particular issue I hope to attempt it here. But every part of this needs to be balanced by the rest, and so I would ask everyone who reads part of this to make sure they read the whole thing. A part of this post taken as the whole would be grossly misleading. Follow up questions are to be expected, but I hope to make the general point clear.
First, what do I intend to attempt? The first part of this consists of a set of retractions, not to mention an important sense in which I need to seek forgiveness. The second half concerns that which does not need to be retracted at all. I am trying to disentangle some old confusions, but I do not wish to entangle some new ones.
The Reason for Retractions
When I first became a Calvinist, back in 1988 |
the midst of the civil and proxy war in northern Syria.[9] In the U.S., as Bookchin often urged the Greens to do in the 1980s and 1990s, we can run for municipal office on a program that includes the rewriting of municipal charters to place political power in the hands of the citizens assembled in neighborhood or town meetings and aims to link up these democratized municipalities in confederations to coordinate public affairs across regions from the bottom up. Bookchin summarized this program with the slogan, “Democratize Our Republic and Radicalize Our Democracy.”[10]
When Pelz cites the Paris Commune, I assume he is referring to its radically democratic structure of a city council composed of mandated and recallable delegates of the people in their neighborhood assemblies. The Paris Commune appealed across France for a “Commune of Communes,” a confederation of radically democratic municipalities. I would argue that an independent left that can go beyond Social Democracy should make this democratization and confederation of local governments a central component of its program along with social, economic, environmental, and anti-imperialist demands. If we are going to replace the capitalist state with a real democracy, we need to build it from the bottom up as we gain power from the bottom up. We will need to build this radically democratic and federated power starting at the local level in order to build the mass participation, institutional power, and experience needed to replace the national state and global corporations with a truly democratic socialism. |P
Mark Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.
Mark Lause, The Civil War's Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor Party & the Politics of Race & Class (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001).
Arthur Lipow, “Direct Democracy and Progressive Reform,” in Arthur Lipow, Political Parties and Democracy (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1996).
Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, New York State Legislature, “Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It,” April 24, 1920: 510.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don't Vote (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 47 (New York: Progress Publishers, 1995), 532.
Howie Hawkins (ed.), Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket, 2006), 23–26.
Thanks to Bill Fletcher for making these points about isolationism vs. internationalism on the left today and in the 1930s during a recent discussion about the crisis in Syria.
Martin O'Beirne, “Ecosocialism Against ISIS–A Salute to Murray Bookchin,” available online at <http://www.kurdishquestion.com/oldsite/index.php/insight-research/ecosocialism-against-isis-a-salute-to-murray-bookchin/1267-ecosocialism-against-isis-a-salute-to-murray-bookchin.html>.
Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (New York: Verso, 2015).
Like this: Like Loading...Image copyright Beano studios Image caption Dennis the Menace has been given a 21st Century makeover for the new series
Dennis The Menace will receive a CGI makeover for a new CBBC series which will air from next year.
The character's faithful dog Gnasher will also appear in the series called Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed.
The 52-part series of 11-minute episodes will see the 10-year-old Dennis given a 21st Century makeover.
The first pictures of the new series to be released show Dennis in his trademark outfit and spiky hair, but without his catapult.
Image copyright Beano studios Image caption The characters have had a modern makeover for their latest outing
Emma Scott, chief executive of Beano Studios, said the new series "will see us bring Dennis to life and bang up to date in CGI for the next generation of Beano fans".
Previous BBC TV series starring Dennis and Gnasher, the last of which aired in 2013, showed the pair only in cartoon animation form.
Cheryl Taylor, controller of CBBC, said: "Dennis and Gnasher have been unleashing their own particular brand of mischief on CBBC for many years.
"Their ardent fans will be delighted by this wonderful new series from two of the UK's most notorious rascals."
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.SACRAMENTO — Anyone who spends time with Gov. Jerry Brown is familiar with his penchant for referring to philosophers, Latin or an obscure tome he has recently read, often in the same sentence. A speaker who uses what he deems an imprecise word should be prepared to listen to a soliloquy on its meaning.
Do not expect his wife to do the same.
Anne Gust Brown, petite and polished, speaks with the directness of someone who has little patience for theoretical colloquiums. She is the first person to whom advisers turn if they need to anticipate the long list of questions the governor is likely to pepper them with. After more than 20 years as his partner — and nearly a decade as his top aide — she is one of the few people who can predict his often unpredictable thinking. And she is the one most likely to tell the governor it is time to end the Socratic seminar and make a decision.
“I would say sometimes he’s exhausting,” Ms. Gust Brown said in a courtyard just outside the governor’s office. “Sometimes I have to foist him onto other people and say, you go talk to someone else about that, because he has a sort of insatiable appetite about these things.”
From the first day her husband, a Democrat, began his third term as governor in 2011, Ms. Gust Brown has occupied an office just around the corner from his. And as he decides whether to run for re-election next year — as many expect he will — no one’s counsel will be more highly valued than hers.Another way Facebook may have facilitated Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
AFP_HS7OU
Russian Facebook accounts attempted to organize more than a dozen Florida Trump rallies during the election, the Daily Beast reported Wednesday:
The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists—brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.
The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.
The Beast reports that the Florida events were put on by a Facebook page called “Being Patriotic,” which had 200,000 followers before being shut down last month, and a Twitter account called @march_for_trump. The “Being Patriotic” Facebook page was shut down at around the same time Facebook revoked multiple accounts being run by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm American intelligence agencies have linked to an ally of Vladimir Putin.
The news comes after the revelation two weeks ago that Facebook also facilitated $100,000 in Russian-funded political advertising targeted at U.S. voters in the run-up to the election.
Donald Trump won 49 percent of the vote in Florida, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 47.8 percent.Lurking on cheezeburger I find a post discussing how King Sombra and Princess Platinum could might have been related on the basis that:
-They reigned ~1000 years ago
-King Sombra and Princess Platinum are both unicorns
-Both likes shiny things (crystals)
-Her people left behind a cold barren wasteland in search of greener pastures... or just green in general at the time.
-Her cloak has some semblance to King Sombra's
Now, while this all sounds fine and dandy there's also:
-Princess Wet Platinum leads the unicorns, not crystal ponies. In fact crystal ponies don't even have horns or wings. Either Sombra marauded a second kingdom or something freaky happened over the last 1000 years
-1000 years seems like a staple in the Equestrian timeline. It's like Princess Celestia got high and wrote history books replacing every missing date with "a thousand years ago". When did I banish Nightmare Moon to the moon? A thousand years ago. When did Discord turn into a stone? Uh... I'm going to say a thousand years ago. Hm... did Twilight move to Ponyville two months ago or three months? Oh well, I'll just say she arrived a thousand years ago.
-King Sombra can terraform harder than 1000 Minecraft guys at once and Princess Platinum can't. I actually meant 40 Minecraft guys, but a thousand sounds cooler.HellRaisers have announced that Bence "DeadFox" Böröcz has joined the team on trial.
The Hungarian player will fill in for Sergey "smike" Sklyarenko, who had been playing for the team as a stand-in since August following the departure of star member Tomáš "oskar" Šťastný to mousesports.
The decision follows HellRaisers' disappointing run at the SL i-League StarSeries Season 2 finals, where they finished at the bottom of their group following defeats against Ninjas in Pyjamas and dignitas.
DeadFox to play for HellRaisers
Bence "DeadFox" Böröcz's biggest achievement to date is a semi-final appearance at the Europe Minor Championship, in January, with PixelFire, with the players later joining forces with Escape Gaming before eventually calling time on the team.
"We practiced a lot and tried to win every single match we played, but we realised that Sergey needs much more time to handle communication in English," HellRaisers coach Ivan "Johnta" Shevcov said. "When it comes to important matches, decisions and communication must be exected quickly and clearly - the outcome of every round depends on that. And it is especially difficult to do that in a language that is not your own. "We decided to say goodbye to him and give a chance to another player who had been playing on an international team for a year."
DeadFox will make his first appearance for HellRaisers on Thursday as the team will face Astralis in the ESL Pro League.
HellRaisers currently have the following team:I attended the 5th annual P.U.N.K. Fest on Saturday, May 25th at the Keith Anderson Community Center in Orono. Punks United by Nintendo Kontest Festival, is an annual event that draws tons of people from around Maine and New England every year for punk, hardcore and classic video games. This post is a little late as I am still having a hard time to put all of what I witnessed into words.
With over 20 bands from around New England and some as far as Washington D.C. it was a long and eventful day. I was amazed at to see such unity between the punks and the hardcore kids. The labels are being peeled of and it was a refreshing sight. I grew up going to punk shows in the Bangor area and can remember feeling very tense when the two crowds showed up at a show. That feeling was replaced by a feeling of community.
With to many bands to talk about I’ve made a very difficult decision to focus on two Maine bands that really stuck out to me.
Late Night Disaster
LND is a fast and fun 4-piece punk rock band from Saco, Maine. The band sights Green Day, Sham 69, the White Stripes and Queens of the Stone Age as their influences and you can truly hear the variety within their sound.
The band’s two singers Dylan and Matt are constantly working the crowd starting hand claps, hopping and sing-alongs. They’ve got a lot of talent and it’ll be interesting to see what they’ll accomplish. The Yessah Posse will be keeping their eyes and ears on them.
Do Your Worst
DYW is a hardcore band from Bangor, Maine. This band got the whole crowd moving. As soon as a break down began the crowd showed no hesitation and began running back and forth clearing the floor for floor punches and stomping.
I don’t have much more to say. Hard, fast, heavy and fucking awesome.
So to sum things up, P.U.N.K. Fest 5 was crazy and I’m looking forward to the 6th. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t mention all of the other amazing bands!
Posted by Derek Cole
Late Night Disaster
Do Your Worst
From Away:
Rat Trap
Rodent Lord
Walk the Plank‘Ali raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu came home one day from a journey that he had been dispatched on by the Prophet Muhammed ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam, to find his wife, Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, radiya Allahu ‘anha brushing her teeth with a siwak – twig of an Arak (Salvadora persica) tree used for brushing teeth. Spontaneously, he, raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu, spouted out poetic endearment:
هنئت يا عود الأراك بثغرها … أما خشيت يا أراكُ أراك
لو كان غيرك يا سواك قتلته … ما فاز منى يا سواكُ سواك
Fortunate are you O twig of the Arak tree,
Have you no fear of me observing you in this embrace
If it were other than you…O Siwak! I would have killed you!
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None found this fortune of embrace before me, but you.
I get emailed & facebooked often from couples trying to salvage and mend broken trust and exponentially inhospitable relationships. I usually respond within a couple of weeks, detailing my unwillingness to “counsel” from a virtual distance that begets unilateralism. Horror stories of infidelity, violence, and arrogance abound. Naturally, there is no greater issue facing the Muslim communities of the West that is more pressing and multidimensional than that of family relations.
The statistics are frightening, imams are untrained in effective counseling methods, mosques are under pressure, Islamically-oriented marital counselors are unheard of and professionalism in terms of confidentiality seem non-existent.
An important dimension of domestic marital problems, as I see, is that the Sunnah of Love and Gallantry seems to be overlooked or dismissed as a long-gone era. The Sunnah, that is taught at times, seems to overlook amazing instances of passion, valor, fidelity and sacrifice in the name of true love. Instances from the life of the Prophet sala Allahu ‘alihi wasSalaam and his companions builds a comprehensive system of devotion – a Sunnah of Love.
Love. The real kind – the genuine love between a man and his wife that stems from a seed of love that is planted by Allah in the hearts of those who are true in submission to the Dispenser of Love and Comfort.
A seed, literally and figuratively, in Arabic symbolizes love.
Houb in Arabic is derived from the same root for the word Haab – seed. The nature of the two words is functionally similar.
Love begins as a tiny speck – a seed that is buried deep in the folds of a receptive heart, carrying the potential of stunning beauty, nourishing sustenance, exotic delicacy, wealth of commodity, shading shelter, and resurgent growth that is stabilized through deep roots that withstand trauma.
Amr ibn al-‘As raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu was appointed by the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam to command an important mission. He was handpicked from many capable individuals who were in fact better than him. Feeling a sense of pride in being selected, he raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu asks the Prophet, in front of a congregation of Sahabah about who he ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam, loves? The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam responds in the way that all of our wives would hope we would respond, by naming his wife, Aisha.
Consider that the Prophet would teach, ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam, that if we love a friend, we need to let them know it. It was with this hope that ‘Amr thought to ask that question after the favorable appointment was given to him.
Thinking that his question has been misunderstood he clarifies, saying that he meant from amongst the companions who did the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam love? The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam responds, “Her Father.”
He does not respond, “Abu Bakr raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu.” His response alludes to ‘Aisha raḍyAllāhu ‘anha as she was still on his mind and in his heart.
Love.
‘Aisha raḍyAllāhu ‘anha, al-Humayra – The Rosy Cheeked one, as the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam affectionately called her; Umm al-Mu’mineen – the Mother of the Faithful was loved and loved in return.
The Sunnah of Love is not whimsical or outrageously simplistic as you find depicted often in multibillion-dollar literary/theatrical sagas. No vampires competing with werewolves here. It is not ambivalent and shifty. It is built on mutual acceptance of the decree of the Divine in search of comfort, repose and peace of mind. It flourishes, paradoxically, in the mundanity of life. Finding fleeting moments of intimacy between stacks of dishes, soiled diapers, mounds of work emails, grocery lists and infinite commitments are its hallmark. A look that you receive as you rush out the door, a quick phone call itemizing how the day is going or an SMS that contains a list of groceries to buy on the way home punctuated with an I love You, are all indicators.
‘Aisha raḍyAllāhu ‘anha and the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam would use code language with each other denoting their love. She asked the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam how he would describe his love for her. The Prophet Muhammad answered, saying: “Like a strong binding knot.” The more you tug, the stronger it gets, in other words.
Every so often ‘Aisha would playfully ask, “How is the knot?” The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam would answer, “As strong as the first day (you asked).”
So I begin to wonder, as should you, about what has happened to our community?
Why is it so hard to speak frankly of one’s love for his wife? Why is it “soft” for a brother to praise his spouse?
How is it the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam can kiss his wife, as he exits to leave his home to lead the faithful in prayer and some in our community find it difficult to just smile?
How is it that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam can stop a whole army, in times of hostility in a region of the desert that had no water to camp near, to look for his wife’s misplaced bead necklace and some find it difficult to give a deserved compliment every now and again?
Since when is sternness considered leadership and harshness associated with married life?
How is it that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam can mend his clothes and look after the domestic affairs of his household, and a brother can’t put away a plate, let alone wash it unless the wife is sick?
How is it that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam can forbid upon himself milk infused with honey so as to please his wives, who complained of its scent, culminating in Allah revealing a chapter in the Qur’an forbidding the Prophet from forbidding the lawful upon himself, “Because you seek to please your wives (66:1).” Yet, some in our community will not even give the rightfully due to their wife?
How is it that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam teaches not to boycott a person for more than three days, and a brother can be out all day at work and feel apprehensive at the thought of returning home to a disgruntled partner who will give them the silent treatment over a petty squabble that has extended into weeks of dreary, isolating depression?
How is it that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam forbids a person to lead another man in prayer in his home without permission, yet some brothers due to constant bickering and negative criticism feel more like the help than the king of the castle?
Misreading the Sunnah, and not linking it to all matters of our life, including the mundane aspects is a justified criticism.
All of us learn through the course of our elementary studies of Islam that if you have no water, or if it is scarce, that you can perform Tayamum – ritual purification for prayer using sand or dust.
What you probably were not taught, and what was glossed over, was the fact that the permissibility and the legislation of that enormously important function were revealed because of the lost bead necklace.
You were not told that the love of the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam for ‘Aisha resulted in him ordering a marching army to stop at a location without water and camp out at night with a dwindling supply of water for their consumption. Her father, Abu Bakr raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu, was furious with her for mentioning what, to him, seemed to be a trivial matter.
You were not told how the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam ordered the troops to look for a necklace in the sands of the Arabian Desert, all for the comfort of ‘Aisha. You were, probably, not informed how verses in the Qur’an descended upon the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam at such an occasion resulting in the joyous celebration of the Sahabah for the ease that Allah has provided for our Ummah as a result of this occurrence.
That is the Sunnah of Love. You look after the near, even if it may inconvenience the far.
You would have heard that the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam mended his own shoes at times. What you may not have heard was how once as he was sitting in a room with ‘Aisha raḍyAllāhu ‘anha fixing his shoes, ‘Aisha happened to look to his blessed forehead and noticed that there were beads of sweat on it. Mesmerized by the majesty of that sight she remained transfixed staring at him long enough for him to notice.
The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam said, “What’s the matter?” She replied, “If Abu Bukair Al-Huthali, the poet, saw you, he would know that his poem was written for you.” The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam asked, “What did he say?” She replied,
“Abu Bukair said that if you looked to the majesty of the moon, it twinkles and lights up the world for everybody to see.”
So the Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam got up, walked to Aisha, kissed her between the eyes, and said,
“Wallahi ya Aisha, you are like that to me and more.”
That is the Sunnah of Love.
From the earliest days of Islam, ‘Ali radiya Allahu ‘anhu was a continuous witness of the life habits of Rasool-ul-Allah ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam. He was a witness to Love.
‘Ali, raḍyAllāhu ‘anhu, arrived home to find the love of his life relaxing at home. No foreshadowing asserts anything special about the occasion or day. No fancy marketing to fleece customers of hard earned money. No gimmicks or convoluted infatuations promising a happily ever after proportional to carat size. It is just a man coming home after a long day at work. What he finds there is the greatest attainment any man could dream to possess, and hopefully retain – a wife whose presence fills him with joy.
The Prophet Muhammad, ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam, said: “The world and all things in the world are precious but the most precious thing in the world is a virtuous woman.”
Virtuous, not, exclusively, in terms of the length of prostration or in devotion to religious obligations but rather as he, ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam, once informed ‘Umar:
“Shall I not inform you about the best treasure a man can hoard? It is a virtuous wife who fills him with joy whenever he looks towards her.”
It is not love at first sight, rather exponential love with every glance.
Ya Allah, put love between our spouse and us and allow us comfort and mercy in our home.
Ya Allah, spread love and peace throughout the Ummah of Muhammed ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam
O Allah grant us Your Divine Love
O Allah grant us the love of those who Love You
O Allah grant us the love of doing the things that earn Your Divine Love
Yahya Adel Ibrahim.
Domestic Violence Series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7Plans for new bike paths traversing East Jefferson streets, to be paid for with state financing secured last year by state Sen. Julie Quinn, R-Metairie, are changing shape after running into concerns from Jefferson Parish officials. Quinn touted goals of making Metairie streets more navigable and parks more accommodating to cyclists. She pointed to a study by the Regional Planning Commission that suggested a route leading from Wally Pontiff Jr. Playground in Old Metairie heading north through neighborhoods, under Interstate 10 and linking to trails on the Lake Pontchartrain levee. A later phase could link to the Mississippi River levee to the south. However, parish recreation officials have stressed they do not allow cycling within playgrounds for safety reasons. And Ron Maestri, who served as an interim Parish Council member in the district including the plan, came out against the Old Metairie route, citing security concerns from neighbors. Quinn said she disagrees with the parish officials' resistance to the plans, but that the parish has the authority to adjust the exact course of the bike paths, and the
proposal has never been a final, official route. So parish officials instead plan to use one pot of money from Quinn -- $95,000 for cycling at Pontiff -- to build a shelter, bicycle racks and an air pump for bike tires there, giving cyclists a place to park when they arrive at the playground by bike but not allowing them to continue riding on the grounds, said Rob Hinyub, council aide in the 5th District, which will be represented by Cynthia Lee-Sheng after she takes the oath of office today. Lee-Sheng defeated Quinn and two other candidates in an
earlier this month. "The walk tracks are walk tracks and walk tracks only," in Jefferson Parish playgrounds and parks, said Leo Webb, assistant recreation director. With lanes too narrow for adding cyclists, he said, "You could have something terrible happen." And with another $237,500 pot of money from Quinn, instead of running a path out of Pontiff through Old Metairie streets, the parish is now planning a first stretch of a new bike trail to start at Old Hammond Highway in Bucktown and run along the 17th Street Canal levee to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, said Mike Palamone, chief executive of Urban Systems, a firm the parish hired to design bike paths. Palamone said later sections, still in need of financing, could continue under Interstate 10 via a restored path at Bonnabel Boulevard that was wiped out by highway construction and reach the river, but specifics are yet to be decided. A third source of money that Quinn encouraged the parish to obtain, a $90,385 federal grant for trail building, will also help mark new paths, although officials haven't set exactly where they will use it, Palamone said. Hinyub, the parish council aide, said Metairie Club Gardens residents worried about traffic, safety and potential crime with an influx of unfamiliar people on a bike path through their neighborhood, which helped prompt parish officials to search for other ways to spend the money Quinn secured. "We want recreation," Hinyub said. "We want to promote bicycling. But we've got to do it in a safe manner." Quinn said she doubts that bike paths increase crime, traffic problems or hazards in parks. "It's just simply absurd," she said, to suggest children are safer riding bikes on streets instead of designated trails in parks. "Biking is healthy. For the parish to take a position that you can't bike in a park, I'm just speechless.".......
Mark Waller may be reached at mwaller@timespicayune.com or 504.883.7056.From the documentary HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis
Faced with the humiliating defeat in the Lebanon, President Reagan’s government was desperate to shore up the vision of a moral world where a good America struggled against evil. And to do this they were going to create a simple villain. An imaginary enemy, one that would free them from the paralysing complexity of real Middle-Eastern politics. And the perfect candidate was waiting in the wings. Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya.
The Americans were going to ruthlessly use Colonel Gaddafi to create a fake terrorist mastermind. And Gaddafi was going to happily play along, because it would turn him into a famous global figure. Colonel Gaddafi had taken power in a coup in the 1970s but from the very start, he was convinced that he was more than just the leader of one country. He believed that he was an international revolutionary whose destiny was to challenge the power of the West.
When he was a young officer, Gaddafi had been sent to England for training and he had detested the patronising racism that he said he had found at the heart of British society. Once in power, Gaddafi had developed his own revolutionary theory, which he called the Third Universal Theory. It was an alternative, he said, to communism and capitalism. He published it in a green book, but practically no-one read it. He had sent money and weapons to the IRA in Ireland to help them overthrow the British ruling class. But all the other Arab leaders rejected him and his ideas. They thought that he was mad. And by the mid-1980s, Gaddafi was an isolated figure with no friends and no global influence.
Then, suddenly, that changed. In December 1985, terrorists attacked Rome and Vienna airports simultaneously, killing 19 people, including five Americans. There was growing pressure on President Reagan to retaliate. President Reagan immediately announced that Colonel Gaddafi was definitely behind the attacks. But the European security services who investigated the attacks were convinced that Libya was not involved at all and that the mastermind behind the attacks was, in fact, Syria – that the terrorists had been directed by the Syrian intelligence agencies.
But what made it even more confusing was that although there seemed to be no evidence that Gaddafi had been behind the attacks, he made no attempt to deny the allegations. Instead, he went the other way and turned the crisis into a global drama, threatening suicide attacks against America.
Gaddafi now started to play a role that was going to become very familiar. He grabbed the publicity that had been given to him by the Americans and used it dramatically. He promoted himself as an international revolutionary who would help to liberate oppressed peoples around the world, even the blacks in America.
The Americans and Gaddafi now became locked together in a cycle of mutual reinforcement. In the process, a powerful new image was created that was going to capture the imagination of the West. Gaddafi became a global supervillain, at the head of what was called a “rogue state” – a madman who threatened the stability of the world. And Gaddafi was loving every minute of it.
Then, there was another terrorist attack at a discotheque in West Berlin. A bomb killed an American soldier and injured hundreds. The Americans released what they said were intercepts by the National Security Agency that proved that Colonel Gaddafi was behind the bombing and a dossier that they said proved that he was also the mastermind behind a whole range of other attacks. President Reagan ordered the Pentagon to prepare to bomb Libya. But again, there were doubts – this time, within the American Government itself. There were concerns that analysts were being pressured to make a case that didn’t really exisτ, and to do it, they were taking Gaddafi’s rhetoric about himself as a global revolutionary and his manic ravings and then re-presenting them as fact. And, in the process, together, the Americans and Gaddafi were constructing a fictional world.
The European intelligence agencies told the Americans that they were wrong, that it was Syria that was behind the bombing, not Libya. But the Americans had decided to attack Libya because they couldn’t face the dangerous consequences of attacking Syria. Instead, they went for Gaddafi, a man without friends or allies.
In April 1986, the Americans attacked Libya. Their targets included Colonel Gaddafi’s own house. Immediately after the attack, Gaddafi appeared in the ruins to describe what had happened. Many other children were killed in the raid because the American bombing was so inaccurate. Gaddafi realised that the attention of the whole world was now focused on him and he grabbed the moment to promote his own revolutionary theory, The Third Way, as a global alternative to democracy.
President Assad didn’t want stability. He wanted revenge. In December 1988, a bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland. Almost immediately, investigators and journalists pointed the finger at Syria. “The bombing had been done,” they said, “in revenge for the Americans “shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before.” And for 18 months, everyone agreed that this was the truth. But then, a strange thing happened. The security agencies said that they had been wrong. It hadn’t been Syria at all. It was Libya who had been behind the Lockerbie bombing. But many journalists and politicians did not believe it. They were convinced that the switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons. That America and Britain desperately needed Assad as an ally in the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. So, once again, they blamed Colonel Gaddafi as the terrorist mastermind.
The attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs, but now on a huge scale. They demonstrated the terrifying power of this new force to penetrate all defences. They had come to kill thousands of Americans on their own soil. 20 years before, President Reagan had been confronted by the first suicide bombers. They had been unleashed by President Assad of Syria to force America out of the Middle East. But rather than confront the complexity of Syria and Israel and the Palestinian problem, America had retreated and left Syria – and suicide bombing – to fester and mutate. They had gone instead for Colonel Gaddafi and turned him into an evil global terrorist. And after 9/11, this led to a new, and equally simple, idea. That if only you could remove these tyrannical figures, then the grateful people of their country would transform naturally into a democracy, because they would be free of the evil.
Both Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. So possessed that they believed any story that proved his evil intentions. And the line between reality and fiction became ever more blurred.
Iraq was imploding. While, at home, they were being accused of lying to their own people to justify the invasion. What they desperately needed was something that would show that the invasion was having a good effect in the Arab world. So, they made an extraordinary decision. They turned for help to the man who they had always insisted was one of the world’s most dangerous tyrants: Colonel Gaddafi. And, instead, they set out to make him their new best friend. A man who had been created by the West as a fake global supervillain was now going to be turned into a fake hero of democracy. And everyone, not just politicians, would become involved. Public relations, academics, television presenters, spies, and even musicians were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi. It would show just how many people in the Western Establishment had, by now, become the engineers of this fake world.
Colonel Gaddafi confirmed that Libya has, in the past, sought to develop weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. Libya has now declared its intention to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely. Colonel Gaddafi now became, for Western politicians, a heroic figure. His decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction seemed to prove that the invasion of Iraq could transform the Middle East. And Tony Blair travelled to meet Gaddafi in his desert tent. To welcome him back into what one journalist called, “The community of civilised nations.” But, as in the past, nothing was what it seemed with Colonel Gaddafi.
In reality, Gaddafi did not really have the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that he was promising to destroy. His nuclear programme had stuttered to a halt long ago and never produced anything dangerous. But now, he had to pretend to have a terrifying arsenal of |
sort of resurgence.
We spoke to Nick Barrucci, the CEO and publisher at Dynamite Entertainment about the importance of pulp influence in comics and he had plenty to say about the resurgence of many of these classic characters into the mainstream.
The characters that influenced Marvel and DC are still here, still around. They just needed someone to shine them in the right light. We have a great love for these characters, and there are many creators who also have a great love for the characters. And that keeps them around. And that keeps some of the greatest comics writers and artists coming to them. Matt Wagner, John Cassaday, Alex Ross, David Liss, Brian Buccellato, Jae Lee, Chris Roberson, and so many others. The pureness of the characters, the influence that they have for other existing characters, keeps their flame alive. At Dynamite, we do publish many of these characters, and hope to announce more soon. Why? Because they're great characters. Our job is to remind the fans.
Dynamite is one company that has been at the forefront of acquiring the rights to many pulp characters and printing them in all-new adventures, particularly recently.
Since we already mentioned him in the previous paragraph, we'll take Doc Savage, for example. The character was first created in the early 1930's by writer Lester Dent and he starred in nearly 40 pulp magazines, most of which were published in a span of twenty or so years. In the mid-1970's a film was issued based on the character, but for nearly thirty years Doc Savage failed to make an appearance in any medium, that is of course until the launch of DC's New 52 where the character was issued his very own series written by Paul Malmont and the art of Howard Porter. The series did well at first, but unfortunately only made it to issue #17. The series' 18th issue was published digitally following its cancelation.
And although things did not necessarily bode well for Doc Savage in the last couple of years, he is far from being the only example of a classic pulp character that has sashayed his way into modern comics. Dynamite Entertainment, for example, has taken the liberty of bringing many of these classic pulp characters back by purchasing the rights to publish new stories of which they get to star. The Shadow, for example, was a character that was widely popular from the early 1930's to the mid 1940's. The character was first introduced via a dramatized radio program. The character went on to become the central character in THE LIVING SHADOW which was first published in 1931. The character went on to star in his own series through various publishers: DC Comics during the 1980's, Dark Horse in the 1990's until the rights to the character were finally acquired in 2011 by Dynamite Entertainment. The character's very own series was launched in April of 2012 and was written by Garth Ennis featuring pencils by Aaron Campbell. The series seems to be a success, and The Shadow frequently crosses over into other Dynamite Entertainment series like THE SPIDER, another pulp character.
Dynamite Entertainment has made huge strides in acquiring the rights to publish stories featuring many popular pulp characters like The Shadow, Black Bat, The Spider, Zorro and The Lone Ranger -- but they aren't the only ones. In 2009 Dark Horse comics decided to released CREEPY, a comic anthology series featuring horror-pulp. The series, which was first published by Warren Publishing from 1964 to 1983 hadn't been in print for nearly 26 years and it has made its return to the mainstream.
Although we would like to think that pulp in comics never really went away, something tells us that it has been making its way back in recent years with a vengeance -- and we couldn't be happier for it. The introduction of these classic characters and concepts is a welcome change and addition to many of the superhero and independent titles that we read each month, but what do you think? Are there any pulp comics that you enjoy reading? What are some of your favorites? Is it a genre and type of comic that you are interested in?Risk assessment tools used to evaluate prisoners are no more fair and free of bias than the societies that created them. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
Brad Lieberman has had more than his day in court. Starting in 1979 with his first arrest, he has had almost a dozen court dates, and counting. Lieberman was convicted in 1980 for seven rapes.
He was scheduled to leave prison in 1999. But today, 17 years after Illinois was required to release him, he is still locked up. If he had been convicted of murder, not sexual assault, he’d most likely be out. Why?
While eligible for release in 2000, then Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan successfully petitioned to hold Lieberman under a 1998 Illinois law that permits a “sexually violent person” (SVP) to be indefinitely detained, or civilly committed, not through the Department of Corrections but through the Department of Human Services. Under this law, and similar ones now in 20 states and the federal system, an SVP is not a criminal but can be involuntarily confined, for treatment.
In 2007 Lieberman unsuccessfully petitioned to be released, providing testimony from a psychiatrist to challenge his diagnosis by the state’s psychologists of “Paraphilia not otherwise specified, sexually attracted to nonconsenting persons,” often shortened to “Paraphilia NOS, nonconsent.” (The dictionary defines “paraphilia” as a “condition characterized by abnormal sexual desires, typically involving extreme or dangerous activities”).
In 2016 psychological experts again dueled and on February 29 Lieberman’s most recent appeal for release was rejected. “The fact is that all the testimony before the court is that the condition he had doesn’t go away with time,” stated Judge Dennis Porter in a downstate Illinois courthouse.
Why did Judge Porter deny his release? Lieberman’s “mental abnormality.” The key evidence supporting this diagnosis? His convictions for rape, 36 years ago.
When 19 and 20 years old, Lieberman harmed a lot of people. If released, he could harm again. Is this possibility grounds for incarcerating him well beyond the end of his sentence?
While locking people up for potential crimes might sound like a middling Tom Cruise movie, or a new FX series, this future is now. Through predictive policing, criminogenics and risk assessment, our current wave of criminal justice reform argues that we can identify who is dangerous, who is likely to break the law. Risk assessment is increasingly used to determine who will be released on bail, who will be sentenced to prison, who will be granted parole and who will be kept on supervision once released.
And nowhere in the justice system is risk assessment more entrenched than in the foggy world of people with convictions for sex offenses. Just ask the more than 550 people, including Lieberman, held at Rushville Temporary Detention Center in southern Illinois, or the approximately 5,400 other people in similar facilities across the US.
While locking up people with convictions for sex offenses for years beyond their legal sentences may sound appealing to people seeking to combat sexual violence in our society, in truth, post-release punishments for people with convictions for sex offenses have done nothing verifiable to reduce rates of sexual violence. There is no research that suggests that sex offender registries and the multiplying regime of community notification laws, for example, have reduced child sexual violence, caught perpetrators, or protected children: Research supported by the US Department of Justice concludes that Megan’s Law, a key federal law that contributed to the establishment of sex offender registries, “has no effect on reducing the number of victims involved in sexual offenses.” States with civil commitment do not have lower rates of child sexual violence than states without civil commitment. Labeling the passports of people with convictions for sex offenses, or limiting their housing options and employment opportunities, does not reduce child sexual violence.
Yet, the fact remains: Most of the people in civil commitment facilities, like Lieberman, sexually assaulted children or women. If released, some of these folks might harm again. Others will not. But regardless of that uncertainty, once they have completed their sentences, is it acceptable for our society to use a checklist, a psychological evaluation, or a software program to legitimate continued confinement?
Delving into the world of risk assessment for those with convictions of sex offenses offers a window into the wider carceral reform movement’s increasing reliance on risk assessment — and it also stands as a warning.
A crucial question for this political moment is this: Will a turn to risk assessment shrink, or augment, the nation’s bloated prison and policing systems?
Science of Predictability
“Predictability is feasible,” wrote sociologist Ernest Burgess, one of the founders of predictability studies, or risk assessment, in 1928. Burgess, co-author of the 1939 Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage and a lifelong bachelor, created a scientific instrument, minus any “index factor” of love, to predict whether a (heterosexual) marriage would be “successful.”
Before his foray into marriage-success evaluation, Burgess created a “21 factor test” in Illinois to assess prisoners’ readiness for parole, asking, If released, is this person likely to reoffend? By 1933, during an era when “corrections” departments were at least nominally more focused on rehabilitation, Burgess’s instrument was in widespread usage in Illinois, and by 1939 predictability instruments shaped parole across the US, according to political science professor Bernard Harcourt in his book Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, Punishing in an Actuarial Age.
The basic framework for most criminal justice predictability instruments is similar: Identify a group of incarcerated people as they are being released from prison. Gather data about their lives — generally the “static” or fixed factors, such as age, type of convictions, martial status, employment, education — and track who reoffends. Use the data points from the individuals’ lives that correlate with recidivism to form an instrument. Notably, recidivism is typically framed as highly individualized and without a context. Erased are the effects of formal and informal penalties that deny people with criminal records access to employment, housing and education and the tight requirements attached to parole.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the need for risk assessment diminished with laws that increased time behind bars and eliminated any discretionary power of judges. “Law and order” policymakers, often Republicans, challenged the belief that corrections could be rehabilitative and derided the supposed softness of parole, instead championing the slogan: Do the crime, do the time. Yet a range of liberal policymakers, including then Senator Edward Kennedy, also pushed for sentencing reforms — often referred to as “Truth in Sentencing” and partially responsible for our now ballooned prison population — to remove bias from the sentencing process, as African American Studies scholar Naomi Murakawa outlines in The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Today, the pendulum of reform, and the role of risk assessment, is again in motion. Pre-trial release decisions will be informed by “data-driven, validated, pre-trial risk assessment tools,” according to a 2016 press release launching the Obama administration’s”Data-Driven Justice Initiative.” Proposed federal legislation with the capacity to reduce the federal prison population by 60,000 (the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act) relies on risk assessment. Predictive or preemptive policing is simply “the same policing just faster and with more math,” says Jamie Garcia, a member of the coordinating team for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and is still reliant on the misguided theory of deterrence. In LA, reports Garcia, Operation Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration (LASER)uses a risk assessment program to profile “chronic offenders” in an “identified hotspot.” State reform initiatives also often rely on risk assessment. For example, in 2015, Illinois acquired the Service Planning Instrument to “standardize” risk assessment across probation, parole and re-entry statewide.
Yet, how accurate are these instruments? Several main critiques have emerged. Many of these instruments, as some investigations have uncovered, aren’t that effective. They aren’t bias free: If an address “predicts” crime, couldn’t this be because specific (and almost always non-white) neighborhoods are under more surveillance by police than others? And while actuarial data may identify which life factors facilitate recidivism in a specific cluster or group, tools generated from this data appear less useful when applied to specific individuals.
ProPublica recently examined over 7,000 people in Florida’s Broward County who were assessed after arrest with one of the most widely used risk assessment programs in the country, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS)created by the for-profit company, Northpointe. Out of every five people Northpointe predicted would reoffend, ProPublica’s analysis found that only one actually did so. And, notably: “The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.”
While Northpointe, citing propriety, refused to make public the analytics or algorithms, COMPAS includes the following questions:
“Was one of your parents ever sent to jail or prison?” “How many of your friends/acquaintances are taking drugs illegally?” “How often did you get in fights while in school?” “A hungry person has a right to steal.” (Agree or Disagree)
Similarly, Operation LASER, according to Garcia, is shrouded in secrecy: “the algorithms that are used to create these hotspots are not transparent to the public and open for public scrutiny,” and, unsurprisingly “as police largely target communities of color and poor communities making the appearance of higher crime in those areas, historically biased and racist data is going into these algorithm and hotspot techniques.” Offered as “race neutral,” these technologies mask how race continues to shape all facets of the criminal justice system.
ProPublica is not the first to name problems with the ascendency of risk assessment. “The New Science of Sentencing,” a 2015 feature piece for The Marshall Project, critically explored the use of risk assessment tools in sentencing reform. In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union raised questions about the for-profit company Intrado’s software, “Beware,” which creates profiles of individuals for police usage.
While the use of risk assessment instruments in sentencing and police profiling has garnered some attention from media outlets and advocacy groups, for those with convictions for sex offenses, where the stakes are arguably higher, scrutiny is almost nonexistent.
Civil Commitment
People with convictions for sex offenses can be detained, even after their sentence ends, based on their “mental abnormality,” according to the 1997 decision in Kansas v. Hendricks. Detention is not criminal but administrative, the court reasoned, and the goal is treatment, not punishment. This decision, and two subsequent Supreme Court cases, opened the door to civil commitment for anyone the state classifies as a sexually violent person/predator (SVP) or a sexually dangerous person (SDP).
The process for civil commitment across the states is fairly similar. For many people with a conviction for a sex offense the attorney general, or another state entity, triggers a review process at the end of their prison sentence. If, in the expert option of the evaluators hired and approved by the state (most require two evaluators), the person has a “mental abnormality,” a trial proceeds. (If not, the person is scheduled for release). A trial is held to determine whether the person meets the criteria of an SVP. If the process is contested from the start, a probable cause hearing can be held to determine whether there are grounds to hold the person pending trial, but these are almost always won by the state, according to Dr. Brian Abbott, a licensed psychologist with 38 years of experience working with people who have convictions for sex offenses.
Evaluators — generally psychologists licensed by the state — play a key role in the civil commitment process. Increasingly, these professionals rely on the mostly widely used instrument in the world to assess the likelihood that a person with a conviction for a sex offense will reoffend: a 10-question Yes/No checklist.
Called the Static-99R after the year it was created — 1999 (revised in 2012) — and for the “static” or fixed life-factors that predicted reoffending, Karl Hanson and David Thornton initially sought to review existing research to create a tool to house people with conviction for sex offenses more effectively in prison, and to decide who should be eligible for release.
Lower scores on the Static-99R (which has a maximum score of 12) supposedly indicate a lower likelihood of committing another sex offense. The tool focuses on the person’s convictions; the most points are allocated for prior offenses. Points are added for multiple convictions (particularly for sex offenses), and if the victims are unrelated to the perpetrator, are strangers and/or are male.
Does the Static-99R predict whether someone with a sexual offense might harm again? Fundamentally, according to Dr. Brian Abbott, “social science research doesn’t have this ability,” as “sexual recidivism risk science is too imprecise.”
Similarly, Daniel Coyne, a Chicago lawyer with clients in civil commitment facilities, states that actuarial data are “wonderful” for bigger-picture data — projections, research and longitudinal studies — but most were never designed for individual predictions. Actuarial data, he says, “might say I am due for a heart attack, but does this mean I will have one?” When applied to individuals, risk assessment instruments in the sex offender world only have a 58 percent accuracy rate, states Coyne. “Not much better than a coin toss.”
Given that SVP laws exist, what should be the standard for civil commitment? How should instruments like the Static-99R be used? Perhaps unsurprisingly, experts don’t agree.
“Alice In Actuarial-Land: Through the Looking Glass of Changing Static-99 Norms,” a 2010 research paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, suggests that the “lure of quantification” advanced the Static-99R without clear evidence to suggest that scores effectively predict recidivism. While acknowledging that professional judgment is not necessarily any more effective, the authors “sound” a “call to caution” in the “weighty decisions involving an individual’s liberty and the protection of public safety.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Abbott cautions against the move to elevate clinical judgment, arguing that this approach is “weaker” than actuarial assessments. In his response to this article, “Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water: Is It Time for Clinical Judgment to Supplement Actuarial Risk Assessment?” Abbot writes that unlike the murkiness of clinical judgment, the use of risk assessment instruments like the Static-99R brings “transparency, accountability, and consistency to the judicial risk-finding process in SVP/SDP proceedings that is not possible when using clinical judgment.” Or, at least an actuarial instrument can be held to some transparent scrutiny. Can the same be said about an expert’s professional judgment?
Even when risk assessments are used, professional judgment plays into decisions to confine or release someone. Take Lieberman: The determination to keep him confined was the result of both a “high score” on the Static-99R (largely thanks to his convictions of 36 years ago) and a “mental abnormality” that needs treatment, according to a professional. Lieberman’s diagnosis: Paraphilia not otherwise specified, nonconsent. A frequent diagnosis for SVPs, this diagnosis is also divisive.
“Paraphilia not otherwise specified” is in the “bible” of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-V. Yet, the “not otherwise specified” (or “NOS”) appendix, attached to other diagnosis in the DSM, is often criticized for vagueness. NOS designations are “residual wastebasket categories provided for clinical convenience” and should not be used for forensic purposes, wrote Dr. Frances Allen, a psychiatrist and former Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine who led the task force that produced the DSM-IV.
The picture gets sketchier. “ParaphiliaNOS, nonconsent” is not included in any version of the DSM. The American Psychiatric Association, which regulates the DSM, has repeatedly rejected the inclusion of ParaphiliaNOS, nonconsent (and some related precursors, including Coercive Paraphilia or “hypersexuality”). Why? It has stated that rape is a criminal act, not a mental disorder.
Wading into these boundaries, and negotiating potential turf wars between criminal and psychological realms, is tricky. The American Psychiatric Association declared in 1998 that the civil confinement of people with convictions for sex offenses was a “misuse of psychiatry,” yet the American Psychological Association has made no such proclamation.
Courts are reluctant to engage. Overall, in cases related to sex offenses, Coyne states that juries are often swayed by what he terms “the ick factor” and, when faced with scientific evidence that could help defendants, they either disregard this evidence or use it in service of further confinement. Coyne’s team’s current strategy is to raise how these instruments are not suited for individual predictions. The problem, however, is that accurate individualized assessment (and individualized treatment) “costs money.”
Meanwhile, we must wrestle with what is being fundamentally left out of risk assessment calculations. Despite their professed goal of securing the safety of the public, these risk assessment calculations completely neglect to include the needs and experiences of those who survive sexual violence — a population, studies show, that is rarely well served by the criminal justice system.
Also, sometimes, the line between perpetrator and victims that our system relies on is not so bright. Many of those who commit acts of sexual violence have themselves survived such violence in the past. Can a risk assessment demonstrate the capacity to heal from such violence? Should it?
In Limbo
David Jones is still waiting for his day in court. Now 30 years old, Jones has spent almost half of his life in institutions. Jones has been at Rushville for almost eight years without an SVP trial. His mother Edie Smith characterizes Rushville as in many ways “worse than prison” because there is no release date, and she feels her son, as a “sex offender” is often treated as less than fully human. (Smith and Jones are referred to by pseudonyms in this article due to Smith’s concerns for her son’s safety).
Smith isn’t convinced that Jones can be in the outside world yet, but she knows that Rushville is mostly harming, not helping, her son. She’s faced with the question of what to do with a loved one that needs more than the family can afford or offer.
Jones’s troubles started early. Grammar and middle school were pocked with school disciplinary actions, and Jones repeatedly sexually exposed himself to other young people. Putting the pieces together now, Smith sees patterns. When Jones was in his late teens she learned that other boys had extensively bullied him in school.
Smith doesn’t know why he was harassed. Maybe because he always looked a little different. He wore glasses. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Possibly a factor: He identifies as gay. She blames herself for the harassment: There was never enough money, she didn’t know enough to help him, his biological father was “not in the picture.”
Other young people also endure a litany of traumas, including schoolyard taunts, absent mothers and fathers, homelessness and sexual violence, but don’t respond by sexually exposing themselves. It is hard to know why Jones was different.
When Jones was almost 16, and the sexual exposure could no longer be dismissed as childish, a parole officer recommended Onarga Academy, a residential treatment center for juveniles with sex offenses. Smith’s first thought was money. How much would this cost? (While Onarga refused to release the cost, experts suggest it is easily over $100,000 per year). The options were jail and treatment, and Jones’s parole officer told her not to worry about the price tag.
Smith thought Jones was making progress but that he wasn’t ready to be out in the world, so she was “really pissed” when he was released after he turned 18. Onarga can house people until they are 21 years old, including those who are wards of the state.
After Onarga, Jones was unemployable. He was still “very immature emotionally,” says Smith, and he was viewed as toxic by potential employers, given his label of “sex offender.” Since Smith lived across from a school, he couldn’t live at home. He had nothing to do all day but “roam the streets.” Smith found a room for Jones in Chicago, but the landlord quickly found out he was a registered sex offender and asked him to leave. Smith struggled to find him another approved place to live within her nonexistent budget. She eventually found one, but at that point, Jones had exposed himself to another minor.
At 20, Jones was convicted for multiple misdemeanors related to sexual exposure, and for aggravated battery and criminal sexual abuse related to a sexual act with a 15-year-old male. (This second conviction, Smith states, was for what she reports was Jones’s consensual sexual activity with a minor.)
While a few people offered support, Smith and her family paid a heavy price when Jones was arrested as an adult. She reports that she was ostracized in her Illinois town. A neighbor told her that her son should be murdered. Committees formed to try to force her to move, even when her son was locked up (and therefore, obviously, not living at home). Neighbors and family members refused to talk to her.
Unlike four years earlier, when similar acts triggered a stay at a juvenile residential treatment program, Jones was sent to a medium-security prison, Pinckneyville. After serving his sentence, he wasn’t released: he was sent to Rushville.
Having now been confined through his 20s, Jones still waits. With a score of 11 on the Static-99R — he has multiple prior convictions, his victims were often unrelated, strangers and male (all “static” factors he will never be able to change) — he is a “high risk.” His risk assessment includes his juvenile convictions, even though the official coding manual cautions against the use of Static-99R with minors, or with adults who were convicted as minors.
Jones’s diagnosis? Smith is skeptical but reports that he was diagnosed in school with Attention Deficient Disorder, and at Onarga with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder and Mild Schizophrenia. Over the last eight years, reports Smith, the diagnoses have expanded to include a seeming laundry list of psychiatric disorders, including, “Paraphilia not otherwise specified, nonconsent.”
Smith wonders if another year or two at Onarga might have enabled him to develop enough to be able to live outside an institution. She also wonders why, at 20 years old, Jones’s life is assessed by the courts and the state as less valuable than it was when he was 16. Plus, why wasn’t even a fraction of the almost $100, 000 a year the state now spends to house him at Rushville made available to actually help Jones earlier on?
Risky Reform Futures
To many, the idea of predictability — an accurate forecast of who would do harm in the future, if released — is alluring in our widely unjust system. Risk assessments can appear more measured and bias-free than the judgment of police, judges, corrections officers or psychologists. The logic behind this reform wave: If police and prosecutors mistakenly target good people, an algorithm won’t. Risk assessment instruments are often seen as better than the status quo where few people convicted of violent offenses are released on parole or receive a reduced sentence.
But is the right question to be asking in this moment really how to balance professional judgment and a predictive instrument, or even how these algorithms or tools are inaccurate and racially profile? Instead, perhaps we should be asking why there is such a profound silence surrounding the elephant in the room: the structural problems in society that drive harm. Even if Burgess was right — that predictability is feasible — what meanings are drawn from these relationships? If reoffending can be predicted, why is the problem the person? Why not the wider environment that shapes our life pathways?
And why wouldn’t we conclude, as Harcourt writes in Against Prediction, “that there is a problem with prisons, punishment, or the lack of reentry programs”? And why wouldn’t predictability then motivate an examination of the root of these institutions, rather than a push to seek more reform?
Take the turn to predictive policing: Los Angeles already spends 54 percent of its general funds on its police department, says Garcia. With an inability to acknowledge and address racial bias within its force, continued histories of corruption, and a long list of lethal actions against unarmed residents, why isn’t the conclusion to shrink policing in LA, rather than produce new and expensive predictive tools that, according to a 2016 RAND study, don’t work?
Similarly, cities pay to expand facilities to monitor those with convictions for sex offenses, including civil commitment institutions, despite the fact that research has demonstrated that registries, and an array of other punitive responses, have neither protected children nor ended sexual violence. If our goal is to end, or reduce, sexual violence, why not focus and support proven preventative measures, including meaningful sex education and non-stigmatizing mental health care? Why not focus on ending patriarchy?
For many, this leap, for now, is too much. The lives and the rights of those with convictions for sex offenses, like Lieberman and Jones, are seen as necessary collateral damage in the wider march toward greater public safety, or perhaps exceptions to reform practices that on the whole will work for others. But as risk assessment in our political moment gains a measure of mainstream scrutiny, another story could emerge. Perhaps the focus on the supposedly incorrigible nature of people convicted of sex offenses (and the assumption that, given the gravity of their acts, many require indefinite detention) deftly masks our collective reality: Just like prisons, maybe big data can’t make us safe. In fact, it might make things worse.
Meanwhile, despite all these scores and diagnoses, Smith can’t predict her son’s future. With no money for a private lawyer, she does the best she can. She visits and calls and tries to stay informed about both what is happening at Rushville and how Jones is doing. She is pleased about the small things: Her daughter, who is now 18 years old, and therefore no longer a risk according to Rushville, can finally visit her brother. But for those in indefinite confinement and their families, the future is a question mark — and with big data in charge, the answer is often limitless incarceration.Ten years from now, we may look at the P.K. Subban - Shea Weber trade in the same light as the Chris Chelios - Denis Savard trade of the early 1990s.
It's a grim assessment, but what's done is done. So given what we know about Weber's style of play and the facts surrounding his on-ice production, what can Montreal's coaching staff do to get the most of this useful, but imperfect player?
1) Shea Weber in a Nutshell
If you do not believe in the value of advanced statistics and are not interested in learning more about the numbers side of things, no worries.
Here's what you need to understand about Weber in very simple terms:
- He is a very good defenseman in static situations - if you need someone to clear out the front of the crease, or take a slap shot from the point with your entire attack set up, or even to make an intermission locker room speech if things aren't going well, Weber is your man. He thrives on playing and thinking in structure.
- He is not a very good defenseman in dynamic situations - if you need someone to stop an opposing rush by playing a tight gap at the red line, or to improvise with the puck under pressure in the defensive zone, or to make a pinch to keep an offensive play alive in the opposing zone, Weber's in trouble. He lacks the fluidity and imagination of a Subban, an Erik Karlsson or a Kris Letang. What he's missing can't be taught.
- Weber is not a puck possession defenseman. He'll let you touch the puck first, and then crunch you into the boards, which is why many NHL forwards are intimidated by his presence. But first he lets you into his D zone, which means you'll always have a chance to make something happen if you can sidestep him and find an open teammate.
These types of defensemen tend to not age as well (Ed Jovanovski, Brent Sopel, Douglas Murray, Roman Polak, etc.) compared to those who can anticipate the play and move the puck without body contact (Brian Campbell, Andrei Markov, Marek Zidlicky, Lubomir Visnovsky, etc.) because they do not have a Plan B if the wait-and-hit approach no longer works. In the modern NHL, if you own the puck, you direct the action.
I do believe that Weber is an elite NHL player at his position, but like soccer's legendary Franz Beckenbauer, perhaps he is playing a position which no longer exists.
I'm not entirely convinced whether Weber's strengths and weaknesses will cancel each other out in Montreal - his on-ice goal differential in Nashville has been right around team average for the past three years. But the above is the essence of the Weber question.
2) Weber's Impact on Montreal's Defensive Unit
The two players most affected by Weber's arrival are Andrei Markov and Jeff Petry - the former being Subban's most frequent partner, and the latter being his most frequent on-ice replacement.
In the past three seasons, Andrei Markov has been excellent playing alongside Subban. The pair accounted for 52% of shot attempts (Corsi) and 56% of goals when on the ice together at 5vs5, some of the best results for any full-time Canadiens defense pairing in that span. However, away from Subban, Markov has struggled, posting a 46.8% Corsi with Alexei Emelin and a 45.0% Corsi with Tom Gilbert, his next two most frequent partners. As you can see in the spider chart above (2015-16 only), Markov's possession numbers have taken a dive whenever he is not on the ice with Subban. At a team level, it's like going from playing like the Pittsburgh Penguins (52.7% Corsi last year), to playing like the Arizona Coyotes (46.8% last year).
Petry, meanwhile, has done well in his role in Montreal - that of a second-line defenseman who never needs to play with the best defenseman to be able to move the puck in the right direction. Petry struggled to meet expectations in Edmonton, where he was the only right-handed defenseman able to keep his team above water, but has blossomed with Subban taking on key matchups and a portion of his 5vs5 minutes.
With Weber replacing Subban, the 38-year-old Markov no longer has a partner able to prop him up and cover his weaknesses. As Weber declines, Petry (who, at age 28, is already in his prime) may not have the chops to take over in a bona fide number one role, either.
No NHL team can hope to be competitive, much less contend for the Cup, with a Top-4 in turmoil, but there might be a fit to be found with the defensemen currently at the Habs' disposition.
If I pulled the strings, I would start the 2016-17 season with the following duos:
Beaulieu-Petry
Barberio-Weber
Markov/Emelin-Pateryn
Beaulieu-Petry have controlled an incredible 58.2% of shots as a unit in the past two years, while the mobile Mark Barberio could be a good left-handed complement to Weber, who does not handle the puck nearly as much as other top NHL defensemen and who needs his partner to quarterback the breakout. Alternating Markov and Emelin will help keep both healthy and productive, and Greg Pateryn has proven himself to be a good, cheap sixth defenseman at the NHL level.
3) Weber and Offensive Deployment
If we look at Weber's possession stats in Nashville, we would see that they've varied wildly depending on which forward lines he played with. In 2015-16, Weber struggled when on the ice with Mike Fisher (#12) and Paul Gaustad (#28), the Predators' two defensive-minded centremen.
Meanwhile, he has been able to thrive when playing alongside Mike Ribeiro (#63) and Ryan Johansen (#92), the team's two offensive pivots. In Montreal, Plekanec and Mitchell have a very similar role to that of Fisher and Gaustad, facing tough competition in defensive zone starts, while Alex Galchenyuk and David Desharnais receive a more favourable offensive tilt by the coaching staff.
What I would do with this knowledge would depend on a few other factors. While Weber's strength and ability to play with defensive structure would be an asset in the Montreal zone, I would be wary to immediately give him a heavy dose of defensive zone starts against top-line competition. How best to deploy Weber would depend on his efficiency on zone exits, his ability to defend the rush skating backwards, and how he influences the shot differentials of Montreal forwards. We won't know until the season starts, but those would be the three metrics to keep an eye on.
4) Weber and the Power Play
From an article I wrote two years ago:
With 347 points in 607 career NHL games (0.57 point per game, compared to Subban’s 0.59), Weber ranks among the elite offensive blue-liners in the league. More importantly for us, his career shooting percentage is 8.1%, significantly higher than Subban’s 5.7% success rate. Last season, Weber led all NHL blue-liners with 23 goals on the strength of a career-best 11.8% shooting percentage. Both guys play the same position and have more or less the same offensive role on their teams. I don’t really buy the argument that Weber has a better shot, and definitely don’t think he's on the receiving end of better passes, so what accounts for that gap? While the even-strength data is inconclusive, we start seeing some serious trends once we get to the man-advantage stats. With the eye test, one is led to believe that Subban and Weber have a similar way of running the point, patrolling the right side of the ice off the faceoff before switching sides with their partners and loading up on their fearsome one-timers. Instead, there are two important distinctions between Weber and Subban, both of which have helped the former score 10 more goals than the latter over the course of the 2013-14 season... The big difference in the results of Montreal and Nashville’s number one power-play gunners relates to their tactics while stationed at the |
In 1994, an Israeli genealogist researching her family in the Mormons' computerized International Genealogical Index made a startling discovery. Her grandfather, a religiously observant Jew killed in the Holocaust, had been posthumously baptized as a Mormon. Distraught, she alerted other Jewish genealogists who soon learned that some 380,000 Holocaust victims, including Anne Frank, had been baptized. Plus, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and scientist Albert Einstein had received this treatment.
Negotiations between Mormon and Jewish leaders led to an agreement in 1995 to stop the posthumous baptism of all Jews, not just Holocaust victims, except in the case of direct ancestors of Mormons.
The church insists the deceased have "the right to choose" whether to accept Jesus Christ as their savior. But that hardly satisfied an outraged Jewish community. To them, the baptisms disparaged ancestors who were forced into ghettos, tortured in inquisitions, expelled from countries or murdered in pogroms and the Holocaust just because they were Jews.
"Baptizing is a very dirty word to many Jews," said Gary Mokotoff, a prominent Jewish genealogist who contacted church elders soon after the Israeli genealogist's discovery. "It reminds us of the persecution Jews had in the past where churches told Jews they had a choice: either convert to Christianity or be murdered."
"They tried to do something very difficult for Mormons to do, which was to stop the whole process of conversion," said Abraham Foxman, who lost 14 relatives in the Holocaust. As national director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, Foxman took part in the negotiations.
Still, Mokotoff told The Huffington Post, "overzealous Mormons" continued baptizing dead Jewish martyrs.
Renewed public outrage prompted more talks with Mormon leaders, who in 2010 agreed to a new, supposedly more ironclad pact that included changes to prevent inappropriate submissions of baptisms to the computer database records of Holocaust victims -- although not of all Jews. But Helen Radkey, an ex-Mormon whose research uncovered the continuation of Jewish baptisms that led to the second agreement, recently told Salt Lake City Weekly that violations of the pact continue.
Posthumous baptisms are among the practices that have made some voters squeamish about the prospect of a Mormon president.
In 2007, when Romney made his first run for the Republican nomination, NECN in Hartford, Conn., asked him about baptizing the dead. He said he is "not a cafeteria Mormon" and adheres to all tenets of his faith. But Romney, a former bishop and top church official in Boston, referred specific questions to religious leaders.
When Newsweek magazine asked Romney if he personally had performed posthumous baptisms on anyone, author Jonathan Darman wrote, "he looked slightly startled and answered, 'I have in my life, but I haven't recently.' The awareness of how odd this will sound to many Americans is what makes Romney hesitant to elaborate on the Mormon question."
There was no mention, and it is not known, whether the people that Romney personally baptized were Jewish.
Requests for comment by Romney campaign and the Mormon Church were not answered.
As a religious minority, Jews have been "somewhat more likely than Americans as a whole to say that a presidential candidate’s Mormon affiliation wouldn't make them less likely to support that candidate," said Kenneth Wald, a University of Florida political scientist who studies religion and elections. But, Wald added, other than the small minority of Orthodox Jews who lean Republican, most American Jews have "some concerns about what they perceive as the theopolitical nature of Mormonism." A recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report stated, "Mormons are more conservative than the general public on a variety of political, social and moral issues."
Wald, whose grandparents died in the Holocaust, said, "Jews are understandably angered when another religious faith denies the legitimacy of Judaism by attempting conversion — and that is precisely what these retroactive baptisms do."
Mokotoff, the genealogist who credits the Mormon database for helping him trace his ancestors back to a small Polish village in 1727, said the controversy should be kept separate from the 2012 election. "Romney should be judged on his political views and political past," he said, "and not on the views of the president of his church."
But if Romney's rivals want to use the issue of proxy baptisms against him, they will do it "quietly under the radar lest Jews find themselves portrayed as intolerant toward a religious minority," Wald said.
Foxman doubts the issue will affect the outcome, "but everything is fair in politics so somebody's going to use it."Army Commander General Eduardo Villas Boas, right, has warned that the military could be forced to intervene in Brazil's corruption crisis
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Rio de Janeiro (AFP)
A general's comment that the military could be forced to intervene in Brazil's corruption crisis has rattled a country that only exited a two-decades long dictatorship in 1985.
The top Brazilian army commander, Eduardo Villas Boas, repeated earlier assurances Friday that the military "is committed to the consolidation of democracy."
But the lack of any public disciplinary action against his subordinate, General Antonio Hamilton Mourao, has raised eyebrows.
Mourao, a popular general, said in a talk to freemasons last week that "either the institutions resolve the political problem, through the judiciary and removing all those involved in illicit acts from public life, or we will have to impose this."
"They will have to look for a solution. If they don't succeed, the time will come when we will have to impose a solution," he said in comments that were published online.
Mourao said he was expressing "the army way of thinking."
Villas Boas rejected the idea, saying that he alone could speak for the military.
But he was vague on what consequences there had been for the general, saying only that he had informed Defense Minister Raul Jungmann on "the circumstances and measures adopted regarding the episode involving General Mourao."
A spokesman for the army told AFP that measures were taken "internally" and that Villas Boas "considers the matter closed."
Jungmann also gave the same assurances Friday.
The state human rights body, however, appeared less convinced.
"There is nothing in the Brazilian constitution allowing an autonomous intervention by the armed forces in an internal or external situation, regardless of the seriousness," a statement read earlier this week.
- Untouchable -
It's not the first time that Mourao, 64, has ruffled feathers.
In 2015, he was removed from the command of the southern region after speaking out against the political class, which has been snared in the giant "Car Wash" corruption scandal.
That same year, subordinates of his paid homage to the notorious dictatorship-era colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who headed internal repression and torture.
But although Mourao was transferred to a desk job, he continues to enjoy high prestige and is considered almost untouchable.
"Mourao is a great soldier, a fantastic figure," Villa Boas himself said this week.
Nelson During, editor of the website DefesaNet, said that "if Mourao is punished, it would probably lead to mutiny, especially among young officers, from major on down. He represents the way the troops think."
A columnist in Globo newspaper warned that with corruption scandals now rising all the way up to President Michel Temer, the government finds itself increasingly helpless.
"The impossibility of punishing the general shows that... the government is losing its legitimacy," the columnist, Merval Pereira, said.
As the crises mount, polls show that the military remains the most trusted of all institutions.
The phenomenon has helped boost the career of rightwing legislator Jair Bolsonaro, a former paratrooper who has gone from a largely fringe politician to one of the leading contenders for October 2018 presidential elections.
Among Bolsonaro's favorite provocative statements? Outspoken praise for "the hero" colonel Ustra.
© 2017 AFPPhoto Credit: Wikimedia
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Vladimir Putin that Israel will attack weapons that Iran or Syria tries to ship to Hezbollah, according to a Defense News report of the conversation between the two leaders last week.
The official statement after their hour-long talk simply said that the Prime Minister criticized Russia’s sale of the S-300 advance anti-missile system to Iran as a “direct result of the dangerous deal on the table” between Iran and the P5+1 countries.
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What was not reported was Netanyahu’s warning to the Russian president that Israel’s “red line” is any attempt by Iran or Syria to transfer, to place any advanced weapons in the hands of Hezbollah, Iran’s world-wide proxy terrorist network operating out of Lebanon. Syria and Hezbollah are heavily armed with Russian weapons, and Hezbollah’s missile arsenal is considered to be larger than almost any army in the world.
Defense News reported this week, “Israel is monitoring ‘active and ongoing leakage of Russian material,’ including SA-22 short-range and SA-17 medium-range air defense systems, via Syria to Iranian-backed Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.”
It quoted an Israeli official as saying:
We’ve discussed this with our friends in Washington and Europe and made multiple demarches to Moscow over a period of weeks and months. Our red line policy is clear: We view unauthorized third-party transfers of Russian-origin equipment as legitimate targets.
In plainer English, if Iran tries to move a Russian s-300 antimissile system to Syria or Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel will make sure it doesn’t get there.
There was no hint of the warning in the official press release of the conversation between Putin and Netanyahu, which stated, “Israel views with utmost gravity the supply of S-300 missiles from Russia to Iran, especially at a time when Iran is stepping up its aggression in the region and around the borders of the State of Israel.”
Israel has attacked Hezbollah-bound weapons in Syria at least five times in the past two years, including a strike in January on weapons and a military unit planning to attack Israel from the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
Israel previously has made it clear that it will strike to stop the transfer of “game-changing” sophisticated weapons and chemical weapons to Hezbollah.
However, Israel does not appear prepared to attack Russian weapons, including the S-300 systems, to Iran.
Netanyahu has done his best to express anger at the Russian sale of the S-300 to Iran.
Israel will take the unusual step of not sending its ambassador to Russia for Saturday’s annual victory parade, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
The United States, France and Germany have snubbed the parade because of Russian’s belligerency in Ukraine, which Israel has no trouble overlooking.
The Foreign Ministry did not cite the sale of the Russian-made S-300 anti-missile systems to Iran as the reason for boycotting the parade.
Some people have tried rationalizing the snub by explaining that attending the parade would require violating the Sabbath.
Benny Briskin, the Director of International Programs of the Russian Jewish Congress, was quoted by Metro website as saying, “Jews in Israel, especially at a state level, do not have the right to participate in ceremonies which are somehow connected with travelling [on the Sabbath]. If the Israeli president – the top public official of the country – publicly violates the Sabbath even for the very best occasion, it might lead to a scandal, up to the dissolution of the government.”
That would be a nifty explanation if it weren’t for the fact the Israel is sending low-level officials to the parade.$\begingroup$
I’d suggest backing up a step. Presumable, these dragons predate modern aviation, and have been using their instincts to avoid collisions for millennia before humans started flying. They’ve now got an older right to the airways, and historically, it is as well established as your right to walk down the street.
So if you want to consider flight rights, paperwork, and insist they get licenses or fill out paperwork to travel, you have to consider the political system, and who’s in charge.
Are the dragons the poor underclass? If so, they might have lost their rights to the airways when the wealthier, more powerful humans developed flight. Under this system, they might need licenses for most or all flights, or only be allowed to fly over the their own homes, or only at certain altitudes. Keep in mind that if a dragon doesn’t fly extensively while young and developing muscles, those muscles will be weak, and restrict the dragon’s ability for its whole life. Imaging a healthy human who always used a wheelchair instead of walking until they were 18. They wouldn’t be able to walk without serious physical therapy, and would always have more difficulty than someone who has walked since infancy.
Is everyone equal? Perhaps look into restricted airspace for human use craft, which are far more likely to crash than the dragons. If dragons want to fly in these restricted corridors, they might need to show they can avoid collisions with the less flexible aircraft to get official permission, or it might be more like a kid learning to cross the road safely, where it is basically a judgment call, and learning the rules as to how to recognize a legal and/or safe crossing point. But airspace basically belongs to the dragons, not the humans.
Are the dragons in charge? Either no humans fly, or they are extremely limited, and only allowed to fly limited, undesirable routes where they aren’t in the way of the dragons. Maybe only at times when most dragons are asleep. Although if your dragons use human-made aircraft for long-distance flights, who knows what might happen.
How would human aviation have been affected? If they need to defer to dragons, they may use blimps and hot air balloons more than fixed wing, and aircraft speeds would be restricted. Also, if dragons rule the sky, maneuverability might be prized over speed and carrying capacity because if the dragons say no to anything likely to kill them, then big, fast airplanes that need a huge turning radius are less likely to be developed.This “seed grant” research project compiled a set of 56 US public opinion polls that asked respondents their opinions about public transit. The first and primary goal of the project was to assemble a large set of transit-related survey questions that can be used to inspire the design of future surveys on the topic of public transit. The report presents the specific wording of every relevant question identified.
A second objective of the project was to identify general patterns in public opinion about transit that emerge across multiple surveys. Reviewing the entire set of polling questions related to public transit revealed that the surveys commonly address the following themes: the reasons people support public transit; opinions about transit service quality; the extent to which people support improving transit as a general concept; and support levels for raising additional revenues to support transit. The analysis of the poll questions on these topics shows that strong majorities of people believe that transit brings a number of specific benefits to their community, especially congestion relief and accessibility to vulnerable residents. Strong majorities also support improvements to transit as a general concept. However, fewer people support the general concept of increased spending on transit, and considerably fewer than half support raising any specific tax to increase transit funding, except for sales taxes, which usually enjoy majority support."Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!"
Have you heard the news that the FBI is looking into new emails related to Hillary Clinton? If you haven’t, Donald Trump says it may be because social media companies are suppressing the news.
"Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!" the Republican presidential candidate tweeted Oct. 30.
Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2016
FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress Oct. 28 that said the FBI may have found new emails relevant to its probe into the private email server that Clinton used while secretary of state. The FBI plans to review these new emails to see if they contain classified information.
There’s no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Twitter, Google and Facebook buried this story in the first couple days after it broke.
We reached out to the Trump campaign for its evidence and received no response.
Sure, the FBI story come out on a Friday, so it competed on social media with users’ upcoming Halloween plans, the World Series and other events. But the topic was certainly popular.
Twitter
Twitter doesn’t have an algorithm to highlight or suppress stories, said Jen Golbeck, a University of Maryland professor and social networks expert. In their feeds, users see everything posted by the people they follow.
If Trump was referring to Twitter’s "moments" feature, the FBI story appears on an accessible archived screenshot of the "moments" homepage the evening before he tweeted his claim.
The website Mashable took a screenshot of Twitter’s featured tweets, which Twitter displays when a logged-out user visits Twitter.com, around the time Trump tweeted. One of the top three featured tweets was about the FBI story.
According to the Twitter trend-tracking website Hashtagify, #ClintonEmails, #Comey, and #FBI surged in popularity over the past week, especially since the story broke.
Google
Google can intentionally suppress topics by tweaking its algorithm, but the company denies that it does this in relation to the election.
"It would have to be an intentional choice, and that's a big deal," Golbeck said.
In any case, it does not appear Google is doing that in this case. For example, over the weekend of Oct. 28-30, the FBI was the top trending Google search topic.
And CNN’s Brian Stelter took a screenshot of Google News in the minutes after Trump tweeted his claim, and the FBI story was at the top of the list.
Facebook
Facebook is a bit harder to pin down. It does have the ability to suppress or highlight stories by altering its algorithm, though no one has produced evidence that this is something Facebook did with the FBI story.
Further, Facebook tailors its trending topics based on the particular user’s interests. So the FBI story may not have appeared in one person’s trending topics bar, while appearing in another’s.
While these companies probably don’t suppress certain stories, it’s hard to disprove a claim like Trump’s beyond a shadow of a doubt because there are so many ways social media sites could manipulate content visibility, said Kjerstin Thorson, a communications professor at Michigan State University.
"Did it appear on people’s trending box space on Facebook? How long was it there? Was it trending only for some people and not for others? Was the story made visible in people’s Facebook news feeds or Twitter streams or in Google search results, via each platform’s display algorithm?" Thorson said. "Outside of internal company data, there is no source I know of who could check that."
Our ruling
Trump said, "Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!"
Trump has not produced any evidence whatsoever to back up his claim, nor has anyone else. We found nothing to support the idea that the three tech and social media companies reduced the visibility of the latest developments in the Clinton email controversy.
The burden is on Trump to produce information to support his statement. He’s offered none.
Meanwhile, we’ve found plenty of evidence to contradict Trump’s claim.
This claim rates False.FILE - At left, in a Dec. 24, 2016, file photo, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick talks during a news conference after an NFL football game against the Los Angeles Rams, in Los Angeles. At right, in a Jan. 1, 2017, file photo, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick speaks at a news conference after an NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, in Santa Clara, Calif. Michael Vick has some advice for Kaepernick if he wants another shot in the NFL; get a haircut. During an appearance on Fox Sports 1 Monday, July 17, 2017, Vick said the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback needs to shed his afro and cornrows look for a "clean cut" style in order to get a job. (AP Photo/File)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Michael Vick has some advice for Colin Kaepernick if he wants another shot in the NFL: Get a haircut.
During an appearance Monday on Fox Sports 1′s “Speak for Yourself,” Vick said the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback needs to lose his Afro or cornrows for a “clean-cut” style in order to get a job.
"First thing we got to get Colin to do is cut his hair." — @MikeVick advises Kaepernick on rebuilding his image pic.twitter.com/YENvUPOIgP — Speak For Yourself (@SFY) July 17, 2017
The former Falcons and Eagles quarterback said he was speaking from personal experience. Vick was suspended for two seasons beginning in 2007 after pleading guilty to charges in a dog fighting investigation.
Kaepernick parted ways with the 49ers in March and hasn’t been signed by another team. His decision to kneel during the national anthem last season to protest police shootings of black people became a topic of national conversation.
___
For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP_NFLShare the News
The so-called War on Drugs has had a negative effect on public health, both in the United States and across the globe, according to a report from a public health commission headed up by Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health in partnership with The Lancet.
The members of the commission reviewed published evidence about drugs and drug policy; they also conducted their own analysis on drug-related violence, disease, and incarceration. They came to the conclusion that drug policies, as they currently stand, do much more harm than good, and that drug policy largely ignores years of research about how to actually have a positive impact. With that in mind, the commission called for:
The decriminalization of minor and non-violent drug use, possession and petty sale
Enactment of policies that reduce violence and discrimination in drug policing
Increased access to controlled medicines that could reduce the risk of overdose deaths
Greater investments in health and social services for drug users
“The goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production, and trafficking of illicit drugs is the basis of many of our national drug laws, but these policies are based on ideas about drug use and drug dependence that are not scientifically grounded,” Bloomberg School epidemiology professor Chris Beyrer said. “The global war on drugs has harmed public health, human rights, and development. It’s time for us to rethink our approach to global drug policies, and put scientific evidence and public health at the heart of drug policy discussions.”
Will such straight talk from some of the world’s most respected medical institutions make a difference? It’s hard to say–particularly in an election year.This is post #16 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.”
In previous posts on vm.swappiness and using RAM disks we talked about how the memory on a Linux guest is used for the OS itself (the kernel, buffers, etc.), applications, and also for file cache. File caching is an important performance improvement, and read caching is a clear win in most cases, balanced against applications using the RAM directly. Write caching is trickier. The Linux kernel stages disk writes into cache, and over time asynchronously flushes them to disk. This has a nice effect of speeding disk I/O but it is risky. When data isn’t written to disk there is an increased chance of losing it.
There is also the chance that a lot of I/O will overwhelm the cache, too. Ever written a lot of data to disk all at once, and seen large pauses on the system while it tries to deal with all that data? Those pauses are a result of the cache deciding that there’s too much data to be written asynchronously (as a non-blocking background operation, letting the application process continue), and switches to writing synchronously (blocking and making the process wait until the I/O is committed to disk). Of course, a filesystem also has to preserve write order, so when it starts writing synchronously it first has to destage the cache. Hence the long pause.
The nice thing is that these are controllable options, and based on your workloads & data you can decide how you want to set them up. Let’s take a look:
$ sysctl -a | grep dirty vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10 vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000
vm.dirty_background_ratio is the percentage of system memory that can be filled with “dirty” pages — memory pages that still need to be written to disk — before the pdflush/flush/kdmflush background processes kick in to write it to disk. My example is 10%, so if my virtual server has 32 GB of memory that’s 3.2 GB of data that can be sitting in RAM before something is done.
vm.dirty_ratio is the absolute maximum amount of system memory that can be filled with dirty pages before everything must get committed to disk. When the system gets to this point all new I/O blocks until dirty pages have been written to disk. This is often the source of long I/O pauses, but is a safeguard against too much data being cached unsafely in memory.
vm.dirty_background_bytes and vm.dirty_bytes are another way to specify these parameters. If you set the _bytes version the _ratio version will become 0, and vice-versa.
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs is how long something can be in cache before it needs to be written. In this case it’s 30 seconds. When the pdflush/flush/kdmflush processes kick in they will check to see how old a dirty page is, and if it’s older than this value it’ll be written asynchronously to disk. Since holding a dirty page in memory is unsafe this is also a safeguard against data loss.
vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs is how often the pdflush/flush/kdmflush processes wake up and check to see if work needs to be done.
You can also see statistics on the page cache in /proc/vmstat:
$ cat /proc/vmstat | egrep "dirty|writeback" nr_dirty 878 nr_writeback 0 nr_writeback_temp 0
In my case I have 878 dirty pages waiting to be written to disk.
Approach 1: Decreasing the Cache
As with most things in the computer world, how you adjust these depends on what you’re trying to do. In many cases we have fast disk subsystems with their own big, battery-backed NVRAM caches, so keeping things in the OS page cache is risky. Let’s try to send I/O to the array in a more timely fashion and reduce the chance our local OS will, to borrow a phrase from the service industry, be “in the weeds.” To do this we lower vm.dirty_background_ratio and vm.dirty_ratio by adding new numbers to /etc/sysctl.conf and reloading with “sysctl –p”:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5 vm.dirty_ratio = 10
This is a typical approach on virtual machines, as well as Linux-based hypervisors. I wouldn’t suggest setting these parameters to zero, as some background I/O is nice to decouple application performance from short periods of higher latency on your disk array & SAN (“spikes”).
Approach 2: Increasing the Cache
There are scenarios where raising the cache dramatically has positive effects on performance. These situations are where the data contained on a Linux guest isn’t critical and can be lost, and usually where an application is writing to the same files repeatedly or in repeatable bursts. In theory, by allowing more dirty pages to exist in memory you’ll rewrite the same blocks over and over in cache, and just need to do one write every so often to the actual disk. To do this we raise the parameters:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 50 vm.dirty_ratio = 80
Sometimes folks also increase the vm.dirty_expire_centisecs parameter to allow more time in cache. Beyond the increased risk of data loss, you also run the risk of long I/O pauses if that cache gets full and needs to destage, because on large VMs there will be a lot of data in cache.
Approach 3: Both Ways
There are also scenarios where a system has to deal with infrequent, bursty traffic to slow disk (batch jobs at the top of the hour, midnight, writing to an SD card on a Raspberry Pi, etc.). In that case an approach might be to allow all that write I/O to be deposited in the cache so that the background flush operations can deal with it asynchronously over time:
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5 vm.dirty_ratio = 80
Here the background processes will start writing right away when it hits that 5% ceiling but the system won’t force synchronous I/O until it gets to 80% full. From there you just size your system RAM and vm.dirty_ratio to be able to consume all the written data. Again, there are tradeoffs with data consistency on disk, which translates into risk to data. Buy a UPS and make sure you can destage cache before the UPS runs out of power. :)
No matter the route you choose you should always be gathering hard data to support your changes and help you determine if you are improving things or making them worse. In this case you can get data from many different places, including the application itself, /proc/vmstat, /proc/meminfo, iostat, vmstat, and many of the things in /proc/sys/vm. Good luck!
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Like this: Like Loading...CARACAS– (Analysis) Even though the independent media community in the West is diverse, there are often some common themes that unite alternative media outlets from different sides of the political spectrum. Common among these unifying forces is a criticism of the U.S. imperial war machine and U.S. efforts – both covert and direct – to subject governments throughout the world to regime change, often for simply conflicting with the U.S.’ “national interest.”
This has held true for independent media coverage of U.S.-led regime change efforts in countries like Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Syria, where the reporting of most alternative media outlets has brought them into direct conflict with mainstream media, government-approved narratives. However, for several conservative-leaning independent media outlets, there is one glaring exception: Venezuela.
While some more left-leaning independent media sites have acknowledged the U.S.’ role in the destabilization of oil-rich Venezuela and its multi-million dollar funding of the political opposition, some on the more conservative side – such as Zero Hedge, InfoWars and We Are Change – have often ignored this outright or only mentioned it as a mere afterthought.
Instead they have chosen to embrace the mainstream media narrative supportive of U.S.-backed regime change in Venezuela, painting the current government of Venezuela as a dictatorship and the sole party responsible for the country’s current crisis, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
CIA-backed coups and opposition funding
For any student of U.S.-led regime change efforts, Venezuela’s current situation has the hallmarks of previous scenarios: lucrative resources, a history of U.S.-backed coup attempts, U.S.-led economic sabotage and a U.S.-funded political opposition.
Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves in the world, found itself in the crosshairs of the US corporate empire as soon as its people rejected the U.S.-allied oligarchical government by electing socialist President Hugo Chávez in 1999. Chávez then began implementing policies that put the Venezuelan people ahead of American business interests that sought to exploit the nation’s resources.
Just a few years later, a U.S.-backed coup took place, one that involved many of the same figures who now lead the Venezuelan opposition. Chávez then ejected two major U.S. oil corporations, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, in 2007, further fomenting the ire of the United States government and corporate world. In the years that followed, numerous foiled coup attempts were uncovered in Venezuela and though Chávez resisted them all, he eventually succumbed to a sudden and rapidly advancing strain of cancer, with some going so far as claiming that the cancer was induced by his foreign enemies.
Ever since Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, won a tight election in the aftermath of Chávez’s death, he too has faced major problems. Similar to what transpired in other Latin American countries targeted for regime change, a scarcity of goods, food and medicine emerged in parts of the country. However, much of this was caused by major corporations – whose owners side with the opposition – hoarding those goods and refusing to put them on shelves.
The shortage was compounded by a drop in oil prices, which was brought about through artificial manipulation by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Though the price manipulation had the ultimate aim of hurting Russia, other oil-dependent economies, like Ecuador and Venezuela, have also suffered tremendously as a result.
Yet, the clearest sign of U.S. involvement in seeking regime change in Venezuela comes from its funding of the opposition. The U.S. government gave well over $100 million to the Venezuelan political opposition from 2002 to 2010, with the “progressive” Obama administration alone pledging $20 million to that cause.
The Obama administration also notably slapped Venezuela with sanctions, calling the nation a “threat to national security” despite no evidence being provided to support that claim. In addition, a current Senate bill, if passed, would give $10 million more to opposition parties. Many of the top figures in the Venezuelan opposition, including those lionized by Western media, have direct ties to the U.S. government.
For instance, according to a leaked recording from 2013, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado detailed how Ramon Guillermo Aveledo, the chairman of the opposition umbrella group Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, told the State Department that “the only way to resolve this (salir de esto) is by provoking and accentuating a crisis, a coup or a self-coup. Or a process of tightening the screws and domesticating to generate a system of total social control.”
Related: The Violent Past Of Leopoldo Lopez, Poster Boy For The Venezuelan Opposition
In addition, recent coup attempts in Venezuela were shown to be linked to the CIA and the DEA. More confirmation of current CIA involvement in Venezuela came earlier this week when the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, stated that the U.S. is working towards a “transition” in Venezuelan governance in coordination with the governments of Colombia and Mexico.
Were Venezuela to be replaced in this account with the name of any other country (save Cuba), it is likely that the very same alternative media sites that refuse to recognize that something is amiss in the mainstream narrative on Venezuela would be up in arms at the U.S.’ meddling in yet another attempt to force a democratically-elected government from power.
Zero Hedge’s flawed coverage of Venezuela
Despite the clear similarities between Venezuela and other victims or would-be victims of U.S. regime change, some alternative media sites refuse to even report on the U.S.’ role in destabilizing Venezuela, instead blaming “socialism” for all of the country’s ills. This, incidentally, is the very same pro-regime change stance taken by U.S. mainstream media and the U.S. government.
One consistent example is Zero Hedge, a respected news aggregation site in alternative media with a focus on finance and libertarian politics. Though Zero Hedge has never hesitated to point out U.S. regime change meddling in countries like Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Honduras and others, it flat out denies the other forces that have clearly had a significant role in shaping Venezuela’s current crisis.
Related: The Strategy Behind Washington’s Destabilization Of Venezuela
Zero Hedge is often accurate in its analysis of why certain economic crises have begun, yet it claims that the problems of Venezuela’s oil sector are due to “mismanagement, a lack of investment and re-nationalization of foreign oil companies,” without mention of the artificial manipulation of oil prices that Zero Hedge has acknowledged was carried out covertly by the U.S. and the Saudis for geopolitical reasons.
This assessment suggests that Venezuela’s economic problems, with relation to the economy’s main driver (oil), are the sole fault of the Chavista government. While these factors have certainly played a role, the drastic decline in oil prices cannot be ignored in good conscience.
However, Zero Hedge has done just that, blaming all of Venezuela’s problems on its embrace of socialism and ignoring other factors that could debunk the “failed socialist state” narrative. It has even scoffed at the idea that the U.S. would orchestrate a coup against Maduro, despite the fact that the U.S. has targeted the Chavista government in the past, most notably in 2002.
In addition, one of Zero Hedge’s most recent articles on Venezuela began with the following: “Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has made it clear: Nothing short of the invasion threatened by President Donald Trump will stop him from holding a vote on a new constituent assembly that will officially replace the country’s legislature and likely allow the embattled president to rewrite the country’s Constitution, cementing his grip on power.”
This assessment, however, is inaccurate and buys into the depiction of Maduro as a “power hungry” president “cementing his grip on power” at all costs. Maduro is actually authorized by Venezuela’s current constitution to call for a National Constituent Assembly. On the other hand, the assembly would not replace the opposition-controlled legislature, as it is tasked solely with authoring a national constitution. This claim comes exclusively from the Venezuelan opposition, who are so opposed to the Assembly that they refused to participate in it, allowing Western media to suggest that only the ruling Chavista party would “hand-pick” the assembly’s membership.
Alex Jones’ war on socialism
Another well-known conservative-leaning alternative news site is InfoWars, led by the firebrand radio host Alex Jones. While Jones is certainly a polarizing figure, there is no denying his popularity nor his success as a figure in alternative media. Jones often speaks against U.S. regime change efforts, criticizing such attempts by the U.S. “deep state” practically across the board.
However, for InfoWars, Venezuela is different, largely because of the site’s strong dislike for socialism. Indeed, InfoWars has warned its readers that the crisis in Venezuela would also befall the U.S. were Bernie Sanders elected U.S. president, as Venezuela’s crisis is the result of “democratic socialism.” They have also warned that “socialism kills.”
Beyond that, InfoWars has published glowing portrayals of the Venezuelan opposition protesters, often referred to as “anti-socialism” protesters, even though those same protesters are often U.S.-funded and violent. Opposition protesters have burned people alive, threatened business owners who won’t join their cause, and threatened journalists from Venezuela and abroad. Yet, InfoWars has had no problem reporting on the U.S.-funded and violent armed |
U.S. Figure Skating Championships. She was featured in Sports Illustrated's Faces in the Crowd in the January 9, 1968 issue.[6] When she failed to make the U.S. Olympics team, she entered the fashion industry.[7] Wang continues to enjoy skating, saying, "Skating is multidimensional".[5]
In 1968, Wang was presented as a debutante to high society at the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria New York.[8]
Career [ edit ]
Wang was hired to be an editor at Vogue immediately upon graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, making her the youngest editor at that magazine. She stayed at Vogue for 17 years, leaving in 1987 to join Ralph Lauren, for whom she worked for 2 years. At 40 she resigned and became an independent bridal wear designer.[9]
Wang has made wedding gowns for public figures such as Chelsea Clinton,[10] Karenna Gore,[11] Ivanka Trump,[10] Campbell Brown,[12] Alicia Keys,[10] Mariah Carey,[10] Victoria Beckham,[10] Sarah Michelle Gellar,[13] Avril Lavigne,[10] Hilary Duff,[10] Khloe Kardashian,[14] and Kim Kardashian.[15] Wang's evening wear has also been worn by Michelle Obama.[16][17]
She has designed costumes for figure skaters, including Nancy Kerrigan, Michelle Kwan, Evan Lysacek, Nathan Chen. Kerrigan wore Wang for the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics, Kwan for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, Lysacek for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and Chen for the 2018 Winter Olympics.[18] Wang was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2009 for her contribution to the sport as a costume designer.[19] She designed the uniforms worn by the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders.[20]
On October 23, 2001, her book, Vera Wang on Weddings, was released. In June 2005, she won the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Womenswear Designer of the Year. On May 27, 2006, Wang was awarded the André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Wang's evening wear has been worn by stars at many red carpet events, including Viola Davis at the 2012 Academy Awards,[21] and Sofia Vergara at the 65th Emmy Awards.[22]
She was honored with the Council of Fashion Designers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.[23][24]
In 2006, Wang reached a deal with Kohl's, a chain of department stores, to produce a less expensive line of ready-to-wear clothing exclusively for them called Simply Vera.[25]
Retail [ edit ]
In 1990, she opened her own design salon in the Carlyle Hotel in New York City that features her trademark bridal gowns.[26] She has since opened bridal boutiques in New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney and has also expanded her brand through her fragrance,[27] jewelry, eyewear, shoes, and homeware collections.
"White by Vera Wang" launched on February 11, 2011, at David's Bridal. Prices of the bridal gowns range from $600 to $1,400 which gives more brides a more affordable way to wear Vera's designs.[28] In 2002, Wang began to enter the home fashion industry and launched The Vera Wang China and Crystal Collection,[29] followed by the 2007 release of her diffusion line called Simply Vera, which are sold exclusively by Kohl's.[26]
In Spring of 2012, Wang teamed up with Men's Wearhouse to offer two tuxedo styles available in both the retail and rental areas of their inventory.[30] In June 2012, she expanded in Australia with the opening of "Vera Wang Bride Sydney" and her first Asian flagship store "Vera Wang Bridal Korea", helmed by President Jung Mi-ri, in upmarket neighborhood Cheongdam-dong in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.[31]
In an interview with a CBS reporter, Wang said, "(It's) painful, and not only that, I have no choice. So I think when you start there's a certain innocence because of that freedom, and as you evolve you begin to see the parameters of what you can and can't do. So I make decisions that are very tiny that will affect an hour of work, I make decisions that will impact the lives of the people that work for me. It's in fashion as well, micro work, a centimeter of proportion and then it's macro to see what a vision is on the red carpet."[32]
Personal life [ edit ]
In 1989, she married Arthur Becker in an interfaith Baptist and Jewish ceremony.[33][34] They resided in Manhattan with their two adopted daughters:[34] Cecilia (born 1990), who currently lives in New York City, and Josephine (born 1993), who attended The Chapin School and currently attends Harvard University. Becker was the CEO of the information technology services company NaviSite until August 2010. In July 2012, Vera Wang Co. announced that the couple had separated. The separation was amicable.[35]
Vera Wang loves sports and exercise. She spends her day dealing with all the different lines of product she handles, from poring over china patterns to small leather goods at Kohl's. She usually doesn't take phone calls during the day.[36]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Several movies and television shows have mentioned Wang's works.
In the Sex and the City TV series, Charlotte York found Wang's wedding dress to be the perfect wedding dress, and wore it for her wedding to Trey MacDougal.[37] Wang's design was mentioned in the NBC television show The West Wing in the episode "The Black Vera Wang". In ABC's Ugly Betty TV series, Vera Wang makes a cameo as herself, designing a dress for Wilhelmina Slater's wedding to Bradford Meade.
In the film Sex and the City, Vera Wang was among the bridal gowns Carrie Bradshaw wore in her Vogue photo shoot. In the film Bride Wars, Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson wore custom-made Vera Wang gowns.[38]
In the Totally Spies! episode "The Wedding Crasher", a villain named Wera Van (parody of Vera Wang), desires revenge on those who rejected her wedding dress designs.
Vera Wang also designed a wedding dress for Sarah Michelle Gellar's character Buffy Summers in the TV Series Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "The Prom".
In the TV series, How to Get Away with Murder, the character Michaela Pratt mentioned a custom Vera Wang wedding gown when confronting her fiancé, Aiden Walker, about his sexuality.
In the political satirical comedy First Daughter, Vera Wang takes the president's daughter Samantha Mackenzie, played by "Katie Holmes", and her friend Mia, played by "Amerie", to try on wedding dresses. She is shown to have a close friendship with Mackenzie, cheek-kissing and grasping hands. She later comforts James played by "Marc Blucas" after Samantha bails on her wedding to him and buys him a limo.
In the TV Series Gossip Girl, Vera Wang is mentioned in multiple episodes and is one of Blair Waldorf's favorite designers. Blair has a wedding dress designed by Vera Wang for her wedding to Prince Louis of Monaco. Blair decides she can no longer wear it after losing her and Louis's baby in a car accident, and has another designed instead. The three bridesmaids in Blair's wedding wear Vera Wang bridesmaid dresses.[39]
Also in Revenge, Victoria Grayson, played by Madeleine Stowe, wears a steel gray Vera Wang mermaid gown in her second wedding with Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny). The dress was actually shown in black at Wang's Fall 2012 show.[40]
At the 2017 Super Bowl, Lady Gaga wore Vera Wang Spring/Summer 2017.
In the second-season episode of Supergirl, "Mr. & Mrs. Mxyzptlk", Mr. Mxyzptlk snaps his fingers and puts a wedding dress on Supergirl. When she protests that he "can't just put [her] in a wedding dress", he responds, "Why not? It's Vera Wang".
Similarly, in The Simpsons episode "My Big Fat Geek Wedding", Edna Krabappel walks out on her wedding to Seymour Skinner. Nelson Muntz refuses to egg her with a canola oil egg per Bart Simpson's request because the dress is a Vera Wang. He eggs Skinner with it instead.
She is mentioned in a film, The Accountant, as the character Dana Cummings describes her as the designer of a dress that she coveted for her senior prom.
She is interviewed in a movie, "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's", which chronicles the history of the famous department store in Manhattan.
Filmography [ edit ]
Movies [ edit ]
First Daughter (2004) as herself
(2004) as herself The September Issue (2009) as herself
Television [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Vera Wang, Vera Wang on Weddings, HarperCollins, October 2001 (ISBN 9780688162566).
See also [ edit ]Queen From 1968 to 24th November 1991 Hometown London Genre(s) Rock, rock and roll Members Brian May, Roger Taylor, Freddie Mercury, and John Deacon Awards Most Amount of Chest Hair on a Single Male, Largest Amount Of Damage From Cannon Fire In a Rock Concert Record Label OMG Records
Queen are an English cock-rock band, formed in 1970 in London by friends Freddie Mercury (lead vocals, piano, posturing), Brian May (lead guitar, vocals, Badger conservation) and Roger Taylor (drums, vocals, screaming) as an alternative to less lucrative careers. Needing someone who played bass to boost their sound they recruited major jazz bass star, John Deacon, who, as the band developed, achieved media notoriety by growing a JewFro™. Queen's earliest works were influenced by satin, latin and swing but the band gradually ventured into more conventional and radio-friendly works by shoe-horning further styles, such as arena rock, pop rock and cannon fire into their music. Over a period of twenty years together they produced many critically disdained hit albums, and wrote numerous hit songs like "Another One Bites The Crust" (a song about pizza), "We Will Rock You (For A Nominal Fee)", "Nous Sommes Les Champignons (French for We Are the Mushrooms)", and their most famous work, a complex multi-layered track named "Bo-Peep Crapsody".
Contents show]
Early Years Edit
In 1968, guitarist Brian May, a student of confectionary at London's Mint Imperial College, and bassist Tim Staffell decided to form a band. May placed an advertisement on a college notice board for a "bang the boxes like a chimpanzee" drummer. Roger Taylor, a young mental disorders student, auditioned and owing to the lack of any competing candidates, got the job. The group called themselves Grimace.
While attending Eel Fishing College, Tim Staffell met Farrokh Bulsara, a painter/decorator who had incorrectly assumed his name was actually Freddie. Bulsara felt that he and the band had similar perversions and soon became a keen fan of Grimace. In 1970, after Staffell left to join the band Unknown Failures, the remaining Grimace members, encouraged by Bulsara, changed their name to "Queen" in preference to "King", which Mercury felt to be "too camp"(that's saying something), and performed their first gig on 18 July in a 10 man tent just off the M1 north of Watford.
During this period, the band was without a bass player and had to use a car horn as a harmonic foundation. The consequent lack of an ability to write songs with more than one chord forced the band to recruit well-known jazz bass star John Deacon to play bass harmonica. When that didn't work out, the results being described by Taylor as sounding "like a skiffle group accompanying a fart", Deacon switched to bass guitar.
Now able to write songs in more than one key, they began to rehearse for their first album. They loosely recorded four of their own songs, "Pliars", "Keep Your Coma Patient Alive", "The Sink Goes Brown" and "Jesus!!", for a demo tape. Despite many begging letters, no record companies were interested. It was also around this time Freddie changed his surname to "Mercury", inspired by the Marvel Comics character. On 2 July 1971, Queen played their first show in the classic line-up of Mercury, May, Taylor and Deacon at a Surrey lap-dancing club in front of 25 members of the Buzz Aldrin fan club.
Having attended decorating college, Mercury designed Queen's logo, called the Queen crest, shortly before the release of the band's first album, stealing his design from the famous crest of the British Royal Family, having first gained permission from Elton John.
By 1972, Queen were finally offered a recording deal by Trident. Under the deal, Queen were able to make use of Trident's hi-tech recording facilities used by other musicians such as the Beatles and Elton John to produce new material, so long as they ran a coat of emulsion over the studio lobby, ensured the fire safety notices met current legislation and cleaned the floors every two weeks.
By July of 1973, they released their debut album Clean, an effort influenced by parlour music, the title being inspired by the state of the studio floor as a result of their cleaning efforts. The album was received badly by critics; Gordon Fletcher of Rolling Stone called it "cynical" and Chicago's Daily Herald called it an "above average turd". Perhaps because of this and the polarising album artwork featuring a large mop, it drew little mainstream attention, and the lead single "Keep Your Coma Patient Alive" sold poorly, largely due to its depressing lyrical themes. However, retrospectively, it is cited as the highlight of the album, and in 2008 Rolling Stone ranked it 31st in the "100 Greatest Coma Songs of All Time", describing it as "an entire coma crammed into a single song". The album was certified appalling in the UK and the US.
The group's second LP, Clean Too, was released in 1974, and features rock photographer Dick Stone's iconic image of the band holding various industrial cleaning items on the cover. The album reached number five on the British album chart and became the first Queen album to chart in the UK. The Freddie Mercury-written lead single "Seven Fields of Rapeseed", inspired by his summer allergies, reached number ten in the UK, giving the band their first hit. The album is the first real testament to the band's distinctive layered sound, and features long complex instrumental passages, fantasy-themed lyrics, bass harmonica, and helium-induced falsettos. Aside from its only single, the album also included the song "The March Of The Drag Queen", a six-minute epic describing life on the Brighton night club scene.
Critical reaction to Clean Too was mixed; the Winnipeg Free Press, while praising the band's debut album, described Clean Too as an "over-produced monstrosity with far too little references to cleaning". However, Allmusic has since highlighted the album as a favourite among the band's hardcore fans, and it is the first of three Queen albums to feature in the book "1001 Albums You Must Take Back To The Shop Before You Die".
1974–1976: Cardiac Arrest to A Nice Bit Of Offal Edit
Despite several torn leotards, a broken pair of curling tongs and the loss of Roger Taylor's shin bone during a particularly powerful bass drum solo in Munich, things were looking up for Queen. However, in May 1974, a month into the band's first US tour opening for Matt the Hoop Juggler, Brian May collapsed with heart problems, forcing the cancellation of their remaining dates. While his guitar recovered from the impact, May was initially absent when the band started work on their third album, but he returned unannounced and inebriated midway through the recording process, announcing himself to be Jesus Christ: Saviour of the Badgers. Despite this, recording continued in earnest, resulting in the group's latest album, Cardiac Arrest.
Released in 1974, Cardiac Arrest reached number two in the United Kingdom, sold well throughout Europe, and went gold in the United States. It gave the band their first real experience of international success, and was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The album experimented with a variety of musical genres, including British music hall, baroque, cockney, ragtime, pained screaming and electric banjo. At this point, Queen started to move away from the meandering tendencies of their first two releases into more conventional song structures, as many fans were still making their way through Clean, several years after release.
The single "Ruptured Spleen" from Cardiac Arrest reached number two on the British charts, and became their first US hit, reaching number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. It combines campfire singing, vaudeville, and British Bulldog samples with May's banjo virtuosity. The album's second single, "Now My Arm Tingles", a more traditional hard rock composition, was a number eleven hit in Britain, while the high speed rocker "Stone Cold Dead" featuring May's uptempo banjo riffs is sometimes cited as a precursor to death metal. In recent years, the album has received disdain from music publications: In 2007, Mojo ranked it No.88 in "The 100 Records That Made Very Little Impact On the World". It is also the second of three Queen albums to feature in the book "1001 Albums You Must Only Hear After You Die From A Cardiac Arrest".
In January 1975, the band left for a world tour of the US accompanied by banks of lights, effects, hair dryers, eye liner and soft drugs. The other band members chose to travel more lightly than Mercury. They toured the US and played in Canada for the first time, to much confusion, as they had actually been booked to play California. In September, after an acrimonious split with Trident, allegedly due to the band having painted the studio lobby in the incorrect colour while making Clean, the band negotiated themselves out of their recording contract using a combination of sarcasm, threatening behaviour and unwanted sexual advances. This left them requiring new management and a decent barrister. One of the options they considered was an offer from Led Zeppelin's manager, Peter Grant. Grant wanted them to buy a number of erotic photographs and sign a legal document stating the band would never attempt to sue Led Zeppelin for plagiarism. The band found the contract unacceptable and unrealistic and instead contacted Elton John's manager, John Reid, who accepted the position on the proviso that his pet dog would have a co-writing credit on any tracks written by Deacon.
In late 1975, Queen recorded and released A Nice Bit Of Offal, taking its name from an old butcher's shop expression. At the time, it was the most expensive album ever produced. Like its predecessor, the album features diverse musical styles and experimentation with soft drugs. In "The Prophet's Thong", an eight-minute epic about the hidden side of biblical prophecy, the middle section features a cannon, with simple patterns layered to create a sound akin to the Coventry blitz of 1940. The Mercury penned ballad, "Lunge At My Wife", featured a Jew's harp and overdubbed helium-affected vocal harmonies. The album was very successful in Britain and went triple bargain bin in the United States. It has also ranked highly in international polls; in a worldwide Guinness poll, it was voted the "19th Greatest Album To Listen To While Pissed On Guinness", while an ABC poll saw the Australian public vote it the "28.5th Greatest Album To Listen To While Pissed On Fosters".
The album also featured the hit single "Bo-Peep Crapsody". A multi-layered song based on the old children's nursery rhyme where the lead character suffers a mental breakdown and guns down 25 of her own sheep, it remained at number one in the UK for nine weeks. Mercury's close friend and dealer, Capital London radio DJ Kenny Everett, played a pivotal role in giving the single exposure, which contributed to the end of his career in radio. It is the third-best-selling song of all time in the UK, surpassed only by Live Aid's "Do They Know Bob Geldof Wrote 'I Don't Like Monday's'?" and Elton John's "Candle In The Eye 1997", and is the best-selling commercial single in the UK.
A Day As a Racist (1976) Edit
Having now experienced a massive boost in their income, Queen became drunk on their success and innumerable bottles of Guinness. This lead to the recording of their most unloved album, called A Day As A Racist. Featuring 15 minute guitar solos performed by Brian May whilst hanging upside down from a roof beam, and cannons filling in for any real form of percussion, the album was a bold leap forward musically for Queen. The recording process was torturous, the band making their way through four studios, largely due to their destruction during the recording of the cannon parts. A solution was eventually found - the band decided to record on Solway Firth, which is commonly credited for creating the muddy sound on the album.
By this time, the power of fame had affected Freddie Mercury significantly and he now turned his lyrical attention to insulting, abusing and slagging off practically every nation on the face of the Earth. Whilst many of Queen's own fans praised the group for "finally having the guts to acknowledge the pointless existence of the French", many music critics and music lovers alike balked at the blatant racism and abusive rhymes.
The major hit on the album was "Somebody to Club", a gang violence inspired song in which Mercury, May, and Taylor multi-tracked their voices to create a 100-voice sample of the word "Club". The song went to number two in the UK, and number thirteen in the US. Such was the popularity of "Somebody to Club" that it was later covered by George Martin and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra.
The album also featured one of the band's heaviest songs, May's "Tie Your Burkha Down", which became a staple of their live shows and a breakout hit in Mecca.
During 1976, Queen played one of their most famous gigs, a free concert in Hyde Park, London. Organised by The Duke of Edinburgh, it set an attendance record with 150,000 people confirmed in the audience, of which 2 were verified sober. Unfortunately, during a particularly enthusiastic cannon solo by Taylor, four buildings were destroyed and to pay for the damages, the group were forced to return to the studio and create a new album.
The Daily Mirror (1977) Edit
The band's sixth studio album The Daily Mirror was released in 1977, which went four times one way and three times the other in the United States, and twice both ways in the UK. The album contained many songs tailor-made for live performance, including two of rock's most recognisable anthems, "We Will Rock You (For A Nominal Fee)" and the French ballad "Nous Sommes Les Champignons", both of which became enduring international drinking anthems, and the latter reached number four in the French charts. Queen commenced The Daily Mirror Tour in October 1977, with Robert Maxwell providing sponsorship. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called this concert tour the band's "most spectacularly over-staged show, the accordions on Nous Sommes Les Champignons being a real highlight".
Many fans have since highlighted "Spread Your Butter", a track by Deacon and John Reid's Dog, as an overlooked classic.
Jizz (1978) Edit
With Jizz, the band moved into new lyrical and musical territory, recording much of the record on a small island off the coast of Australia as a tax dodge. The use of a "lounge band" style for much of the album gave an interesting feel that was very different to previous records.
The album included the hit singles "Fat Bottom Turds" and "Bicycle Repairs" on a double-sided record. Queen rented Wimbledon Stadium for a day to shoot the video for "Fat Bottom Turds", but the results were so graphic that the tapes were scrapped. Reviews of the album in recent years have been more favourable than contemporary critical appraisals, with the album being listed in NME's "Best Albums To Listen To While Reading Best Albums To Listen To Lists" in 2008.
The New Adventures of Dennis Norden Soundtrack (1979) Edit
In 1979, Queen were commissioned to produce the official soundtrack to an action adventure film called The New Adventures of Dennis Norden. The eponymous lead character of the film, Norden, was a short sighted, drug-addled clip show presenter, searching the galaxy for high adventure and a more stylish clipboard. Rising to the challenge of their first film score, the band produced over three hours of material. The New Adventures of Dennis Norden was one of the earliest high-budget feature films to use a score primarily composed and performed by a rock band and also one of the last.
The soundtrack album features lyrics on only two tracks - "Dennis's Theme" and "The Clipboard".
"Dennis's Theme" was the only single to be released from the album under the title "Dennis's Theme". The album reached #110 on the UK charts and #223 in the US. The album was reissued worldwide on 27 June 2011 (excluding the US and Canada, where it was banned) as part of the band's 40th anniversary.
The Same (1980) Edit
Queen began their 1980s career with The Same. It featured the singles "Crazy Little Rip-off Of Elvis" and "Another One Bites the Crust", both of which reached number one in the US. The Same marked the first appearance of a xylophone on a Queen album. Heretofore, their albums featured a distinctive "No Xylophone!" sleeve note. The note is widely assumed to reflect an anti-xylophone, pro-"hard"-rock stance by the band, but was later revealed to be an attempt to clarify that those albums' multi-layered solos were created with guitars, not xylophones, as record company executives kept assuming at the time.
Hot Spasm (1982) Edit
As 1982 approached and seeking more commercial success, Queen produced an album that sounded like everyone else's. Consequently, Hot Spasm generally considered the worst Queen album ever. Described by Freddie Mercury as "funk black music", it has been named as the single most racially offensive genre experiment in music history.
Despite this, the album maintains a small group of fans who are often seen at Queen conventions espousing the virtues of funk black music. According to a recent report from the Official Queen Fan Club, these individuals are usually recaptured very quickly.
However, one track from the album has remained critically acclaimed despite its surroundings. "Udder Pleasure" which was co-written with David Cassidy, has since become a classic and was covered to universal praise by David Bowie in 1992.
The Buerks (1984) Edit
Following the failure of Hot Spasm, Queen decided to return to their rock roots. The Buerks was aptly named and became a source of hate amongst fans in the band's catalogue. Queen had foolishly decided to record an album that sounded nothing like an album. Instead, they hoped to achieve the effect of a greatest hits set by writing each song from the perspective of being a single. This lead to the following years being filled with live shows featuring only the songs on this record, as the band felt they had accidentally created the best songs of their career. Fans were known to commit suicide at their concerts rather than endure yet another 12 minute rendition of the album's lead single "Radio? AAAAARRGGGHHHH!!!"
Despite this, "The Buerks" provided Deacon and John Reid's Dog with their first major hit in "I Want To Break Wind".
The album was notable for the band attempting to show their up to date knowledge of pop culture and current affairs with tracks such as "Keeps Crashing, This Microsoft Windows" and "Vending Machines (Or Back To Human-Run Convenience Stores)" being particularly potent explorations of the downsides of the increasing advances in technology of the early 80's.
Live Aid, A Kind Of Faggot and Final Tour (1986) Edit
At Live Aid, held at Wembley on 13 July 1985, in front of the biggest-ever TV audience of 1.9 billion, Queen performed some of their greatest hits, during which the sold-out stadium audience of 72,000 people collapsed in unison from heat exhaustion. The show's exploiters, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and other musicians such as Elton John, Cliff Richard and Dave Grohl stated that Queen stole their instruments and subsequently threatened to file for damages. This was eventually resolved by the band by inviting everyone to a lavish party where allegedly, scantily-clad giants served Coca-Cola on silver trays. An industry poll in 2005 ranked the band's performance at Live Aid as the greatest show-off of all time. Mercury's powerful, lavish chest hair became known as "The Best Chest Wig in the World".
When interviewed for Mojo magazine the band said the most amazing sight at Live Aid was to see the audience clapping to "Radio? Arrrgghhhh!!!". Brian May stated: "I'd never seen anything like that in my life and it wasn't calculated either. I remember thinking 'oh great, they've picked it up' and then I realised there had been an infestation of Locusts at the stadium and that the audience were frantically trying to shoo them away. But it was a great moment."
The band, now revitalised by the response to Live Aid – a "shot up the arse" Roger Taylor called it, and the ensuing increase in record sales, ended 1985 by releasing the single "One Vice", notable for being the first time that all four bandmembers received a writing credit for the one song without the need for a punch-up. Also, a limited-edition boxed set containing all Queen albums to date was released under the title of The Complete Buerks. The package included previously unreleased material, most notably Queen's non-album single of Christmas 1984, titled "Thank Fuck I Haven't Got To Work This Christmas".
After Live Aid, Queen had decided to continue on as a group by making another album, A Kind of Faggot. The first single of this album, One Vice, explains to the listener why he shouldn't eat chicken during recording sessions. The title track was a plaintive ode to the popular Black Country snack of the same name.
The remainder of the album was comprised of tracks featured in the soundtrack of the film "Scotsman". These were not well received by critics, featuring as they did considerable chunks of dialogue from the movie, interspersed with vocal samples of Mercury shouting "Ay-Oh!" and "It's Magic!" and lengthy cannon solos by Taylor.
However, the track "Who Wants To Live In Devon" (featuring an orchestra conducted by Michael Jackson) was widely considered to be a classic and has been used by the Devon Tourist Board as their marketing jingle since 1989.
In the summer of 1986, Queen went on their final tour with Freddie Mercury. A sold-out tour in support of A Kind of Faggot, to expand their sound and drown out Taylor's cannons they hired Spike Milligan on keyboards. The Faggot Tour's highlight was at Wembley Stadium in London and resulted in the live double album, Queen At Birmingham, released on CD and as a live concert VHS/DVD, which has gone five times platinum in the US and four times platinum in the UK. Queen could not book Wembley for a third night, owing to credit card issues but they did play at Knebworth Park. The show sold out within two hours and over 120,000 fans packed the park for what was Queen's final live performance with Mercury. To mark the occasion, Deacon, who was MC'ing the show, invited his co-writer, John Reid's Dog onto the stage for a rousing performance of "I Want To Break Wind".
The Clinical (1989) Edit
After working on various solo projects during 1988 (including Mercury's collaboration with Noddy Holder, "Brummie Loner"), the band released The Clinical in 1989. The album continued the direction of A Kind of Faggot, using a pop-rock sound mixed with a few heavy numbers and various Casio keyboards.
With The Clinical, the band tried to move into new territory and failed dismally. Critics felt it wasn't the strongest idea for a concept album - 10 songs developed from entries in the Mosby's Medical Encyclopedia - and it was criticised by fans and critics alike for its tinny sound production (it was recorded in an operating theatre) and its persistantly graphic medical themes. Another point of conflict was the conjoined four-head of Queen's members, which was achieved by a controversial doctor in India. Monty Python fans were upset over the eerie resemblance to their three-headed guard on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A number of tracks came in for criticism, including "Pancreoplasty", "The Invisible Mammogram" and "Was Gender Reassignment Worth It?", Mojo referring to these tracks as "disgustingly graphic in their wholesale misuse of complex medical terminology".
Despite this poor reception, the album spawned the European hits "I Want Gall Stones (Removing)", "Brain Tumour", "Scrotal", and "The Clinical". To this day, many hardcore fans cite "Testes Must Fall (At Onset Of Pubertal Development)" as a hidden highlight, despite its lyrics (written by the puberty researcher and convicted hebophile Dr. Tanner) being at odds with the Casio keyboard demonstration used for the backing track.
1989–1992: Sexual Innuendo, Mercury's Death and Tribute Edit
After fans noticed Mercury's increasingly gaunt appearance in 1988, the media reported that Mercury was seriously ill, with the loss of his mustache frequently being mentioned as a likely cause. Mercury flatly denied this, insisting he was merely suffering from a cold and putting his weight loss down to his new insect diet. Mercury had in fact shaved off his mustache during 1987, but did not make this development public and denied that anything was missing. For May and Taylor, the possibility of no longer earning royalties from new Queen albums was too terrifying to comprehend and Mercury was placed in an oxygen chamber 24 hours a day, absorbing cough syrup intravenously through a funnel held up using one of Taylor's cannons. This is credited for the particularly distinctive vocal sound on the group's next album.
Fearing that time was running out to earn more royalties, the band decided to continue making albums, starting with Sexual Innuendo (released at the beginning of 1991).
Despite his deteriorating health, the lead singer continued to contribute. For the last two albums made while Mercury was still alive, the band credited all songs to Queen, rather than specific members of the group, freeing them of internal gun fire and strangling matches. In 1990, Queen ended their contract with Capitol and signed with Disney's Mickey Records, which has since remained the group's music catalogue exploiter in the United States and Canada. In February that year, Mercury made his final public appearance when he joined the rest of Queen to collect the British Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Petroleum Industry. The band were promptly informed that the Brit Awards were in the neighbouring conference hall.
Sexual Innuendo was released in early 1991 with an eponymous number 1 UK hit and other charting singles released later in the year, which included "The Shag Must Go On". This song, released as a forerunner to Greatest Flops II in October 1991, featured archive footage of Queen's performances between 1981 and 1989, and along with the manner of its lyrics, this continued to fuel the media reports that Mercury was still sleeping around, although this was still officially denied.
Mercury was increasingly ill and could barely walk when the band recorded "The Shag Must Go On" in 1990. Because of this, May had concerns about whether he was physically capable of singing it. Recalling Mercury's successful performance May states; "he went in and killed it, completely lacerated his vocal cords". It took four weeks for Mercury to recover and two weeks for the blood to be removed from the control room windows.
For what the band believed could be their final studio album, themes of sexual exploration were explored to the farthest exploratory points of the band's previous explorations. The record was universally panned for its weak lyrics. NME commented "The record never really rises to the occasion," while Melody Maker remarked that "The record lacks spunk - there's no excitement and you never feel truly satisfied". Two singles were released from the record - "Handjob" and "The Shag Must Go On". "Handjob" reached number 69 in the UK and US and "The Shag Must Go On" reached number 2 in the UK and number 1 in the US and remained there for some time.
The band's second compilation, Greatest Flops II, followed in October 1991, which is the eighth best-selling album of all time in the UK and has sold 16 million copies worldwide.
On 23 November 1991, in a prepared statement made on his deathbed, Mercury confirmed that he had shaved off his mustache. Within 24 hours of the statement, he died of pneumonia at his Kensington garden centre.
On 20 April 1992, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert was held at London's Wembley Stadium to a 72,000-strong crowd. Performers, including an escaped Leopard, Robert Plant, Guns N' Roses, Elton John, David Bowie, George Michael, Annie Lennox, a seal, The Wurzels, and Basil Brush performed various Queen songs along with the three remaining Queen members (and Spike Milligan.) The concert is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as "The Least Successful Rock Star Benefit Concert". It was televised to over 1.2 billion viewers worldwide, and raised over £20,000,000 for barber shops.
Made in Droitwich (1995) Edit
In 1995, the remaining members of Queen, who were all alive despite media claims of the premature death of John Reid's dog, assembled at their local Safeway supermarket cafe. Here they were played several cassette tapes of the late Freddie Mercury singing about losing his virginity for the first time (and later |
and can stir up excitement among his audiences) does not. It may be easier to entertain sexual fantasies about a charming bachelor than a happily married husband and diligent father of two.
But that transformational election was as much about “Canada-mania” as it was about Trudeaumania. The success of the stylish and witty Expo 67 in Montreal had caused many in the outside world to notice Canada for the first time. By our own joyous celebration of the centennial of Confederation, we had discovered ourselves. The nation’s mood was expansive and optimistic. Essentially, Pierre Trudeau was blown into power with the prevailing wind at his back.
No such luck for Trudeau the Son. One statistic confirms the difference the passage of time has made: today only 14 percent of Canadians say they believe their children will enjoy a better life than they did. So we are not looking for a saviour. Mostly, we are looking for a good accountant. Today our proudest national boast is that our banks are boring. Indeed, if the prevailing wind benefits anyone, it would be Stephen Harper, since conservatives are assumed to be better than progressives at managing in difficult times.
In one way, the two Trudeaus are about equal in terms of their allure to voters. Trudeau the Father benefited because he fulfilled our need not to be outdone by the Americans, who had had a charismatic leader in John F. Kennedy. Trudeau the Son could be benefiting from our discomfort that we have yet to find our own Barack Obama.
The new phase he has embarked on as he leads his party into the next election will be far harder. His clumsy comments about the Boston Marathon bombings confirmed that he has only just started up a steep learning curve. Immigration minister Jason Kenney’s comment on Trudeau’s prime ministerial qualifications—“zero executive experience, zero governing experience, and zero record of putting forward substantive ideas to address the tough issues of the day”—is a view shared by quite a few others, including some Liberals. In other words, he may well catch the long pass and then, as Kim Campbell and John Diefenbaker did before him, drop it. Still, Justin Trudeau has already done something substantial; and, like his father, he has done it his way.
In an ebook published by the Toronto Star during the Liberal leadership race, reporter Susan Delacourt came up with a deft description for the centrepiece of Trudeau’s platform: “the no-policy policy.” He had spent the five months of the campaign telling voters precious little about what he would give them in terms of policies and programs. He did toss out a few thoughts: he wants 70 percent of young Canadians to attend universities or colleges or pursue apprenticeships; he is open to foreign takeovers of Canadian companies, seeing such transactions as necessary in a globalized world; he thinks we shouldn’t tinker with the Constitution. But that’s pretty much it.
Of course, the reason he avoided specifics, in addition to the fact that he is not a policy wonk, is that with two years until the next election any ideas he makes public will be attacked if they are flawed, or copied if they are good. Yet a no-policy policy is nevertheless a policy, and quite a coherent, creative one.
Its author was not Trudeau but Gerald Butts, his principal adviser, a.k.a. the backroom guy the leader listens to. They met at McGill University in Montreal in the early ’90s and became close friends. As a former principal secretary to Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, Butts knows a good many tricks of the political trade. He combines a first-rate intellect with the street smarts that come readily to the son of a Cape Breton coal miner.
While working for McGuinty, he developed a close relationship with Matthew Taylor, a senior aide to Tony Blair, then the British prime minister. From Taylor, Butts learned the political lesson that forms the foundation of Trudeau’s governance strategy.
Early in Blair’s first term, his government poured out a mass of ambitious, clever programs and policies, all of which got instantly bogged down. Only then did Blair and his staff realize, in Butts’ words, that “their levers of office weren’t attached to anything.” So they did an about-face. They set out to earn the trust of suspicious interest groups—in some cases creating think tanks to facilitate dialogue—before asking them to buy in to the proposed schemes. It was slow, exhausting, and at times tedious, but it worked.
As Butts puts it, “The days of governing effectively by fiat are over, and by governing effectively I mean actually making things happen out there in the country.” Gaining the trust of stakeholders before bombarding them with bright ideas is Trudeau’s answer to what the experts call “public policy futility.” This phenomenon confronts pollsters when they ask people if they want improvements to, say, health care, and get a resounding yes, only to be followed by an equally resounding no when they ask whether the government should get on with making them. Government thus becomes paralyzed, not by its own incompetence, as is widely assumed, but by a deep and entrenched public skepticism about, if not outright contempt for, government itself.
To make this dysfunction worse, the welfare state—since the end of World War II the defining contract between governed and governing—has passed its best-before date. For decades, new social programs could be implemented or existing ones expanded by passing on the costs to future generations, but we have come to the end of that road. From now on, and simply to remain solvent, welfare states will be taking more from their citizens in the form of taxes than they can provide in the form of services. Public discontent will grow, and so will public cynicism.
Reinforcing this trend is the so-called “new individualism.” In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam described how collective institutions, even informal ones like family dinners, were in decline. Condos, for example, are gated communities in all but name. In one way or another, more and more people are living by themselves; inevitably, many are living more and more for themselves rather than for the larger society. All institutions, from unions to mainstream religions, are affected, but none more so than political parties. Compared with what they were in the past, our parties are tiny; Canada may have the smallest, proportionally, among all of the industrial democracies. Nor does it help that contemporary political debates focus on managerial issues rather than ideological ones; even the NDP wants to cozy up to the capitalists. Our politics, like our banks, are boring.
The new individualism has a positive aspect, inasmuch as it reflects a better-educated electorate. Not just in universities and colleges, but also from the Internet—from Google, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and even Wikipedia—people can now learn for themselves much of what they once depended on learning from their representatives, the experts, and the media. And they can answer back, as many of Trudeau’s 221,000 Twitter followers do.
Justin Trudeau is attempting to reconnect the new individualists with the political system, offering cynics and skeptics a reason to give the system another chance. Simply put, he is trying to move Canadian politics into the twenty-first century, and the remedy he is advancing is like a mirror image of his own personality.
Of his father’s personality, Trudeau the Son has remarked that he was “extremely strong intellectually and academically, but it left him a little short on some of the interpersonal skills, the emotional intelligence.”
Beyond the least doubt, intellectual intelligence is Justin Trudeau’s short suit. He once declared, “I don’t read newspapers. I don’t watch the news. I figure if something happens, someone will tell me.” Yes, this was back in 2001, and it was mostly a young man’s braggadocio. But his credentials to govern are indeed scanty: he put in four years as a teacher at the Vancouver school he attended; he gave instruction in snowboarding; he chaired Katimavik, the youth organization funded by his father. Even his responsibilities as a party critic in Parliament have been of the second order: post-secondary education (anyway, a provincial responsibility); amateur sport; youth, citizenship, and immigration. By the time Trudeau the Father gained the Liberal leadership, he had, as justice minister, legalized homosexual relationships and bested Quebec premier Daniel Johnson in a public debate at a federal-provincial conference.
What the younger Trudeau does possess is an abundance of emotional intelligence. Some of it came to him via life’s hard knocks: the breakup of his parents’ marriage as the entire nation watched, and the tragic death of his beloved brother Michel in an avalanche. A major share of it comes from his mother, Margaret, troubled but brave. Some part, always overlooked, he inherited from his maternal grandfather, James Sinclair, an establishment rebel and federal cabinet minister who took an uninhibited pleasure in the zaniness of politics, especially at election times.
Trudeau is exceptional at street politics, because he genuinely likes people. He in turn is impossible not to like, a carefree extrovert, forever smiling, happy to kiss babies and their mothers, happy to hug their fathers, and blessed with a keen remembrance for peoples’ names. One savvy old Ottawa hand suggests another attraction: “It’s so refreshing that he doesn’t pretend to know everything.”
Add to this another legacy from his father, which enables him to attract attention to an unusual degree: Justin Trudeau is fearless. He showed this quality when he out-boxed Senator Patrick Brazeau, a stronger and larger opponent, in a charity bout, and since then he has taken up extreme surfing. Attacks by opponents faze him not in the least; he lights up when an aide warns him that one is coming. In an actual election, he will be hard to beat, although he is quite capable of beating himself—as in the toe-curling YouTube video in which his florid rhetoric convinces a scrum of reporters (some of which may be his own young volunteers) that he can solve all of Canada’s problems just with good intentions.
His most persuasive quality in an election will be his skill as an actor, a performer, a ham. Had Bill Clinton not made the phrase his hallmark, Trudeau would probably be telling audiences, “I feel your pain.” He has the intelligence to understand that people are not moved by analysis or reasoned argument but by emotion and empathy. He has thus spotted, as many others have yet to do, a major new political trend.
At its extreme, this involves questioning the Enlightenment, and since the Enlightenment gave us the scientific method, democracy, the rule of law, and the rule of reason, it is like questioning evolution; still, it is now beginning to be done. In his influential 2008 book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff took off after reason. The brain, he pointed out, is not “a disembodied thought machine,” but rather an intrinsic part of the body. According to scientists, about 98 percent of reasoning is unconscious and reflexive. What is needed in contemporary politics (hence Lakoff’s subtitle) is a new Enlightenment that adds emotion and empathy to reason. The best expression of this view—that because of the Internet the twenty-first century differs radically from previous ones—was offered by the rapper Kanye West on Twitter in September 2012. “Feelings,” he said, “are the only facts.”
He was on to something. Some of the world’s best and brightest, its bankers and financiers, almost brought about a global depression in 2008, whereas the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have managed to mobilize huge numbers of people with calls to action that are largely emotional. With no money or organization, comedian Beppe Grillo won the support of a quarter of the Italian electorate just by saying that what ailed the country was not debt but neck-deep corruption. Even Pierre Trudeau might say today not “reason over passion” but “reason and passion.”
This kind of comment comes as naturally to Trudeau the Son as his no-policy policy. Transforming it into practical politics is quite another matter. Butts talks about the need for “a structure in which all citizens can connect directly and easily [to government] if they want to,” which sounds like a sort of permanent genteel revolution, excruciatingly difficult to sustain. Trudeau offers generalities: “The Liberals must trust Canadians”; “Canadians want to again be nation builders”; “Young people are looking for something they can believe in.” So, yes, he could very well drop the ball. To compound his challenge, the three biggest issues that concern Canadians these days are economics, economics, and economics. There, he presents no serious threat to Harper.
Yet it is possible to see how Justin Trudeau could join the trio of leaders—John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau, and Jack Layton—who in different ways made the country different. By virtue of his personality and, as can never be underestimated, his name, he has helped revive the underlying sense, now part of Canada’s DNA, that there is more to the country than balancing the budget and trimming the fat, or that there should be and so can be again. His is the kind of fearlessness it took, more than a century back, to build a transcontinental railway and, more than a quarter-century back, to enact a charter of rights and freedoms. The ball may yet slip out of his hands, but it is still in play.
The Walrus thanks the Writers’ Trust of Canada for its financial support of this story.Ingraham: Obama Wants Hillary to Continue 'Globalist, Post-American' Agenda
Trump Supporter: Mexican Restaurant Refused to Serve Me
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani explained this afternoon why FBI Director James Comey made a "special exception" in recommending no charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney who worked with Comey, said that Clinton violated federal statute 18 U.S.C., section 793-F by mishandling classified information on her unsecured server.
During his remarks, Comey criticized Clinton for being "extremely careless" with classified information in her emails.
Giuliani said that there is no difference between someone being "extremely careless" and showing "gross negligence"
"I think that's why he walked out [without taking questions]. There's no way to square the two things," said Giuliani, arguing that Clinton cannot pass an FBI background check to gain top security clearance.
"If you took his report and made it an FBI background check, she couldn't get any kind of sensitive job in the government," he explained.
Giuliani argued that a prosecutor never proves intent using direct evidence, but rather through "circumstantial evidence," which is overwhelming in this case.
"Here's the biggest piece of the circumstantial evidence: the destruction of the 34,000 emails," he said, adding that a prosecutor could have instructed a jury that deleting the emails "infers guilty knowledge."
"This is the special exception for the Clintons."
Giuliani pushed back on Comey's assertion that any reasonable prosecutor would not bring charges in this case.
"I don't have any doubt I can win this case in front of a jury.... It is so discouraging to someone who loves the Justice Department to see a decision like this," he said.
At the very least, Giuliani said Clinton should "resign" as a candidate for the presidency.
Watch the full interview above.
McCain: 'It's Scary... Hillary Can Do Whatever She Wants and Get Away With It'
'Rigged System': Trump Reacts to News That Hillary Won't Face Charges
Judge Jeanine: 'The Clintons Repeatedly Violate Our Standard of Truthfulness'
Sharp-Shooting Army Vet Saves Bald Eagle Stuck Upside Down in TreeThe Hotelier have announced their follow-up to 2014's Home, Like Noplace Is There. The Massachusetts band's latest LP, Goodness, is out sometime this May via Tiny Engines. In anticipation of its release, the group have shared an album trailer featuring some new music. Directed by Xirin, the trailer depicts a woman heading out from the city into the countryside, where she encounters a group of nudists (needless to say, it's not safe for work). Check it out below. Update (3/12, 12:35 p.m.): The Hotelier have detailed Goodness. It's out May 27. Find the tracklist and (again, not safe for work) nudist-filled artwork below (via Bandcamp).
Goodness:
01 N 43° 59' 38.927" W 71° 23' 45.27''
02 Goodness Pt. 2
03 Piano Player
04 N 43° 33' 55.676" W 72° 45' 11.914"
05 Two Deliverances
06 Settle the Scar
07 Opening Mail for My Grandmother
08 N 42° 6' 3.001" W 71° 55' 3.295"
09 Soft Animal
10 Sun
11 You in This Light
12 Fear of Good
13 End of ReelAll humans were once hunter-gatherers. Back then, versatility came with the territory. There were only so many game animals, and they differed a lot in size, shape, and color. So you had to enjoy switching back and forth from one target animal to another. And you had to enjoy moving from one place to another. Sooner or later you’d have to.
Beginning 10,000 years ago, farmers made their appearance. Now monotony came with the territory. A plot of land wasn’t something you could forget while you took off somewhere else. It needed constant care. The tasks were also more repetitive: ploughing, sowing, harvesting …
Things worsened as farming became more advanced. You had to focus on one crop and a limited number of key tasks.
Different means of subsistence have selected for different mental traits, and this selection has had genetic consequences. Monotony avoidance has a heritability of 0.53 (Saudino, 1999). This predisposition has usually been a handicap in modern societies, so much so that it often leads to criminality. Males with a history of early criminal behavior tend to score high on monotony avoidance, as well as on sensation seeking and low conformity (Klinteberg et al., 1992).
Today, if you have trouble fitting into your society, you might still survive and reproduce. In the past, you probably wouldn’t. Other people would take your place in the gene pool and, over successive generations, their mental makeup would become the norm.
That’s gene-culture co-evolution. We have reshaped the world we live in, and this human-made world has reshaped us. After describing how our ancestors radically changed their environment, Razib goes on to write: “We were the authors of those changes, but in the process of telling that story, we became protagonists within it” (Khan, 2014).
China: a case study
Advanced farming—intensive land use, task specialization, monoculture—has profoundly shaped East Asian societies, particularly China. This is particularly so for rice farming. Because the paddies need standing water, rice farmers must work collectively to build, dredge, and drain elaborate irrigation networks. Wheat farming, by comparison, requires no irrigation and only half as much work.
Advanced farming seems to have favored a special package of predispositions and inclinations, including greater acceptance of monotony. This has been shown in two recent studies.
The first one was about boredom and how people experience it in their lives. The results from the 775 Chinese participants were then compared with the results from a previous survey of 572 Euro-Canadians. It was found that the Chinese participants were less likely to feel bored in comparable situations. They seemed to value low-arousal (calm, relaxation) versus high arousal (excitement, elation) in the case of Euro-Canadians (Ng et al., 2014).
The authors attributed their findings to cultural learning. One may wonder, however, why preference for low arousal persists in the face of China’s massive influx of high-arousal Western culture.
Relational thinking, collectivism, and favoritism
The second study had the aim of seeing whether the sociological differences between rice farmers and wheat farmers have led to differences in mental makeup. When 1,162 Han Chinese performed a series of mental tasks, the results differed according to whether the participants came from rice-farming regions or wheat-farming regions (Talhelm et al., 2014).
When shown a list of three items, such as “train”, “bus”, and “tracks”, and told to choose two items that pair together, people from rice-farming regions tended to choose “train and tracks,” whereas people from wheat-farming regions tended to choose “train and bus.” The former seemed to be more abstract relational in their thinking and the latter more relational abstract. This pattern held up even in neighboring counties along China’s rice-wheat border. People from the rice side of the border thought more relationally than did people from the wheat side.
A second task required drawing pictures of yourself and your friends. In a prior study, Americans drew themselves about 6 mm bigger than they drew their friends, Europeans drew themselves 3.5 mm bigger, and Japanese drew themselves slightly smaller. In the present study, people from rice regions were more likely than people from wheat regions to draw themselves smaller than they drew their friends. On average, people from wheat regions self-inflated 1.5 mm, and people from rice regions self-deflated -0.03 mm.
A third task required imagining yourself doing business with (i) an honest friend, (ii) a dishonest friend, (iii) an honest stranger, and (iv) a dishonest stranger. This person might lie, causing you to lose money. Or this person might be honest, causing you to make money. You could reward or punish this person accordingly. A previous study found that Singaporeans rewarded friends much more than they punished them. Americans were much more likely to punish friends for bad behavior. In this study, people from rice regions were more likely to remain loyal to friends regardless.
Interestingly, these findings came from people with no connection to farming at all. They grew up in a modern urban society, and most were too young to have known the China that existed before the economic reforms of the late 1970s. It looks like rice regions have favored hardwiring of certain psychological traits: less abstract thinking and more relational thinking, less individualism and more collectivism, and less impartiality toward strangers and more favoritism toward kin and friends.
Why farming sucks, for you but not for me
These findings corroborate the ethnographic literature on the differences in mentality between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Hunter-gatherers typically see farming as a kind of slavery, and they have trouble understanding well-meaning outsiders who want to turn them into land-slaves.
Yes, for the same land area, farming can produce much more food. But it’s hard work, not only physically but mentally as well. Humans had to undergo a change in mentality before they could make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming
Those humans ended up transforming not just their physical landscape but also their social and cultural landscape … and ultimately themselves. By creating new values and social relations, they changed the rules for survival and reproduction, thereby changing the sort of mentality that future generations would inherit.
Humans transformed the world through farming, and the world returned the favor.Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages
Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org. We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code.
Getting over there was no small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things.
Background
The rationale isn’t the focus of this post, but suffice it to say that Bazaar isn’t very widely used, and many projects are abandoning it. Eric S. Raymond wrote a good post on the Emacs dev list about why they need to move from Bazaar to git. The same rationale applies to Bugzilla: “Sticking to a moribund version-control system will compound and exacerbate the project’s difficulty in attracting new talent.”
So, moving on, I started off scouring the Internet to find the best way to perform this migration. One major complication is the fact that we want to keep mirroring (one-way) to Bazaar for at least a while, since the main suggested way to upgrade Bugzilla is from bzr.mozilla.org. It was deemed unreasonable to require existing installations to switch to git to obtain a small security fix, so we’ll continue to mirror changes to Bazaar for some time.
Initial migration
I found a few posts here and there about people who had done migrations like this, but the most useful was a post by David Roth from last year that detailed how to preserve Bazaar’s commit metadata, specifically bug-tracker metadata, which Bugzilla has used on virtually every commit since switching from CVS. It involves using the --no-plain option with bzr fast-export and then translating the output to something git understands.
Interestingly, Roth’s translation script was written in C#, not my personal first choice for such a task (or any, really, since I don’t generally develop for Windows). However it compiled fine under Mono, so I could run it on a Linux box. Something I learned, though, is to not try this kind of thing on OS X, where, by default, the filesystem is case-insensitive.
As much as I’d prefer to deal with a language with which I am more comfortable, I dislike duplicated effort even more. I used Roth’s C# script as a basis, modifying it a bit for our needs. The metadata is in the form <bug URL> <resolution>. Rather than editing existing commit messages, I just took that string and pasted it to the bottom of the commit message, but only if the bug number was not already in the commit message. This actually revealed a few typos in the “Bug 123456” strings that generally start commit messages.
There turned out to a few other subtle bugs, like the fact that a file which is both renamed and modified in the same commit shows up, in the output from bzr fast-export, as being modified under the original name. Thus if the delete is processed first, it looks like bzr has modified an nonexistent file. Those were easy to see by comparing the contents of every file before and after migration (admittedly just for the last revision).
Since there are a lot of branches on bzr.mozilla.org, I created a bash script to record them all and make sure none were missed. It output the pre-/postmigration diff of md5 sums as well as doing a git repack for each repo, after all branches were migrated.
One thing I forgot was pushing tags via the --tags option to git push ; I had to do that manually after the migration. That’s also when I discovered that the same tag existed in several related bzr branches which were all combined into one git repo. This is, of course, not allowed in git. It made me think more about how Bugzilla uses certain tags, like current-stable, which are moved after each release. In git this requires the --force option to git push and is a big no-no if the remote repo is shared. I learned that, in fact, this is also the case in bzr, though perhaps it’s regarded as less of a sin than it is in git. Anyway, I’ve since realized that those should be branches, named appropriately (per branch). Despite them not being branches in the standard sense—they’ll always point to somewhere at or behind a version branch and never fork—it’s perfectly acceptable to move them, as opposed to tags, and since they’ll always be fast-forwarded, they won’t take any more space than a lightweight tag.
Mirroring
This was a harder problem. Originally, I tried to use the bzr-git extension, and it failed when I tried to pull in changes from git. I exchanged some emails with bzr-git’s author, Jelmer Vernooij, and he said that to keep an existing bzr branch in sync with a newly formed git repo is impossible at the moment: “This is essentially the ‘roundtripping’ support that we’ve been trying to achieve with bzr-git for a while. It’s a nontrivial problem (since it requires all semantics from bzr to be preserved when pushing to git).” Considering bzr-git hasn’t had a new release in two years, I won’t be holding my breath.
Luckily (and perhaps somewhat unfortunately) Bugzilla has jumped VCSes before, as I hinted above. With the old bzr-to-cvs script as a starting point, I created a git-to-bzr script—in, of course, Perl, as the original.
This script is essentially an automated way of applying individual commits from a git branch to a bzr branch. For each commit, the entire file tree is copied from a local git clone to a local bzr checkout, bzr add and remove are executed where needed, and the changes committed with the original author, contributor, and date preserved. The script also parses out the standard “Bug X:” commit-message format and passes it to bzr’s --fixes commit option. A file called.gitrev in the bzr repo tracks the associated git commit ID for each bzr commit.
To avoid excessive disk activity, since the script polls git and bzr for changes, the script uses bzr cat to check the contents of the.gitrev file and git ls-remote to get the ID of the last git commit. If they are equal, no further actions are performed.
Summing up
And that, folks, is how you can migrate from bzr to git! The initial migration is pretty straightforward, more so if you don’t care about any bzr commit metadata. It was unfortunate that there was no off-the-shelf way to sync the repos afterwards, but the basic idea isn’t too complicated.
For more, there’s the project page on our wiki, and all the scripts used are in a GitHub repo for your perusal. I’m no VCS expert—I’ve never heavily used bzr, and I’m constantly learning new things about git—but feel free to ask me questions if you want our process further clarified.Story highlights U.S. didn't have "crystal clear idea" who hostages were, Pentagon spokesman says
Hostages "faced imminent mass execution," according to Pentagon
70 hostages were liberated in the operation, officials say
Can we crush ISIS in the chaos we left behind in Iraq? A CNN special report, "Long Road to Hell: America in Iraq," airs Monday at 9 p.m. ET.
(CNN) The Pentagon identified the U.S. Army soldier who died as part of a rescue mission in Northern Iraq earlier this week as Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, of Roland, Oklahoma.
About 70 hostages facing "imminent mass execution" were rescued in the operation at an ISIS-controlled prison that killed Wheeler, 39, according to a Pentagon statement.
Wheeler, who was was part of the Army's Delta Force and assigned to Headquarters of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is the first American to die in combat in Iraq since November 2011.
Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler
The hostages he was helping to rescue included more than 20 members of the Iraqi Security Forces, local residents and several ISIS fighters accused of spying. They were liberated Thursday after a helicopter assault that involved U.S. special operations troops as well as Kurdish and Iraqi forces, U.S. officials said.
"There was not a lot of time," one U.S. official told CNN on condition of anonymity. "The threat of execution was imminent."
Read MoreWe could be just a couple of months away from gaining an insight into what Apple plans to do with iOS 7, but as the Cupertino company’s software development team continues to work in collaboration with lead hardware designer Jony Ive to create the next revision, many Apple fans have also been offering their own ideas on what could be done to improve the look of the famed mobile OS. We’ve seen quite a few concept designs hitherto, but a theme we recently discovered over on Cydia rather delightfully combines elements of the current iOS interface with a tiled, Windows Phone-esque appearance which in turn borrows from the HTC One’s Sense 5.0 design. It’s an interesting recipe for sure, but as I suspect you’ll agree after seeing the screenshots below, it’s one that works very well indeed.
On the main screen, you have the standard clock / date and weather combination along the top. When either is tapped, the Clock or Weather app is subsequently revealed, allowing you to quickly set an alarm, or check the more detailed weather reports. The rest of home screen interface is dissected by these rather beautiful tiles, with each containing a set of icons specific to the tile’s theme.
The look instantly draws comparisons with Windows Phone 8, but while Microsoft’s smartphone ecosystem operates in a vertical scrolling motion, this theme uses the native horizontal gestures to navigate between pages. Along the bottom are five icons which tell you which page you are on, while also allowing you to jump between screens without scrolling one-by-one.
Despite looking nice, there are obviously a couple of limitations to this kind of design. First of all, the squared-off look doesn’t quite match the smooth, glossy titles borrowed from the current look of iOS, and with no vertical scrolling, the kind of poetic fluency offered by Windows Phone leaves this experience feeling comparatively deflated.
Irrespective of those issues, this theme is one of the best I can recall seeing, and although my not-so-secret liking for Windows Phone’s UI may have something to do with it, the design is still very nice to look at.
It works only for jailbroken iPhone 5 / iPod touch 5G devices, and requires WinterBoard, Gridlock 2.0, Iconoclasm, PageJumps, PerPageHTML and Five Icon Dock in order to work. If you already have those tweaks, or don’t mind downloading the ones you’re missing, simply search for ConceptOS on Cydia under ZodTTD & MacCiti repo and get downloading. Installation instructions are included in the README file found in the theme’s folder. Make sure you read that to setup and configure the theme and widgets.
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone and iPad.
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Related StoriesSEATTLE — One night this spring, the rapper Lil Pump, 16, with braces on his teeth, was asleep — or something like it — on the couch in the upstairs green room at the Columbia City Theater here, his blond and pink dreads dangling in front of his face and a pair of Gucci high-tops slung around his neck.
In walked his longtime friend and fellow rapper Smokepurpp, 20, in a loosefitting plaid shirt over a Nirvana T-shirt, wondering, “Who got Xanax and Percocet?”
In the high-ceilinged, brick-walled main room, around 300 fans were bouncing off one another, waiting for the show to begin. They were young — the bar was effectively closed, and a woman was selling cans of Sunkist and Minute Maid Lemonade from an ice-filled tub.
Eventually Lil Pump roused himself and sneaked out the back door. When he finally made it to the stage — joining Smokepurpp, who had been scheduled to go on after him — he was received full-throatedly, rowdily, sweatily. Perhaps a little too much so: Someone in the crowd said something Lil Pump didn’t take kindly to, and he replied with a kick to a young man’s head. Soon, the front of the room was a royal rumble, sending combatants from the stage to the floor, and some on the floor running for the doors.What is conflict?
Beginners are always told to have conflict in every scene. Keep that story moving! But what is conflict?
Too often it is taken to mean an "Odd Couple's" squabbling. That's an easy and obvious conflict. For instance, she's an urban animal, into cappuccino and corporate power games, he works a small ranch and loves the land; they are thrown together when her company decides to develop land next to his; they meet as enemies, but sparks fly.... Many an amusing and sexy novel has been written on the premise of opposites attracting as much as they repel, but this is not the only form conflict can or should take.
Conflict can be more subtle, more complex, more interesting than "she says tomayto, he says tomahto." Conflict is opposing desires, mismatches, uncertainty, deadlines, pressures, incompatible goals, uneasiness, tension. We are all caught up in some of these conflicts every day. And so should your characters. A convincing story has many conflicts built into it, layered and connected. The first layer is inside your characters. Once you know what these are, you can use them to make the conflicts between the characters more convincing and interesting.
A character's inner conflict is not just being in two minds about something, not just being torn between obvious incompatibles ("I want to be a priest, and yet I love her") but is about being in a new situation where old attitudes and habits war with and hinder the need for change. For instance, a man who drives himself to succeed because he doesn't want to be like his happy-go-lucky father is suddenly confronted with a situation where he isn't winning. Or an executive discovers that her ambition to be vice president of her company is being thwarted by her own self-doubt. This war inside each of your characters makes them act and react in complex ways.
You show these internal conflicts not by means of internal dialogue (which is a cop-out and is dull), but by showing your characters responding to their own inner compulsions. She, for instance, decides to confront her own self-doubts by taking on a no-win project where the local people are opposing a development. She is determined to be hard-nosed, prove she's vice-president material. He is always confrontational, fearing that one minute of negotiation would be the first step to becoming a wimp like his father. You have a grade-A opposites-attract situation here, yet it is believable because we understand why each of them is acting the way they do, why they are foolishly stubborn, why it's important for each of them to win.
A character's inner conflict can be between what he thinks he wants and what he really wants. The rancher thinks |
Christensen has to contrast this with all the other far worse things that Big Brother did. But how did Big Brother get to be Big Brother? A little bit at a time. Try being an active member and criticizing a Mormon “Authority” in public or publishing something. See what happened to Rock Waterman, here. This is not Big Brother watching?
This point seems lost on Christensen but I’m not surprised. And who STILL has the dead links even in their current article?
Christensen claims:
The whole concept of paradigm debate and the influence of theory on experiment design, testing, and interpretation has also been a prominent theme in my LDS writings since my first publication in 1990. And Stephenson’s conspicuous failure to address that basic underlying premise means that the beam in his own eye remains in place to obscure his vision. Everything that follows in his essay suffers thereby.
Well, now I’m a hypocrite. See PART II of my response where I do just that. I guess he didn’t bother to read that. He can find it here. Christensen talks about personal responsibility to be informed, (which should be a must before making accusations of hypocrisy) but he doesn’t even think to check if there was a response somewhere other than Jeremy’s CES site. He had at least five months to find it. He then writes,
Likewise, Stephenson seems to forget that he is an apologist for Jeremy Runnells and their mutual unfaith, which claims that Joseph Smith fabricated the Book of Mormon. Their conclusions are at as much risk of bias and distortion as mine are — but Stephenson apparently cannot see this. He is objective and rational; all who disagree are merely schizophrenic apologists.
No, not nearly as much as we will see below. Christensen just admitted to bias and distortion. What is my bias? Why would I distort? Can he answer those questions? Has he? No. Don Bradley disagrees with me quite often. I don’t consider him schizophrenic. But then, he doesn’t call me and my friends hypocrites and question their honesty and motives. (Not even subtlety). And I don’t question his. He’s not an Apologist like Christensen.
Notice that Christensen claims that we have mutual “unfaith”. This is an interesting way to describe us but totally wrong. I still have faith, but don’t believe Joseph Smith was a prophet. Is Christensen somehow better than I am because he still has “faith” in Joseph Smith’s claims? Seems so. He has read and believes the “superior” research. Got it.
And I have no problems with being called an apologist for Jeremy as I was defending him. FAIRMORMON has an army of people arrayed against Jeremy, including Christensen. But I’m just not invested in Jeremy as Christensen is in Mormonism, therefore who has more to lose here? Jeremy is just my friend. I have no reason not to present the evidence in a balanced way the best I can. I had nothing to do with Mormonism for 25 years after I left the church. I just find Mormon History fascinating. (I always did, even when I was a member of the Church). But I guess that is something that Christensen can’t fathom. I have an “agenda”. No, I just dislike the dishonesty of those Mormon Apologists.
I, in fact, disagree that some of Jeremy’s evidence in the CES Letter should be there. One example is the Vernal Holley maps. We discussed it. Jeremy even sent me the letter and asked me to evaluate some of the claims it makes and provide more source material. Jeremy is open to valid criticisms. He is just not open to being called names by Christensen, however subtle and folksy sounding. He is far from “brittle” and unbending. This is simply an ad hoc assumption concocted by Christensen.
Jeremy can also speak for himself and I’m not going to spend my life defending him as Christensen and Lindsay are obviously spending theirs defending Mormonism. We will see who is distorting what below when we get into the specific claims, which is what I really want to address instead of Christensen’s 30+ pages of esoteric bullshit and whining.
Ah, and the good old “rhetorical effects.” Well, where was I not accurate? Christensen just doesn’t like the word peepstone it seems, even though Mormon Authorities have done the reverse, calling what anyone besides a Mormon “prophet” used, that very thing. Here is Marion G. Romney from 1956:
Now, the Prophet gave other tests applicable to special claims and doctrines, of which the following two are typical.
(1) He made it clear that there is never more than one man on the earth at a time authorized to receive revelations for the Church. This principle answered the claims of the purported peepstone revelations. (Conference Report, April 1956, p.73).
Is this just for rhetorical effects? Here is Marvin S. Hill doing the same thing,
Opposition to Joseph came from the followers of Hyrum Page, who had a peepstone and had received a handful of revelations of his own. About this time, Smith had ceased to rely heavily upon his own seerstone for inspiration, and the change was disturbing to Cowdery and the Whitmers. (Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge, p.28).
Why did Romney not use “seer stone” in relation to those revelations he did not deem as “authentic” to the truth claims of Mormonism? In all actuality, they were called both peepstones/peekstones and seerstones. I’ve made it clear that I disbelieve that Joseph Smith was a “seer”, so why should I pander to Christensen’s obvious bias? And I suppose that Dale Morgan should be accused of the same thing:
That the senior Joseph did much to launch his son upon his troubled career as a diviner and peepstone seer, that his unbounded extravagance of statement as to the wonders his son could see contributed largely to his celebrity, is clear from all accounts; the more fantastic stories of Joseph’s early powers and the marvels he discerned are to be traced back to the wagging tongue of his father.(John Phillip Walker, Dale Morgan, p.229).
Mike Quinn writes,
The excavation of the Logan (Utah) temple site during the 1880s unearthed a stone which a local woman (“Peepstone Lady”) used to locate lost animals and the body of a missing person. (D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, p.203)
Just this year, Mike Quinn wrote,
The second object of divine revelation that LDS headquarters has recently publicized is the brown-colored seer stone that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon in 1829. In 2015, the Church officially clarified a century of misconceptions about how the translation occurred. I must admit that the official photographs of his artifact are stunning, and I can see why Joseph Smith refused to give it [back] to Willard Chase after the farmboy found while digging a well on Chase’s property. Like the common seer stones or “peek stones” in early America, Mormonism’s founding prophet dictated the translation while looking at the brown stone in a hat held close to his face for about six weeks during 1829. (D. Michael Quinn, Using Material Objects to “Receive” Revelations, Sunstone Symposium, 18 October, 2015, 5)
Jan Shipps called it a peepstone in The Prophet Puzzle. Is she guilty too, of simple “rhetorical effects?” Of having an agenda and distortion? Does Christensen want to criticize her for that? Good luck with that.
So are we to call what Joseph used a “peepstone” when he looked for buried treasure and then a “seerstone” when he used it for “revelations”? In the new Ensign article they don’t want to make this distinction, they stick to the “faithful” name calling.
Why be so concerned with this distinction? The fact that this bothers Christensen is rather telling, is it not? It shows that he is viewing things through a “faithful” lens, and so his claims to a better methodology are suspect and his admitted bias is right there to see.
Here is something interesting that Alma Jensen recently said, (Mormon (LDS) Institute Director from the University of Utah Institute of Religion) reportedly by someone who was there,
“Yes, Joseph used the seer stone to search for treasure. Just because he misused the stone, does that mean he’s not a prophet?”
Why is it called a seer stone when Smith misuses it, but a peepstone when Hiram Page does? Is there any kind of good explanation for this? That is why I call them peepstones. It is not just a matter of rhetoric, what Smith did was called “peeping” or “peeking” in his day. (Even when he “translated” the Book of Mormon). See this interesting article about Mary Jane Thompson (Joseph F. Smith’s cousin) and her “peeping” in 1856 Utah:
On July 18, 1856, she [Martha Ann Smith] wrote, [to Joseph F. Smith] “Ma[r]y Jane has been looking is [sic] the peap stone for you and she seen you[.]” …Referring to the same event Martha Ann wrote of, Jane wrote: “Mary Jane saw you only last Friday, Martha will tell you how” (Jane Fisher to JFS, Great Salt Lake City, July 20, 1856). Jane again wrote to Joseph F. Smith, again mentioning the peepstone, on May 11, 1857: “I think you have stayed long enough, away, and if you do not come home soon, more than mary, Jane, will take a look in the peepstone. I should like to see you, in little grass House.”
So in the days before webcams, there were other media for communication–something faster than mail, and even more virtual than photography: a peep stone.
So what makes this a peepstone and Joseph’s a “seerstone”? Modern Mormon preference. Was Mary Jane “misusing” the stone? Was Joseph? Interesting questions.
Christensen whines that I didn’t disclose his entire history when I mentioned his experience about “knowing” Moroni was a prophet. Yet, he didn’t do that with Jeremy as I pointed out in my rebuttal to him. I guess he really ought to have read that second part. The thing is, my point didn’t need the bio. It spoke for itself and Christensen loves to talk about himself.
And did I not share a LIVE link to the podcast where Christensen makes his comments on my blog? Anyone could go and listen to it for themselves in one click. This is something that FAIRMORMON and Christensen do not do. The link in his CURRENT article is still dead to the CES letter and to Jeremy’s posting of Part I of The Sky Is Falling. And where is a specific link to Jeremy’s podcast where he explains his background and reasons for leaving the Church? I can’t find one.
Christensen then creates a straw man by claiming that I stated that “cognitive dissonance provides the means by which apologists like me ignore “facts”. Nope, I never said that. Christensen even quotes me. I said,
“Christensen appears to be unable to grasp that flexibility does not change facts while cognitive dissonance can allow you to live with and ignore them.”
Notice my wording: can allow you to live with them and ignore them. I argued that the part that applies to Christensen is his dissonance allows him to live with those facts. (not ignore them). Since he loves to talk about himself, he has made it clear that he is well read, and so is not ignoring the facts. This is very simple. Christensen mentions Edward Ashment’s excellent article, Reducing Dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study, and I highly recommend it. Of course, everything he doesn’t like is a “rhetorical tool” to Christensen. His rebuttal to this was a quote by Wendy Ulrich:
People who put cognitive dissonance forward as the explanation for the high level of commitment and sacrifice among some Mormons ignore that by the time the prophecy of the world ending in Festinger’s study had failed three times virtually everyone left the group, cognitive dissonance theory or no. People may rationalize their behavior and beliefs for a time, but they will not continue to do so indefinitely unless their beliefs are producing the expected payback–as long as they have reasonable choices about what to believe.
This misapplies my argument. It is not about those who have a high level of commitment and sacrifice among some Mormons, it is about those who engage in disingenuous apologetics. Again, what about the failings of Warren Jeffs who also predicted the end of the world and it never came to pass? His movement is still going strong and has been for many decades. I strongly suggest he watch the movie Prophet’s Prey. And perhaps Christensen ought to think about why he is even challenging Jeremy Runnells.
Is it because many Mormon are feeling uncomfortable about much of what he published, so much so that the Church authored their anonymous Essays soon after the CES Letter was published? Is Christensen uncomfortable with what Jeremy published? If not, why spend so much time writing long Essays about him, and spending months to answer me? If this is all so frivolous, (the claims by Jeremy) why bother? Jeremy published the CES Letter in April of 2013 and the first anonymous Essays appeared seven months later.
But Christensen claims he has no dissonance and that I don’t understand the term and am misapplying it. Perhaps then, his problem is just DoubleThink. As George Orwell explains,
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink. (Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, part 1, chapter 3, pp 32).
This is why to Christensen, the truth is “in the eye of the beholder”. In his world, I suppose it is.
And claiming that I (or Jeremy) didn’t address “Old World evidences for the Book of Mormon”? I do, in Part II of “The Sky is Falling” which has been published since April. Jeremy does so, here. What I find astoundingly hypocritical of Christensen is that he (in many instances) acts like Jeremy has published nothing but the original CES Letter even though he will reference Jeremy’s other writings when it is convenient for him.
Nothing about the so called “Old World evidences for the Book of Mormon” makes me uncomfortable. (Nice try with endeavoring to put his own dissonance–or whatever it is since I am so wrong–on me). As for Thomas Kuhn, I addressed some of my concerns in Part II of The Sky is falling, and others have challenged Christensen here. Christensen did not really address those challenges, but simply left a short comment. As Runtu wrote,
In essence, Kevin is turning Kuhn on his head, as Kuhn’s notion of a crisis of faith is a point at which one clings stubbornly to the “rules,” despite the presence of anomaly. It’s not about “values” but about accepting the prevailing paradigm as a boundary of inquiry. The paradigm shifts (and only just enough) to accommodate anomaly when the rules can’t explain them anymore. “Conclusions among individuals will differ” seems completely unrelated to a discussion of paradigm and shift.
He then takes a jab at me for calling Joseph Fielding Smith a prophet before he was the Church President. But doesn’t he realize that Smith was ordained a “prophet, seer, and revelator” when he became an apostle? This kind of silly posturing is all Christensen has to offer. His apathy towards Joseph Fielding Smith’s racism when he was an apostle (prophet, seer & revelator) and Church President is appalling. Dissonance anyone? It wasn’t Smith who lifted the Priesthood Ban when he was the PRESIDENT (The chief Apostle), now, was it?
Most the the FAIRMORMON Apologists that I’ve crossed paths with have disappointed me with their deceptive tactics and justifications for Mormon Leadership’s racism. Christensen is no different. He writes,
Stephenson cannot help but demonstrate how a hidden ideology lurks behind his arguments.
So, point of view determines truth? What does point of view have to do with it?
For years, Joseph Fielding Smith denied that Joseph Smith used his peepstone to translate the Book of Mormon. He also called black people “an inferior race.” Did his evaluation of the evidence and point of view make these things true? Or make Joseph Fielding Smith a true prophet?
What does Joseph Fielding Smith’s denial regarding the historical use of a peepstone (seer stone, if labels applied by the people involved matter) have to do with his being a true prophet? What do his views of race have to do with his being a true prophet? Should I assume that the answers are self-evident, or should I actually ask the question and consider that such a question is most appropriate only from January 23, 1970 to July 2, 1972, when the office of prophet was actually his? I’ll hazard the risk of making my own ideology explicit so you can see what happens when I do it.
So exactly what, is my “hidden ideology”? Christensen is strangely silent about this. He speaks of his own ideologies. All this is, is Christensen bragging about how much humbler he is than anyone else. He writes,
He argues based on a premise that a prophet wouldn’t make or perpetuate a mistake in history. And a prophet wouldn’t reflect any of the now embarrassing prejudices of his time and culture.
I get this all the time from Mormon Apologists. You see, this is the only way they can make their prophets blatant racism work. And see how he turns it into I advocate that their prophets can’t make a mistake “in history”. (Whatever that is). And I am well aware that men are human, and a prophet is a man. Joseph Smith said,
I never told you I was perfect but there are no errors in the revelations I have taught.
Mormon “authorities” still claim there are no errors in the “revelations”. Joseph Fielding Smith’s racism was institutional. He believed that God instigated the racism in Mormonism. (Of course it wasn’t racism to them). He taught that blacks were an “inferior race”. That God had revealed it so through his “prophets”. I have a real problem with this. But Christensen doesn’t get it. I simply have an agenda. Yeah, right.
I addressed peepstones above, but here is Joseph Fielding Smith in Doctrines of Salvation, Volume III:
EARLY SPECULATION AS TO SITE OF NEW JERUSALEM. When it was made known that the New Jerusalem was to be built in America, the saints began to wonder where the city would be. Hiram Page, one of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, secured a “peep stone” by means of which he claimed to receive revelation for the Church. Among the things he attempted to make known was where this city was to be built, Considerable commotion naturally prevailed, and even Oliver Cowdery was deceived into accepting what Hiram Page had given. The Prophet Joseph Smith had some difficulty in correcting this evil and composing the minds of the members of the Church. (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, Vol. III, 500).
So why can’t I apply that criteria to Joseph Smith since I do not believe that his “revelations” were authentic? Should I be dishonest and apply what I think is a Mormon prop? This is simply Christensen’s double standard, folks. Was this simply rhetoric on the part of Fielding Smith? Will Christensen admit he also had an “agenda”? No, he instead claims, “He actually comes out looking very good…”
How does the above show a “hidden agenda” on my part? First, all Mormon Apostles are ordained prophets, seers, and revelators, and Christensen ought to know this and so, is being dishonest here. Claiming that such a question is “most appropriate only from January 23, 1970 to July 2, 1972” when JSF became the President of the Church is simply disingenuous. Smith was actually ordained an Apostle, (thus a prophet, seer, & revelator) on April 7, 1910. As Jeffrey R. Holland explained,
Against such times as come in our modern day, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve are commissioned by God and sustained by you as prophets, seers, and revelators, with the President of the Church sustained as the prophet, seer, and revelator, the senior Apostle, and as such the only man authorized to exercise all of the revelatory and administrative keys for the Church. … Are the heavens open? Does God reveal His will to prophets and apostles as in days of old? That they are and that He does is the unflinching declaration of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to all the world. (“Prophets, Seers, and Revelators”, Jeffrey R. Holland, Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, General Conference, October 2004).
So how is Joseph Fielding Smith a true prophet when he teaches and condones racism? Dallin Oaks makes my point when he claimed:
Stand fast with the leadership of the church. I heard President Hinckley in describing a revelation he had received concerning the building of small temples form which he will soon benefit in this part of the world that he did not claim perfection that there was only one perfect person who had ever lived upon this earth and even the prophets of God were not perfect. But, as the Prophet Joseph Smith said, on a great occasion, ‘there is no error in the teachings. ’Spoken under the influence of the spirit of the Lord, witnessed to be true in the hearts and minds of those who have the gift of the Holy Ghost, those teachings are the Lord’s will to his people. And I testify to you that these teachings are true and that if we hold with and follow the current leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, we will stay on the path toward eternal life. (Dallin Oaks, “Boise Rescue Transcript”, 117, On tape, 1:12:38)
“There is no error in the teachings.” The problem with Christensen’s version of what a constitutes a prophet, is that it is not what Mormon prophets themselves declare they are. Their teachings (the ones that don’t fit the Apologist’s personal criteria) are error filled opinions that aren’t much good for anything. This is Christensen’s version of Mormonism, nothing more. His agenda is promoting his own opinion and condemning those who don’t jump on board his Apologist band wagon. He wants us to give Joseph Fielding Smith a pass on his blatant racism simply because he was not the “head prophet” at the time. Yet these “apostles” are all ordained and sustained as prophets when they become apostles. What a silly and disingenuous argument.
As Brigham Young taught,
An Apostle is the highest office in the Church & kingdom of God. Joseph Smith was a Prophet Seer & Revelator before he was baptized or ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood or had any Authority to administer one of the ordinances of the house of the Lord. He was afterwards ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood then to the Melchizedek Priesthood & Apostleship which is the highest office in the Church & kingdom of God on Earth. When a man is ordained to the Apostleship & keys thereof if he dies in faith He will hold those keys to all Eternity. All the Prophets Patriarchs & Apostles who ever did or ever will hold the keys of the Apostleship if faithful unto death will hold them forever.
Brigham Young also taught,
Many may say, “br. Brigham, perhaps you are mistaken; you are liable to err, and if the mob should not come, after all, and we should burn up our houses and learn that the Government had actually countermanded their orders and that no armies are coming to Utah, it would be a needless destruction. We have all the time felt that there was no need of leaving our houses. How easy it is for men to be mistaken, and we think a Prophet may be mistaken once in a while.” I am just as willing as the Lord, if he is disposed to make me make mistakes, and it is none of the business of any other person. If a people do the best they know, they have the power to ask and receive, and no power can prevent it.
And if the Lord wants me to make a mistake, I would as soon be mistaken as anything else, if that will save the lives of the people and give us the victory. If you get such feelings in your hearts, think of what my conclusion on the subject is, and do not come to my office to ask me whether I am mistaken, for I want to tell you now perhaps I am.
Do I want to save you? Ask that question. But John, what are you doing? Are you not an Elder in Israel? “Yes, I am a High Priest.” What is the office of an High Priest? John replies, “I do not know, without it is to whip my wife, knock down my children and make everybody obey me; and I believe a High Priest presides over an Elder.” You will find some Elders just about that ignorant. Let me tell you what the office of a High Priest and an Elder is. It holds the keys of the revelation of Jesus Christ; it unlocks the gates of heaven. It opens the broad windows of revelation from eternity. John, what are you about, imagining that I may be mistaken? or that br. Heber may be mistaken? Why do you not open the windows of heaven and get revelation for yourself? and not go whining around and saying, “do you not think that you may be mistaken? Can a Prophet or an Apostle be mistaken?” Do not ask me any such question, for I will acknowledge that all the time, but I do not acknowledge that I designedly lead this people astray one hair’s breadth from the truth, and I do not knowingly do a wrong, though I may commit many wrongs, and so may you. But I overlook your weaknesses, and I know by experience that the Saints lift their hearts to God that I may be led right. If I am thus borne off by your prayers and faith, with my own, and suffered to lead you wrong, it proves that your faith is vain. Do not worry. (Brigham Young, sermon given on 21 March 1858, Salt Lake Tabernacle, transcribed by George D. Watt, Richard S. Van Wagoner, The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, Vol. 3, pp. 1417-1418)
Notice how it would be “the Lord” making Young make a mistake. And again on the same day in the afternoon session Young clarified what he was talking about:
I have told you what causes apostacy. It arises from neglect of prayers and duties, and the Spirit of the Lord leaves those who are thus negligent and they begin to think that the authorities of the church are wrong. In the days of Joseph the first thing manifested in the case of apostacy was the idea that Joseph was liable to be mistaken, and when a man admits that in his feelings and sets it down as a fact, it is a step towards apostacy, and he only needs to make one step more and he is cut off from the church. That is the case in any man. When several of the Twelve were cut off, the first step was that Joseph was a prophet, but he had fallen from his office and the Lord would suffer him to lead the people wrong. When persons get that idea in their minds, they are taking the first step to apostacy. If the Lord has designed that I should lead you wrong, then let us all go to hell together and, as Joseph used to say, we will take hell by force, turn the devils out and make a heaven of it. (ibid., 1420)
Christensen claims,
None of the biblical keys condemn Joseph Fielding Smith as a potential prophet. He actually comes out looking very good by these measures. His racial views and mistakes on points of history, his behavior before he became the prophet, and his age and behavior when he was the prophet, all have a historical context and biblical precedent.
By Christensen’s personal “measures”. Except he wasn’t a “potential prophet”, he was a prophet when he was ordained an apostle, therefore all of Christensen’s criteria to Presidents of the Church (the chief apostle) apply. Christensen simply is advocating his own brand of Mormonism, not what is taught by Mormon authorities. There is no Biblical precedent for a “revelation” that excludes anyone from all the blessings that others enjoyed under the New Covenant. The “Curse of Ham” was an invention of racist men and adopted by a misguided Mormon Hierarchy who claimed it for themselves as a revelation from God.
But of course to Christensen, racism is irrelevant. And then here we go with the red herring soup:
“By their fruits shall ye know them” refers to the recognition of a characteristic fruit as the key to identification. So if you happen to spot unripe, fallen, bruised, or wormy fruit, if you know the fruit’s identifying characteristics, even they will do. A grape with a blemish is not a thorn, nor is even a perfect thorn any kind of fruit. A fig that has been pecked by a bird is still a fig, and a flawless or fashionably popular thistle is still a just a thistle (see Matthew 7:16–17).
If Stephenson wants to dismiss or reject these biblical criteria, his alternative ideology resorts to a subjective appeal to emotional hot-button issues argued on the unacknowledged basis that Smith represents behavior and attitudes that are “not the way I would arrange it if I were God.” Such an argument suffers from the inescapable limitation that Stephenson is not God. Notice that if Stephenson had openly stated that his use of these criteria depends on the reasoning that the situation is “not the way I would arrange it if I were God,” that opens his reasoning to critical examination in the same way my listing of biblical tests opens them to critical examination. Rather than be swept up by the emotional wave of impassioned disapproval of Joseph Fielding Smith as a person — which flatter the reader as enlightened and demand no mental or emotional effort — such as offered by Stephenson as an apparently objective and decisive set of self-evident facts, he’d have to admit that they are grounded on the claim that if he were God he wouldn’t permit such behavior in a true prophet. The effectiveness of the argument therefore depends on concealing these assumptions and forestalling any undesirable critical consideration from his audience about who is clearly not God.
So racism is not bad fruit? Ok. Where does this guy get this shit from? Did I claim that I was God? Nope. But Christensen must be claiming that, according to his own words, because his “ideology” is right and Fielding Smith comes out just fine by his criteria.
And what were the “fruits” of Mormonism’s institutional racism? Oh yeah, that is irrelevant! And what Biblical criteria does Christensen give? None. He mentions a couple of Chapters in Acts and a couple of books and an article by a Mormon Apologist. Could he be more vague? How does he apply such references? Where is his reasoned argument using the evidence? Nowhere to be found, though we have lots and lots of copy detailing Christensen’s own personal ideology.
So what Christensen classes as “emotional hot button issues” are off the table? Sounds like the National Rifle Association’s shtick when anyone wants to discuss gun regulatons after a mass shooting. Except there was no mass shooting here (this is an old issue but still very relevant) and of course the Church itself published on the issue just a few years ago in one of their anonymous Essays. So no one can have a reasoned argument about Mormon revelation without first declaring “If I were God” first? Hogwash. As one of the Mormon “Apostles” stated:
False prophets and false teachers are those who arrogantly attempt to fashion new interpretations of the scriptures to demonstrate that these sacred texts should not be read as God’s words to His children but merely as the utterances of uninspired men, limited by their own prejudices and cultural biases. They argue, therefore, that the scriptures require new interpretation and that they are uniquely qualified to offer that interpretation. …However, in the Lord’s Church there is no such thing as a “loyal opposition.” One is either for the kingdom of God and stands in defense of God’s prophets and apostles, or one stands opposed. (M. Russell Ballard, 1999)
This is the very thing that Christensen is doing with Fielding Smith, claiming that the Mormon apostles words “should not be read as God’s words to His children, but merely as the utterances of uninspired men, limited by their own prejudices and cultural biases.” He and his FAIRMORMON friends have the “right” interpretation. All that Mormon “Authorities” teach is opinion, based on their faulty reading of the scriptures unless they are the President of the Church and make an “official” declaration. The Holy Ghost does not operate in this brand of Mormonism except when Mormon Apologists say so. It is irrelevant unless an official vote is taken. But according to Ballard, Christensen is the false teacher here if he contradicts the “Authorities” of the Church. Remember, he claimed that Jeremy was wrong in favoring official doctrine over “the best books” when it came to answering his questions about his eternal welfare:
His preference for “official” thought rather than “the best books” is telling (D&C 88:118).
Notice though, what D&C 88 states in context,
118 And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.
This is directed to “those who have not faith”. Jeremy did have faith. He was simply troubled by things he had learned. He then went to what Christensen describes as “the best books,” but that made it worse. But Jeremy is wrong simply because Christensen has a personal preference for Apologist answers, which to him are always “superior”.
The only one playing God here appears to be Christensen by deigning to judge his methods of research as “superior” to Jeremy’s. This is simply Big Brother mentality. FAIRMORMON’s ways are what one must follow to keep the “faith”. Otherwise, you will turn bitter and brittle and you will “shatter”. Don’t follow your heart, follow our formula.
Our leaders are to be revered, but we will question their relevance when it suits our purpose. You must read the Book of Mormon our way, to have the correct interpretation of what it states. Those “Authorities” that came before, didn’t know what they were talking about because our interpretation is “superior”.
The only one that seems to be getting swept up in an “emotional wave” is Christensen. He is the one who is bothered by anyone speaking about Mormon racism. And he condemns my rhetoric?
The rest of Christensen’s rant is just more same ol’ same ol’, which I may come back and address at a later time. But I want to get to the claimed 1820 vision and the supposed priesthood restoration.
It’s not surprising to learn that Christensen has been carrying on with his pseudo historical apologist blather for years. For a good example of how “Christensen travels [the] well-worn path of the pseudo-scientist, pseudo-historian, and New Age religionists,” see Dan Vogel’s 2002 critique here. To quote Vogel:
Christensen misapplies Kuhn’s work to Book of Mormon studies in several ways….Christensen questions the “adequacy” of my approach, by which he means that I paid little attention to the works of Book of Mormon apologists, particularly those at FARMS, that support Book of Mormon antiquity. (Emphasis mine).
Sound familiar folks?
II. First Vision Vagaries
I was intrigued by Christensen’s mention of the late Matthew Brown’s book, and so I bought the Kindle Version (they didn’t have it at Gospelink) and read it. (It took me a couple of hours). This will actually help me with an Essay I’ve been writing on the claimed 1820 Vision, because Brown makes some interesting (but mistaken) conclusions.
Christensen writes,
Stephenson’s most focused and substantial challenge applies to a specific argument regarding the First Vision. He quotes this passage from me:
Look at his [Jeremy Runnells] complaints about the various First Vision Accounts and the priesthood restoration. On page 22 of his Letter, Runnells claims that “there is absolutely no record of a First Vision prior to 1832.” The FairMormon website response points out an article in the Palmyra Reflector from 1831 that indicates discussion of Joseph’s vision as early as November 1830. They also point to the allusion in D&C 20, which dates to April 1830.67
In response Stephenson has this:
This is the real issue. Is there any evidence of discussion about the claimed 1820 vision before 1832 when Joseph first penned it? The answer is no. The FairMormon article that Christensen quotes is wrong. Why? Because the two missionaries that the newspaper article describes are referring not to any claimed 1820 vision but rather the visit of Moroni three years later.
Christensen links to a FairMormon article that is not only incorrect but completely deceptive as well.
One check on whether the FairMormon article is correct or deceptive is to read the newspaper article cited. Matt Roper has reproduced the Reflector February 14, 1831 for the archive of “19th-Century Publications about |
, who is a Republican from North Carolina, and vice chairman Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said in a statement: "We believe that it is critical to have a full understanding of the scope of Russian intelligence activities impacting the United States."
The committee plans to interview senior officials of both the Trump and Obama administrations and may issue subpoenas, Reuters reported.
Donald Trump. Evan Vucci/AP Photo
The Trump dossier
Trump's one-sided battle with the US intelligence community continued this week, with the publication of a file that contained unverified research on Trump, intended to draw links between Trump and Russian operatives.
During a long-awaited news conference on Wednesday, Trump and his advisers attempted to scold reporters they accused of spreading details about the dossier.
The incoming president revived his attacks Friday in a raging early morning tweetstorm:
"It now turns out that the phony allegations against me were put together by my political opponents and a failed spy afraid of being sued," Trump tweeted. "Totally made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans — FAKE NEWS!"
He continued: "Russia says nothing exists. Probably released by 'Intelligence' even knowing there is no proof, and never will be. My people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days!"
Trump is set to be inaugurated as the 45th US president on January 20.The Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum presents….
This past weekend, a pop-up exhibit of the Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum displayed new illustrations of Hunter x Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho by famed mangaka Yoshihiro Togashi.
冨樫先生仕事してた！
物産展に行ったら新庄・最上漫画ミュージアムの出張展示がされてて、新しいハンタ（ゴン）と幽白の色紙もあった！
幽白の新庄祭りの絵、細かく描かれててカッコイイ!! pic.twitter.com/6Y9g5r8218 — 琴音 藍 (@cotone_ai) 2017年5月28日
Hunter x Hunter‘s Gon and special edition festival themed Yu Yu Hakusho drawings appeared in the exhibition as part of a fair displaying Mogami District’s “produce.” The Mogami District, an area in the city of Shinjō, Yamagata, has become the representation of Togashi’s hometown in recent years.
While most regions in Japan boast about particular foods and goods produced, the Mogami District claims manga artists are its”produce.” Though a rural area, the Mogami District has embarked on a campaign to portray the region of Yamagata as a “holy land” for manga artists. The Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum opened in December 2016. Currently, the museum displays over 100 reproductions of original manga manuscripts and has a collection of around 200 volumes of manga. The museum additionally features Kamuten, Shinjō City’s official character designed by Togashi, and the Kamuten Shrine, a shrine covered with several manga artists’ art and signature. Still a relatively new tourist attraction to the Yamagata area, the Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum appears to an effort to increase tourism and industry in rural parts of Japan through popular culture.
Other mangaka associated with The Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum include Chica Umino (Honey and Clover, March Comes in Like a Lion), Yutaka Abe ( Detective Conan: Crossroad in the Ancient Capital, Dragon Quest Seirei Rubisu Densetsu), Marie Abiko (Made in Yamagata), Richi Okada (Honke no Yome) and Masami Kaiwa (Momo ♥ Ichimoji).
Hunter x Hunter Returns
Beyond the Shinjo Mogami Manga Museum, Togashi resurfaced in the news this week as well. On May 31, Shueisha’s Shonen Jump Plus announced Hunter x Hunter manga would resume serialization on June 26. Viz Media will simultaneously publish an English digital edition of Hunter x Hunter. Shueisha will also publish the 34 volume of Hunter x Hunter on the same day.How To Guide
Winter is fast approaching and it won’t be long before we see the first snow flurries. Before you know it we’ll be putting up Christmas decorations and wrapping presents. Why not have a go at making a festive present for your garden birds too! I’ve designed this fun snowman feeder using a recycled Cravendale milk bottle. A great project to do with the kids!
Collect all your materials
There are three key items you need to make the snowman feeder. First the bottle for the main body. I chose a Cravendale milk bottle as it has a great snowman…ish shape and its white plastic rather than translucent. The second key item is the black snowman hat. I used a plastic tub from a Tesco microwaveable chocolate pudding (yum!). They come in packs of two and are the ideal diameter to sit nicely on top of the milk bottle. The final key item is a plastic plant pot drip tray. I always have a few of these laying around as I’m always coming up with new ways to use them! I pick them up from the local discount store for 50p each.
Cut out the seed ports
To create my inky paint mixture I used non-toxic black powder paint and a small amount of vegetable oil. Add just enough oil to the powder paint to give you a single cream consistency when mixed. The oil prevents the paint from drying out and will last several days.
Drill two holes in the base of the bottle
Drill two 4mm diameter holes in the base of the bottle as in the image above. Drill two similar holes in the centre of the plastic plant pot drip tray too.
Attach the drip/seed tray
Attach the drip/seed tray to the base of the bottle using a cable tie as in the image above. Drill three or four extra holes randomly around the base of the tray for drainage.
Drill two holes in the cap for the hanging string
Drill two holes in the bottle cap in preparation for creating the hanging loop. Drill two similar holes in the base of the small pudding tub.
Attach the bottle cap and hat together
Attach the plastic bottle cap and the pudding tub hat together using a loop of string.
Fix the cap back onto the bottle
Screw the cap back onto the bottle and ensure that the hat sits nicely in position.
The fully assembled snowman feeder!…Well almost
You should now have a blank snowman feeder ready for decorating.
Get creative and start decorating!
Now this is the really fun part! Start adding your snowman features. You can be as creative as you like. I’ve used a couple of stick on googly eyes, some black insulating tape for the snowman’s scarf and permanent marker pens to draw the rest of the features.
Hang your new snowman bird feeder in the garden!After an abrupt gaveling out sine die last night both chambers have concluded the work they will be doing for this special session.
Even though it was a day early, the Texas Legislature accomplished more than many expected them to when the session was called. Just as the session was beginning a month ago many thought that Speaker Joe Straus would pass the Texas Medical Board sunset bill and gavel out or as it became known “sunset and sine die.”
It turns out 11 of the 20 called items were passed. While some of the more controversial topics failed to move, it is likely enough to give Gov. Greg Abbott an out to avoid calling another special session.
Here are the call topics that were passed and the bills associated with them. Some measures only partially fulfilled the call.
Texas Medical Board Sunset Bill – Legislation amending Sections 151.004, 501.005, 502.003, 503.005, and 505.005 of the Texas Occupations Code to extend the expiration dates applicable to the Texas Medical Board, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Marriage and Family Therapists, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Professional Counselors, and the Texas State Board of Social Worker Examiners.
Bills Passed: SB 20 and SB 60
Teachers Salary Increase – Legislation to increase the average salary and benefits (including TRS-Care) of Texas teachers; and legislation to provide a more flexible and rewarding salary and benefit system for Texas teachers.
Bills Passed: HB 30
School Finance Reform – Legislation establishing a statewide commission to study and recommend improvements to the current public school finance system; and other legislation relating to school finance, including Additional State Aid for Tax Reduction (ASATR).
Bills Passed: HB 21
School Choice For Special Needs – Legislation to empower parents of children with special needs or educational disadvantages to choose an educational provider that is best for their child.
Bills Passed: HB 21 had some grants for autism and dyslexia, but no stand alone bill passed.
Local Permits (Tree Ordinances) – Legislation expediting the issuance of permits by political subdivisions and reforming the laws governing the issuance of permits by political subdivisions.
Bills Passed: HB 7 A similar bill had passed during the regular session and was vetoed by the governor.
Abortion Insurance Reform – Legislation restricting health plan and health benefit plan coverage for abortions.
Bills Passed: HB 214
Abortion Complication Reporting – Legislation strengthening the laws applicable to the reporting of abortions and abortion complications to the state.
Bills Passed: HB 13 and HB 215
Patient Protections – Legislation enhancing patient protections contained in the procedures and requirements for do-not-resuscitate orders.
Bills Passed: SB 11
Mail-In Ballot Fraud – Legislation enhancing the detection, prosecution, and elimination of mail-in ballot fraud.
Bills Passed: SB 5
Maternal Morbidity Task Force – Legislation continuing the operation and expanding the duties of the Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Task Force to ensure action is taken to reduce the maternal mortality rate in Texas.
Bills Passed: SB 17
Municipal Annexation Reform – Legislation reforming the authority of municipalities to annex territory, to exert control over territory, or to regulate the use of annexed land or land in a municipality’s extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Bills Passed: SB 6
Not all the bills that have been sent to the governor have been signed, but Gov. Abbott is expected to sign them all.
The following called issues did not have a bill sent to the Governor this special session.
Property Tax Reform – Legislation reforming the laws governing ad valorem property taxes. Spending Limit for State Government – Legislation using population growth and inflation to establish a spending limit for state government. Spending Limit for Local Government – Legislation using population growth and inflation to establish a spending limit for political subdivisions. Property Right Protections – Legislation protecting the private property rights of land owners from political subdivision rules, regulations, or ordinances that interfere with, delay, or restrict private property owners’ ability to use or enjoy their property. Property Acquisition Grandfather Clause – Legislation preventing political subdivisions from imposing on private property additional or enhanced regulations that did not exist at the time the property was acquired. Statewide Texting While Driving Preemption – Legislation preempting local regulation of the use of hand-held mobile communication devices while driving. Privacy Act / Bathroom Bill – Legislation regarding the use of multi-occupancy showers, locker rooms, restrooms, and changing rooms. Blocking Public Unions from Automatic Deduction (Except First Responders) – Legislation prohibiting state or local government entities from deducting labor union or employee organization membership fees or dues from the wages of public employees. Defunding Abortion Facilities from Local Government Contract – Legislation prohibiting financial transactions between a governmental entity and an abortion provider or affiliate of the abortion provider. Sunset Scheduling – Legislation adjusting the scheduling of Sunset Commission review of state agencies.
Even with some of the most talked about bills not receiving a hearing, it is unlikely there will be another special session anytime soon.We’ve all been there, you shave or wax then annoying ingrown hairs appear. They are hairs that don’t emerge from the follicle but remain embedded in the skin, usually causing inflammation. I’ve been battling with ingrown hairs particularly around my knees for years. I started using the Bump eRaiser antibacterial wash and mitt together and have noticed a considerable difference. It helped get rid of my ingrown hairs within days of using them and my skin feels lovely and smooth.
The Antibacterial wash comes in a clear plastic 250 ml bottle with a pump dispenser. The product itself is of a runny consistency. It has a mild citrus medicinal scent which is quite nice and not too overpowering. This is a low foaming face and body wash which may be good for those that are sensitive to foaming agents.
The exfoliating mitt is one of the most cost saving tools in my beauty collection. It comes with a handy strap which I leave hanging in my shower and having it there becomes a constant reminder to use daily. Do not use it on your face or neck as it may be too abrasive. However it is the perfect texture to use everywhere else on the body. It’s flexible and perfect for men too (one size fits all).
Price: $16.75 AUD Bump eRaiser Zesty Antibacterial Wash is a face and body wash designed to cleanse, remove excess oil, and prevent ingrown hairs, bumps and breakouts. It is formulated with tea tree oil, a natural antiseptic and anti-inflammatory, to help reduce ingrown hairs and irritation. Orange oil and Guarana help to purify the skin, leaving it clear and smooth. It is ideal for all skin types and suitable for the whole family. Exfoliating Mitt The Bump eRaiser Exfoliating Mitt is a must have in your shower to prevent ingrown hairs. The unique blend of fibres massage away dead skin cells, improve circulation and leave the skin feeling soft and smooth.
Ideal for use prior to hair removal and self-tanning application.
Regular use prevents hairs from getting trapped under accumulated dead skin cells, reducing the chance of ingrown hairs forming.
With handy shower strap.
Made from Italian fabric.
For best results use in conjunction with Bump eRaiser Medi Paste, Triple Action Lotion, Cool Splash or Concentrated Serum. Price: $16.75 AUD *Disclosure: I received these products in exchange for an honest unbiased review. All opinions expressed and the choice to review is 100% my own! Let’s get social | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest
Oust your ingrowns was last modified: by
Like this: Like Loading...White people feel emboldened to kill people of color in Trump’s America.
A Missouri man is accused of shooting and killing an Indian immigrant engineer he thought was Middle Eastern and wounding two others after shouting “get out of my country” and opening fire.
Adam Purinton was arrested after fleeing Austin’s Bar and Grill, a suburban Kansas City restaurant that was packed Wednesday night when he allegedly blasted off several rounds at 7:15 p.m.
Cops arrested the 51-year-old at an Applebee’s hours later in Clinton, Mo., some 80 miles away after they were able to negotiate with him over the phone early Thursday morning.
The fatal victim was identified by the Kansas City Star as Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an aviation engineer at technology company Garmin whose Facebook page says he is from Hyderabad, India.New year, New shows!
Bravo is thrilled to reveal details of what's coming down the pike this year—and beyond. The network has announced green lights for several returning series, along with an expanded scripted slate, including the development of The One, from executive producer Charlize Theron.
What's coming to the small screen soon? Read on for all the details.
Odd Mom Out
Premiere Date: Monday, June 8
Odd Mom Out stars acclaimed author Jill Kargman playing a satirical version of herself as she navigates the treacherous and elite ecosystem of New York’s Upper East Side, and the uber-wealthy mommy clique inhabiting this fantastically outrageous domain. A New Yorker through and through, Jill Weber (Kargman) embraces her quirky and somewhat unconventional life with her loving husband, Andy (Andy Buckley, The Office) and three great kids. Jill's frenemies and in-laws only fuel the pressure for her to conform, including the status-obsessed family matriarch, Candace (Joanna Cassidy, Six Feet Under), brother-in-law Lex (Sean Kleier, Madam Secretary) and his wife, Brooke (Abby Elliott, Saturday Night Live), who reigns over a group of quintessential Upper East Side mombots with an iron credit card.
RETURNING SERIES GREENLIGHTS
Flipping Out, Season 8
Everyone's favorite interior designer, Jeff Lewis, and his genius design team including Jenni Pulos are back in action for season eight and taking their business to the next level. Not only is business expanding, but so is Jeff’s family as he moves forward with a plan to have a child.
Married to Medicine, Season 3
The fabulous ladies return for a third season full of friendships, rivalries, medical moments, and high stakes of drama. This year, the ladies deal with tough issues both personal and professional. From juggling careers as MDs and moms to keeping friendships alive in the wake of a shocking betrayal, this season is sure to keep your blood pressure elevated.
The Real Housewives of Orange County, Season 10
These ladies show no signs of slowing down and although they may be enjoying the sunny SoCal lifestyle, replete with plastic surgery and frequent shopping sprees, real life still manages to find them, even in the land of excess and indulgence.
RETURNING SERIES PREMIERE DATES
Shahs of Sunset, Season 4
Premieres Monday, March 2nd at 9:00 pm ET/PT
The glittery and gold-drenched cast is living the good life, riding high and taking some big chances to find happiness in their professional, artistic and romantic lives. When a scandalous accusation from one of their own shakes the group to the core, lifelong friendships are in jeopardy. Reza Farahan, Golnesa "GG" Gharachedaghi, Mercedes "MJ" Javid, Asa Soltan Rahmati and Mike Shouhed return along with a sultry new cast member Asifa Mirza.
Newlyweds: The First Year, Season 2
Premieres Tuesday, March 10th at 10:00pm ET/PT
Four new couples, Samantha Abby and Laura Leigh Abby, Erik Courtney and Nadine Jolie Courtney, Kirk and Laura Knight and Toi and Rouvaun Walker are putting love to the test in this groundbreaking series that follows newlyweds for an entire year. From challenging in-laws to fertility struggles and merging complicated lives together, the show will once again document all of the trials and tribulations that can arise in the first year of marriage.
Southern Charm, Season 2
Half-hour preview special airs Monday, March 9th at 10:00pm ET/PT
Season Premieres Monday, March 16th at 10:00pm ET/PT
Craig Conover, Kathryn Calhoun Dennis, Cameran Eubanks, Thomas Ravenel, Shep Rose and Whitney Sudler-Smith along with new addition Landon Clements, are taking King Street by storm. Kathryn and Thomas are busy as new parents, but still finding time to spearhead his campaign for US Senate. Shep and Whitney are both making a play in the restaurant industry while Craig is now an official law school graduate, and newly married Cameran is making her name as a real estate agent. Even with their recent successes, relationship tensions, ballots, businesses, and babies are pushing the group to their breaking points.
Million Dollar Listing New York, Season 4
Premieres Wednesday, April 8th at 10:00pm ET/PT
The Emmy-nominated series returns for season four with superstar real-estate agents Fredrik Eklund, Luis D. Ortiz and Ryan Serhant taking their professional and personal lives to the next level and the drama is at an all-time high. Luis shifts his business into high gear as he takes on his first new development project. Ryan is charming his way through some of the biggest deals of his career, but his most important “deal” yet involves his girlfriend, Emilia and living happily ever after. Fredrik is officially New York City’s #1 broker, but he still faces a litany of challenging clients and colleagues, as he and Ryan attempt to work together for the first time.
SCRIPTED DEVELOPMENT
The One
Written by Roger Wolfson (Saving Grace, The Closer) for Universal Cable Productions and Denver & Delilah Films with Charlize Theron and Laverne McKinnon serving as executive producers.
A dramatic series that explores what it takes to succeed in the cutthroat world of billionaires and CEO’s through the eyes of those who are often overlooked…the assistants. A young woman and struggling street artist is hired to be the assistant to a visionary but enigmatic tech genius. The surprising relationship that forms between them begins to threaten everything the company has built.You might not be aware that Blade Show happened last week.
Just kidding. I know you’re aware that Blade Show happened.
I’ve compiled a bunch of stuff for this post from 2014 Blade Show. You’ll notice it’s not exhaustive as far as brands or products go, but I did include awesome stuff from Spyderco, Microtech, Benchmade, Zero Tolerance & Kershaw, and CRKT. You may have already seen most of the products, but I’ve got lots of it here in one place so you can browse through it at your leisure and also get a good look at some stuff you might not have seen yet, like Spyderco’s new stuff for 2014.
Enjoy!
Awards
Overall Knife of the Year: CRKT/Ken Onion HI JINX
People’s Choice Award: RAT Worx MRX
American Made Knife of the Year: Zero Tolerance 0562CF
Imported Knife of the Year: Spyderco Rubicon
Most Innovative American Design: Spartan Blades Integral Frame
Most Innovated Imported Design: Klecker Knives Ti-Klax
Accessory of the Year: SOG Bladelight Sheath
Kitchen Knife of the Year: KAI USA Shun Dual Core
Investor/Collector Knife of the Year: Protech Ultimate Godson 2014
Collaboration of the Year: Spartan Blades/Les George
Best Buy of the Year: Kershaw Emerson
Manufacturing Quality Award: Lion Steel
Spyderco Manix 2 Lightweight CPM S110V
You already know the Manix. It’s got a strong lock, and when you pair that with Spyderco’s quality and functionality, you’ve got a winner. This new version has a ball bearing lock, a lightweight handle, and a CPM S110V steel blade. The knife only weighs 3 ounces, so it’s hardly noticeable when in pocket. The overall length is 8.03 inches with the blade being 3.37 inches long. This knife is made in the USA.
Spyderco Roadie
You might remember back in March 2013 when TSA announced that small knives would be allowed on planes. That policy was withdrawn before it was ever put into practice, but Spyderco was already on the ball with the Spyderco Roadie, which is compliant with the proposed TSA policy. So, if TSA’s knife policy ever does become activated, Spyderco’s got you covered.
The Roadie is 5.07 inches long overall, has a 2.10-inch Sheepsfoot blade made with N690Co steel, and is 2.97 inches long when closed. The Roadie is a slip joint, and it has an indiex-finger choil to provide more control with precision cutting and also prevent accidental closure. The Roadie is made in Italy.
Spyderco Schempp Bowie
The Schempp Bowie is the newest addition to Spyderco’s Ethnic Series. This knife takes the spirit and style of the classic American Bowie and expresses it in the form of a folding knife like you’ve never seen it before. The Schempp Bowie is well designed for everyday carry, and it has top-notch cutting ability.
The Schempp Bowie is 8.45 inches long overall and it has a 3.72-inch long CPM S30V steel blade. The handle has skeletonized stainless steel liners, textured carbon fiber/G-10 laminate scales, a solid steel backspacer, and a liner lock.
Spyderco Burch Chubby
The Burch Chubby was inspired by one of Michael Burch’s most popular custom knives, and there’s no denying the fact that it looks awesome. This compact frame lock folder has a titanium handle with carbon fiber inserts. Overall, the length on this knife is 5.96 inches and it weighs 4.10 ounces. The blade is 2.30 inches long, and it’s made of S30V steel.
Spyderco PITS Folder
PITS stands for Pie In the Sky. This knife is based on a popular non-locking folder that was designed by Mike Read, a British knife maker. Intended for hard use while still complying to British knife laws, the PITS has a unique, yet functional build. The titanium handle has been skeletonized to cut down on the knife’s weight and also provide ample grip texturing.
The 4.19-inch handle also has integral split spring arms, which Spyderco says power the knife’s unique slipjoint mechanism. The mechanism and a lower blade guard both contribute to prevent the blade from accidentally closing during use. The blade is made of N690Co steel and is 2.97 inches long, making the knife 7.16 inches long total. It weighs just 3.40 ounces, and it is made in Italy.
Spyderco Dice
Does this knife look familiar to you? It should. The Dice is a smaller version of the Spyderco Domino by about 15 percent. The Dice is designed by Eric Glesser, and it has a Kit Carson–inspired flipper. The CTS-XHP blade is 2.50 inches long and has a full-flat grind. The knife features a solid titanium scale on one side, and on the other a titanium liner and Cubic Check carbon fiber/G-10 laminate scale. The handle also features a frame lock and a four-way reversible pocket clip.
Spyderco Bradley Bowie
This Spyderco Bowie was designed by Gayle Bradley, knife maker and former BladeSports champion. This knife is versatile and very tough. The blade is made of PSF27 steel, and the Bowie blade features a full-flat grind and a swedge. The overall length is 9.93 inches with a 5.13-inch blade and a 4.80-inch handle. The Bradley Bowie has a full tang, so this is one solid blade. Comes with a custom-molded Bolatron sheath with G-Clip attachment.
Spyderco Rubicon
The Rubicon is based on a custom design from Peter Carey. The 4.34-inch handle is contoured and made of carbon fiber with skeletonized titanium liners. The knife features an orange G-10 backspacer and pivot accent; it’s the perfect amount of orange to catch the eye without being overwhelming. The 3.03-inch blade is made of CPM S30V steel with a hollow grind. The blade opens smoothly thanks to special ball bearing washers that elevate the Rubicon to an even greater status in the knife world.
Microtech Anax
The Microtech Anax is a frame lock folder with a 6AL-4Vbeta titanium handle and an ELMAX steel blade. The handle features a 3D-machined lock bar, and the knife is able to open and close very smoothly due to a silicon nitride bearing race plate. A couple of other unique features in this knife include a threaded integral lanyard mount and a silicon nitride ball bearing retaining jib in the pocket clip. The hollow-ground blade is 3.71 inches long, the overall length is 8.59 inches, and the weight is 5.3 ounces.
Benchmade 757 Vicar
The 757 is a top-notch creation from Shane Sibert. The knife has a 3.90-inch CPM-S30V steel blade that features a tanto blade with a modified recurve, and the knife comes to 8.95 inches in length overall. The liner lock on this knife is solid and features a 0.90-inch-thick titanium liner lock. The handle has green and black stacked G-10 handle scales, and it also has a tip-up carry pocket clip.
Benchmade 5400 Serum
The new 5400 is a dual action knife, which means it can be operated both as a manual and as an automatic knife. It utilizes an AXIS dual-action mechanism which is pulled down like normal for manual action, and you pull the AXIS bar down slightly further for automatic action. The knife features a blade that totals 3.45 inches in length and is made of Elmax premium steel. The handles are made of machined G-10, and the weight on the 5400 is 4.63 ounces.
Benchmade 15008/15009 Steep Country
The HUNT series is new this year, and Benchmade just released a couple more hunting knives for 2014. These are the Steep Country knives. It’s available in black and orange, and it’s also available with a gut hook (15009 version) or a drop-point blade (15008). These knives feature CPM-S30V steel and Santoprene handles. The overall length on these is 7.65 inches and the blade length comes to 3.50 inches. The gut hook version weighs 4.70 ounces, and the drop point version weighs 4.40 ounces.
Benchmade 15003 Saddle Mountain Skinner
The 15003-1 and 15003-2 Saddle Mountain Skinner has a gut hook that is made of CPM-S30V steel, which offers a great balance of edge retention, durability, and corrosion resistance in addition to excellent stability, grindability, and toughness. The overall length is 8.73 inches with a 4.17-inch blade. The 15003-1 features G-10 scales and the 15003-2 features Dymondwood scales.
Zero Tolerance 0392
The ZT 0392 is a Rick-Hinderer collaboration that will rock your world. It’s got titanium framelock handles and 3.5-inch blade made with M390 steel. This knife is based on Rick’s new Eclipse model.
ZT is calling the 0392 a “factory custom” which basically means ZT is taking Rick’s hardware and using it from the start, and then building the knife so that it fits with the hardware. So the titanium screws, titanium spacers, pocket clip, Hinderer-style pivot, and pivot screw in the knife are all from Rick Hinerer. All the parts are interchangeable with the parts Rick sells, which means that you have some flexibility to customize the knife to your liking. It also has the KVT washer-bearing technology for super smooth opening.
Zero Tolerance Rexfored 0801BW Flipper
This 0801 has a blackwash finish with an Elmax steel blade, titanium handle scales, and the KVT ball-bearing system. The overall length on the 0801BW is 8.20 inches, the blade is 3.50 inches long, and the weight is 5.85 ounces. If you love the BlackWash look, get this blade, designed by Todd Rexford.
Zero Tolerance 0350SWCF
This is the popular 0350 with a stonewashed S30V steel blade and carbon fiber handles. The knife has a 3.25-inch blade and is 7.75 inches long overall, and it weighs 5.8 ounces.
Zero Tolerance Hinderer 0566CF
The 0566 has a carbon fiber front handle, Elmax blade, frame lock, and a stainless steel back handle. It has a 3.25-inch blade and is 7.70 inches long overall. This Hinderer design weighs 5.30 ounces.
ZT is also releasing the 0566BW:
It’s got a nice BlackWash finish.
Kershaw Funxion
The Kershaw Funxion is a spring assisted knife that utilizes Kershaw’s SpeedSafe technology which can be activated using the flipper or thumb studs. It has a steel liner lock frame, charcoal anodized aluminum scales, and a rubber grip insert on the front. On the front of the handle near its end, you can see what is actually a locking carabiner clip and belt/cord cutter with a hex wrench and bottle opener. The knife has a 3-inch blade and totals 7.25 inches in length, and it weighs 4.8 ounces.
Kershaw Leek BlackWash Composite Knife
The Leek is probably one of Kershaw’s most well-known knives, and now it’s out in new look. This new leek has a BlackWashed composite blade made from Sandvik 14C28N & D2 steels. This Leek has a 7-inch build overall, and its blade measures 3 inches long and it weighs 3 ounces. This is a classic from Ken Onion with a fresh twist.
CRKT
CRKT Hi Jinx
The CRKT Hi Jinx is a pretty big deal; it won “Overall Knife of the Year” this year at Blade Show. The Hi Jinx is based off of Ken Onion’s custom design, the Old Scallyway. It has a 6A14V titanium frame lock handle and totals 8.10 inches in length. Other features include an IKBS ball-bearing pivot and a 3.32-inch Sleipner steel blade. The Hi Jinx is designed by Ken onion and manufactured in Italy by LionSteel.
CRKT Cobia
The CRKT Cobia is a Matthew Lerch design. This spring assisted knife is 6.56 inches long overall and has a 2.94-inch blade that is deployed using CRKT’s OutBurst spring assisted mechanism. The handle is made of stainless steel, and the cross-hatch texturing provides good gripping and a nice look.
CRKT Argus
The CRKT Argus is another Matthew Lerch design. It’s another spring assist, and it also features OutBurst opening and the Fire Safe mechanism. It has a 3.55-inch blade and it’s 8.13 inches long overall, weighing a total of 4.20 ounces. The handle is made of aluminum and it has a stainless steel frame.
CRKT Graphite
The CRKT Graphite is a Glen Klecker design. It uses a Klecker Lock mechanism that is integrated into the open-build stainless steel handle. The handle also features G-10 for a comfortable grip. You can open the blade using the thumb studs or flipper. The overall length comes to 7.50 inches, the blade is 3.06 inches long overall, and the weight is 4.40 ounces.
CRKT HoodWork
The CRKT HoodWork is designed by Karen Hood, and it’s made in the USA. It’s got 1095 high carbon steel which gives you excellent durability and cutting ability, especially when paired with Veff serrations. The HoodWork has a full tang, so it’s a great option for taking camping. The high carbon blade is bead blasted and Cerakote finished and is 6.13 inches in length. The overall length is 11.31 inches, and it weighs 9.20 ounces. The handle sports a G-10 handle and an orange paracord lanyard.
CRKT KCK1
The CRKT KCK1 is another USA-made knife that’s designed by Karen Hood. It also has 1095 high carbon steel that’s been Cerakote finished and beat blasted, and it’s great for camping and survival use. The handle sports Micarta scales, the knife totals 11.31 inches in length. The high carbon steel blade is 6.13 inches in length and it weighs 8.20 ounces.
CRKT Clark Fork Fillet Knife
The Clark Fork Fillet Knife is pretty unique because unlike many fillet knives, it’s a folder. This knife is designed by Ken Steigerwalt, and it has a tail that folds up into the handle to lock the blade securely in place for use, and it folds out to cover the blade tip. The knife is 10.94 inches long when open, and the blade is 5.94 inches long. It weighs 1.80 ounces, so it’s a great option to bring on your fishing trips because it won’t weigh you down.
ESEE
The ESEE Izula is coming out in two new colors: purple and dark earth! Here’s a picture of them from ESEE’s Facebook page:
They also are making the Candiru in dark earth too, but we don’t have that on the site yet so stay tuned! Here is another picture from ESEE’s facebook page.
That’s everything I’ve got from Blade Show for you from Blade HQ! What knife are you most stoked about?Copyright by WBTW - All rights reserved Florence County investigators are searching for Charles Durell Nethercutt for the attempted murder of his wife.
Copyright by WBTW - All rights reserved Florence County investigators are searching for Charles Durell Nethercutt for the attempted murder of his wife.
FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) - Florence County deputies are searching for a man they say poured gasoline on his wife and set her on fire.
According to Major Mike Nunn with the Florence County Sheriff's Office, deputies are looking for 32-year-old Charles Durell Nethercutt, of Florence. A warrant for attempted murder was issued for Nethercutt after he allegedly tried to kill his wife. Deputies say Nethercutt poured gasoline on his wife and set her on fire on Sept. 19.
The report states that deputies were called to the home on Longfellow Drive and found the victim being treated for severe burns to her arms, torso, legs and feet. At the time, the victim was conscious and alert and was able to tell investigators that he husband accused her of cheating on him before he doused her in gasoline and lit her on fire.
The incident report also says the suspect left before officials arrived and took the couple's 1-year-old child with him. Wednesday, Major Nunn confirmed that the child was no longer with the suspect, but would not release where the baby was.
Warrants for Nethercutt state that his wife was taken to an out of state burn center to be treated for her injuries.
Nethercutt is described as a black man, approximately 6' tall, weighing about 230 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. Investigators say Nethercutt has tattoos on both arms and his last known address is off of Longfellow Drive in Florence.
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you. Until then, you shouldn’t release them.
May 21, 2016: Trump tells The Washington Post that he pays “substantial” taxes.
In an interview this week, Trump said that he has paid “substantial” taxes but declined to provide specifics. He reiterated that he fights “very hard to pay as little tax as possible.” “One of the reasons is because the government takes your money and wastes it in the Middle East and all over the place,” he said.
Since this article was published, Trump and a top aide have made more comments on the matter. See these additions below:
July 27, 2016: As questions arise over Trump’s financial relationship to Russia, his campaign chair says in a CBS interview that his tax returns have “nothing to do” with the matter.
NORAH O’DONNELL: I saw that Trump tweeted yesterday that he has zero investments in Russia. But does Russia have investments in Trump? Would Mr. Trump be willing to release his taxes to provide transparency on this issue? PAUL MANAFORT: Mr. Trump has said that his taxes are under audit and that he will not be releasing them. It has nothing to do with Russia. It has nothing to do with any country other than the United States and his normal tax auditing processes. That issue will be dealt with when the audits are done. O’DONNELL: So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs? MANAFORT: That’s what he said. That’s obviously what our position is.
July 28, 2016: In his most recent comments on the issue, Trump tells Fox News that he hasn’t received much pressure to release his tax returns.
VAN SUSTEREN: If Secretary Clinton were willing to give up the transcripts from her Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street speeches, would you be willing to give up, or surrender, or let the media see your tax returns and, if it’s not — at least not for the years not currently in audit? DONALD TRUMP: […] You’re the one that said recently, and I have used your name a couple of times, that if I had a client who was under a routine audit by the IRS, I wouldn’t let him go public until the audit is over. Now, you said that on your show, and you were speaking then not as a great and talented anchor, but you were speaking as a lawyer, and somebody that knows what they are talking about. But you said yourself, if you were a lawyer, you wouldn’t do it. VAN SUSTEREN: I said as a lawyer for the years in audit, absolutely, but […] To give sort of a general idea, and sort of call off the dogs and the people who are after your tax returns to look at them, why not release those that are not in audit, even if they go back a number of years? TRUMP: Well, I haven’t had much pressure. I’ll be honest, most people don’t care about it. The only ones that care are certain people in the media. I’ve had very, very little pressure. And, I remember with Mitt Romney four years ago. Everybody wanted his. […] And Mitt gave that, and after he gave it, they found a little sentence and they made such a big deal. He might have lost the election over that.
Photo: Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a news conference in Bismarck, North Dakota US May 26, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstChennai: The Tamil Nadu government will set up 500 Amma gymnasiums and Amma parks in the rural areas across the state for the benefit of the youth.
The project are expected to cost more than 100 crores.
"Amma parks would be established in village panchayats at a cost of Rs 100 crore in this financial year.
“The parks would have good drinking water facility, toilets, play equipment, cement benches,” TOI quoted CM Jayalalithaa as saying in the TN assembly.
“Children, women and senior citizens can spend time in these parks which will also contain green grass," she reportedly said.
The government will also set up 500 Amma gymnasiums in rural areas at a cost of Rs 10 lakh each, the report said.
"The gymnasiums will help youth in rural areas be fit both physically and mentally. The government will spend Rs 50 crore to set up the gymnasiums," the chief minister said.
She also said the self-help groups will be able to get loans from banks to the tune of Rs 6,000 crore.
"In the last five years, the banks have lent Rs 26,460 crore as loans to SHGs and this year it would be Rs 6,000 crore," she said.
"For the first time in 2015-16, under the Tamil Nadu Rural Roads Upgradation Scheme, all sandy roads were converted into tar roads at a cost of of Rs 800 crore.
“This year, 900km of sandy roads and 1200km of damaged roads will be repaired at a cost of Rs 800 crore. This would help farmers transport their produce easily and this would also improve the rural economy," the report quoted the chief minister as saying.Samsung was the first to selectively boost system performance when a benchmark app was run, but it was forced to backpedal pretty quickly on that one. The latest OEM to try and sneak one past the benchmarks is Huawei with its new-ish Ascend P7. Futuremark is wise to this game, though, and has pulled the P7 from the 3DMark top phone charts.
The Ascend P7 isn't running a top-of-the-line ARM chip like the Snapdragon 801 and Tegra K1 devices that dominate the charts. Instead, it packs a budget-friendly Kirin 910 with four Cortex-A9 cores clocked to a maximum of 1.8GHz and a Mali-450 GPU. Even with the modest hardware, the Ascend P7 was doing respectably in benchmarks, but that was all a farce. As detailed by Anandtech, the device detects when a known benchmarking app is running and manually keeps all four CPU cores cranked until the test has completed. This is not representative of the workload performance in other apps.
The shenanigans were verified by changing the package name of 3DMark and comparing the resulting score to the one obtained in the regular Play Store version. Futuremark got a baseline of 5816 in the renamed version and 7462 in the Play Store version. The company has a set of rules for OEMs which require they avoid benchmark-specific optimizations, so Huawei's device is out. Bummer, but maybe they'll knock off the cheating now. The device is at the bottom of the phone list with no score, right along side other devices that failed to follow the rules, including the HTC One M8 and Galaxy Note 10.1.
[3DMark Top Devices]There are many interesting retail trends in 2014 that will greatly impact the retail landscape. The following is our list of the top four trends that forward-looking merchants will be watching and testing.
Mobile Commerce Growth
In 2014, more business is being done through electronic and mobile platforms. The Millennials, a consumer base predicted to represent 30% of total retail sales by 2020, have shown a clear preference for electronic commerce. In fact, over two thirds of UK current bank account holders would prefer to use online or mobile apps rather than going in branch.
Smaller, independent merchants around the world have found success with implementing mobile payment through Square, a mobile payment wallet recently valued at $5 billion. Merchants see the mobile wallet as the most exciting evolution in payment technology and are putting it on the forefront of their innovation plans in 2014. With merchants like department store Macy’s already testing Google Wallet in-store, can you afford to ignore this trend?
Improved Social Media Standards
Most merchants have been using social media for many years as a marketing and customer service tool. In 2014, merchants will be following the online trail left by their online customers to better understand how to serve them.
Targeted Marketing Customers
Millennials in particular, are demanding more custom marketing solutions, and it is no longer acceptable to use social media like a traditional push marketing medium. Nestlé Purina Pet Care regularly connects with pet owners on Twitter by replying to pet-related tweets and sending pet owners resources that are more informative than promotional. Customers expect offers and information to be customized for their readership. When they have questions, they expect quick, personal responses rather than a canned answer, especially as more customers migrate to mobile channels to connect with brands.
Customer Service
“The squeaky wheel gets greased.” While customer service has been focused on responding immediately to complaints posted through social media, it’s important to treat all customer service channels with the same level of immediacy and consistency. Customers waiting for resolution to their phone, mail, or email inquiries should not have to wait until social media inquiries get serviced first.
Customer Loyalty
Social media can build or destroy customer loyalty. The best practitioners have a vision for all their customer interactions and are transparent about their business. Those brands are winning and will continue to win in 2014.
Customers Expect Customization
Customers are no longer satisfied with a one size fits all solution. In 2014, not only do customers want a custom fit, but they want the entire purchase experience to be tailored to them.
Personalized Products
Consumers expect more customization in 2014 and they will not expect to pay a significant premium for this. Loblaws offers No Name, President’s Choice and Blue Menu product lines, which are comparable or less than the national brand, in order to address different consumer needs. Nike ‘s NIKEid service allows customers to customize products across their line without a significant upcharge. Whether it’s through a multi-tier private label offering or giving customers the ability to build a made-to-order product, customization allows retailers to profit from individual tastes.
Store Services
Whether it is in your bricks and mortar location or online, consumers expect services to be unique to their needs. In store, the omni-channel marketing trend will continue. A custom experience could include product trial and testing, service, showrooming, Wi-Fi or even sending offers directly to their mobile device based on time spent in an area of the store. Consumers want to have fun while they shop, and it is the merchant’s challenge to make this a reality.
Online Communication
Consumers expect to be able to navigate your site and to receive real time communication from you while on your site. Whether this is through tracking what they have looked at, suggesting items to go with those in their cart, instant offers while they are shopping, or through online chats with a service representative, consumers expect you to speak directly to them.
Custom Delivery Options
How the product gets to the consumer must be customized as well. From home delivery to in-store pick up, consumers expect more choice and convenience than ever before.
Power of Millennials
The power of Millennials is being felt throughout all business categories. As the Millennials move towards their peak earning years, businesses are changing their models to accommodate the Millennials’ unique demands, such as personalization, transparency, and added value. Recognizing the influence of Millennials and meeting their demands can drive an exponential increase in your business and lay the groundwork for longer term success.
By watching and testing some of these trends over the coming year, merchants can expect 2014 to be one of constant innovation and growth.
To learn more about how we can help your retail business achieve success, visit our retail services page or contact us for further information.5 Liter Mini Keg with Tap
These kegs are approx. 10" x 7.25"
How do I fill and dispense mini kegs?
Always start with a clean keg.
Fill the keg with a mild soap solution and let soak for a few minutes.
Rinse well with warm water and flush the valve well.
Remove all water with a few pieces of paper towel and let the keg completely air dry.
Sanitize the keg and two-piece bung immediately before use.
When filling the 5 liter mini keg, leave a 1” space at the top for CO2 space.
Next prime the beer. Use one level tablespoon corn sugar, Only one level tablespoon per 5 liter keg.
Prime kegs individually, priming mini kegs and bottles using different ratios of corn sugar.
<====IMPORTANT NOTE====>Legends Room Officially Launches Membership Sale
This is a paid press release, which contains forward looking statements, and should be treated as advertising or promotional material. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support this product/service. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the press release.
Las Vegas goes digital at exclusive gentlemen’s club
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Legends Room, a unique gentlemen’s cabaret official opening next month, is pleased to announce the official kickoff of the sale of its lifetime digital membership token starting March 11, 2017.
Operated by Las Vegas club manager and promoter Nick Blomgren, hosted by UFC Hall of Famer Stephan Bonnar, and curated by the most famous adult star in the world, Asa Akira, the Legends Room aims to exceed all expectations for club life in Las Vegas.
“We have created an experience unlike any other club in Las Vegas,” Blomgren said. “Beautiful girls, amazing service and unparalleled exclusivity.”
In addition to traditional forms of payment, Bitcoin will be accepted for all services at the Legends Room, opening access to paying for just about everything in Las Vegas using the digital currency. Hotels, exotic cars, fantasy excursions, training with a UFC star and more.
Platinum lifetime memberships are on offer for $5,000 each, and Silver Memberships for $1,500. Sales, limited in perpetuity to 3,000 members, will run until April 15th, 2017.
Platinum members will receive $2,500 in drink and $2,500 in dance credits; Silver members will receive $500 in drink and $500 in dance credits for personal use. As a special touch, members who participate in the token sale will receive a personalized welcome video from a celebrity associated with the Legends Room.
Members will also enjoy 24-hour access through a private entrance, a reserved bar with a dedicated mixologist, a members-only menu, hidden conversation areas and ultra private rooms. Special evenings with some of the world’s most well known adult stars, the world’s most beautiful entertainers, and events with globally recognized personalities drawn from mixed martial arts, boxing, film, entertainment and music industries. Further privileges include access to discounted private airfares, exotic car rentals, hotel rooms, and car and limo services.
In addition to enjoying club benefits directly, members will also be able to rent or lease their memberships on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, either privately or through the club’s concierge. Members can also trade their membership on multiple digital-currency exchanges.
Memberships can be purchased directly at www.legendsroomlv.com/MTO using 30 different types of digital currency such as Bitcoin, Ether, Dash, Blackcoin, and Dogecoin. Sales are also available via Cash and Wire Transfer, for further details and information on becoming a member of Legends Room please go to legendsroomlv.com.
About Legends Room
The Legends Room is the most exclusive club experience in Las Vegas. Members are privy to ultra-luxurious premises featuring a private lounge, celebrity hosts, distinguished clientele and, for the first time ever, use of cryptocurrency to purchase everything Las Vegas has to offer.
www.legendsroomlv.com
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Anthony Scaramucci’s appointment as White House communications director is supposed to help President Trump move his messaging away from the relentless Russia scandal—but first Scaramucci may have to get past his own Russia issue.
Since January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has pressed the Trump administration to determine whether Scaramucci, at a January meeting, may have broken the law by discussing possible joint investments with the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund that is under US sanctions. The White House and the Treasury Department have so far blown off Warren’s inquires.
Her questions include “if Mr. Scaramucci may have violated current U.S. sanctions law; if he made any implicit or explicit promises related to the relaxation of U.S. sanctions on Russia; if President Trump or other Trump Administration transition officials were aware of Mr. Scaramucci’s contacts” with the Russian fund.
“An individual under investigation for such violations should not be nominated to serve in the U.S. government,” Warren wrote in a June 15 letter to President Trump, citing reports that Trump planned to pick Scaramucci for an ambassadorial post.
“I think the sanctions had in some ways an opposite effect because of Russian culture,” Scarmucci said after his meeting with the sanctioned Russian investment firm.
Bloomberg News first reported the January 16, 2017 meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where Scaramucci—then advising Trump’s transition effort—met with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which was among Russian financial firms covered by 2015 sanctions implemented after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The sanctions bar Americans from conducting various financial transactions with the entities named. Scaramucci at the time ran a hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital (which he soon announced he was selling to a Chinese conglomerate).
The day after the meeting with Dmitriev, Scaramucci told the Russian state news agency TASS that US sanctions on Russia don’t work. “I think the sanctions had in some ways an opposite effect because of Russian culture,” he said. “I think the Russians would eat snow if they had to. And so for me the sanctions probably galvanized the nation with the nation’s president.”
In the interview, Scaramucci said about Trump: “The president-elect has the vision to see enough common interests where, hopefully, in a year from now the relationship with the Russian people and the Russian government and the United States will be better than it is today. That’s our hope.”
In letters to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Warren asked the agency to determine if Scaramucci had facilitated or promoted “prohibited transactions” with the Russian fund. She also asked Treasury to investigate whether “Scaramucci or any other member of the…Trump Administration has any financial interest” in the fund.
In a brief letter to Warren prior to his confirmation, Mnunchin said he would ensure the department assessed “whether further investigation of this matter is warranted.” On May 12, Matt Kellog, Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary of legislative affairs told Warren that her letters, “like all congressional inquiries concerning economic sanctions enforcement” were forwarded to the department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
A Warren spokeswoman said the senator had received no further response, but would continue to pursue the issue.
The White House and Treasury Department did not respond to inquiries on Friday.MONTREAL-A rural Quebec man was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday for his role in an overseas terrorist bomb plot by an Al Qaeda affiliated group.
It is just the second time in Canadian legal history that a life sentence has been handed down in a terrorism case, after the one last month to one of the so-called 'Toronto 18', Crown prosecutors said.
Said Namouh was found guilty last October of four terrorism-related charges relating to a loosely planned plot to bomb targets in Germany and Austria.
The terror attack was motivated by those countries' military presence in Afghanistan.
Namouh was involved with the Global Islamic Media Front, an organization recognized by the court as a terrorist group that took part in propaganda and jihad recruitment.
The organization is described as an Al Qaeda media tool.
Namouh, 37, will have no chance of parole for at least 10 years.
Quebec court Judge Claude Leblond said Namouh remains dangerous and remorseless whereas in other Canadian terrorism cases, some of the accused had seen the error of their ways.
Leblond noted that an attempt by Namouh to seek the court's favour by taking the stand during his sentencing hearing last November had the opposite effect.
“In no way since the events has he distanced himself from terrorism,” Leblond said in his judgment.
“His attempt at manipulating the court during his sentencing hearing reveals the danger he continues to represent.”
Namouh was arrested by the RCMP in Maskinonge, Que., in September 2007, and will get credit for time served since then.
The earliest Namouh would be eligible to apply for parole would be 2017.
Namouh was found guilty of one count each of conspiracy to detonate an explosive device, participating in a terrorist act, facilitating an act of terrorism and committing extortion for a terrorist group.
He was sentenced to life for conspiracy and, on the other charges, to four, eight, and eight years, concurrent to the life sentence.
Part of the wealth of evidence against Namouh included a report that indicated a wide-ranging hit list of possible targets, although the targets were never mentioned in the specific charges.
They included Vienna-based OPEC, prominent German and Austrian government officials and politicians, as well as the Euro 2008 soccer tournament.
The Crown argued that Namouh was on the verge of carrying out the plan, while the defence called that notion far-fetched.
The evidence presented during his trial showed that Namouh spent countless hours on jihad forums and preparing propaganda videos.
The Crown got the life sentence it wanted.
“The message is for people, not only in this country but abroad also,” said federal prosecutor Dominique Dudemaine.
“You cannot come into Canada to carry out a plot here or elsewhere. We are not a safe haven.”
Namouh's lawyer had argued for a short sentence and had called the Crown evidence overblown as concerned to Namouh's enthusiasm for jihad.
“I'm not at all convinced that the evidence is compelling that the gentleman is as dangerous as he is being portrayed now,” Rene Duval said.
Duval said that his client had access to paltry legal aid and little chance against a prosecution and police team with enormous resources.
Duval said Wednesday that he needs to look at the judgment, and said an appeal is possible.
Namouh is a permanent resident. Canada has already begun procedures to have him deported to his native Morocco.Yeah, somebody might mention this to Dana Milbank, Bill Kristol and the "presumptuous" (i.e. "uppity") crowd:
Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.
Uh-oh, it looks like somebody’s in danger of not getting to sit on McCain’s lap:
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he talks to McCain, a personal friend, several times a day. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia’s government. McCain also announced this week that two of his closest allies, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would travel to Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi on his behalf, after a similar journey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice…The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.
And results similar to Rice too, no doubt, as the Russians have gotten all they wanted…and they’ll keep it.
Say, it sure would be interesting to know when these "daily" talks started and what they were comprised of? I’m pretty sure even the GOP cannot assert a "Presidential Candidate" privilege. Especially since the criticism of Russian actions shouldn’t cause us to completely ignore the fact that Saakashvili is a bit of a rouge and a chunk of moron himself.
This video of McCain the other day sums up the whole … "John McCain Experience" — if you’ve seen a more pathetic campaign stop since "Bob Dole Stagediving" you’ve watched entirely too much C-Span:
Which, if you’re like me — and I know I am, reminds you not so much of any other candidate but this:This article is over 1 year old
According to analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, both of ‘Claire’s’ parents were born in Australia
Census says 'typical' Australian is 38-year-old married woman with two children
The “typical” Australian is a 38-year-old married woman with two children and both parents born in Australia, the first insights from the 2016 census have revealed.
The analysis, released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday, suggests the typical Australian woman does up to nine hours more housework a week than the typical man and finds the median age for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is 15 years younger than all Australians.
The typical Australian – dubbed Claire by the ABS – is determined by the median age and the most common answers for questions including marital status, education and type of home. The analysis comes before the first census data release on 27 June.
Computer says no: Australian census shambles explanation depends on who you ask Read more
Claire completed year 12, lives in a three-bedroom house with a mortgage and two cars. She does five to 14 hours of unpaid domestic work a week, compared with less than five hours a week done by the typical Australian male, who is 37 years old.
The census found the typical Australian, male or female, was born in Australia, has English ancestry and parents born in Australia. However, the typical person from New South Wales, Victoria or Western Australia has at least one parent who was born overseas.
The typical migrant in Queensland was born in New Zealand, in Victoria they were born in India and in New South Wales the most common country of origin was China.
The typical Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person was a 23-year-old woman.
Among persons born overseas, the median age was 44, and the typical person was a woman born in England.
Census 2016: outage due to 'overcautious' response, not hacking, government says Read more
The only states where men outnumbered women were the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where the typical person was a 34-year-old male and a 37-year-old male respectively.
The 2016 census was plagued by technical difficulties, after a 43-hour outage caused by the ABS taking the online form down after denial of service attacks. The ABS has said the shutdown cost $30m in a reduction from savings expected to be made by moving the census online.
Small business minister, Michael McCormack, said in a statement on Tuesday that the 2016 census collected 4.9m online forms and 3.5m paper forms, a response rate of 96% and on par with the 2011 consensus.
“More than 58% of Australians completed their census online, representing a shift of 2.2 million more households participating online than in 2011,” he said.
McCormack said that “no two people living in Australia are the same and we’ve changed”.
Australia's 2016 census website shutdown to cost $30m Read more
“The profiles released today will not only show some major attributes of Aussies in 2016 but it will also provide some contrast to a typical Aussie from the first census in 1911.” In 1911 the typical Australian was a 24-year-old male, but women have outnumbered men since 1979.
The June release will contain 80,000 summaries of local area data, containing nearly three million tables and more than 68m pieces of data.
“These statistics will represent the combined efforts of over 700 ABS staff and more than 23 million clerical operations in classifying the data, and I want to thank the ABS for its efforts to date,” McCormack said.
“Data from the census is a vital resource to help governments, business and communities shape the future of our nation and our regions.”
The full census results will be released after the independent assurance panel of experts has reviewed the detailed results and provided its report.SLEEPING rough on the street before being picked up and exploited by traffickers, these are the children the world ignores.
But an Australian hero has made it his life’s work to rescue and protect Vietnam’s forgotten street kids.
Michael Brosowski and his team save young girls and boys sold as sex slaves and into child labour. His charity gives children a new chance at life after they have suffered through these traumatic experiences in their formative years.
Thuy, 16, was lured from her home by a friend who promised her a well-paying job in China, at a clothes shop near the border.
But there was no shop, and the teenager was sold to a brothel as a sex slave.
One night, she made a run for it, but was tackled to the ground by three brothel-keepers, who attacked her with knives and apparently stuffed a drug into her wounds, leaving her for dead. The Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation got her to hospital, tracked down relatives and began work to heal the extraordinary psychological scars her ordeal had caused.
In one recent case, the charity brought home 16-year-old Sung, who had apparently been sold to a massage parlour in China.
He had escaped and wandered for two days through the unfamiliar country until a woman took him to the police.
This week, they rescued seven-year-old Thi, who had been kidnapped and handed to a family in China for $750.
Michael, now 40, first learned about the fate of such children when he went to work at Hanoi’s national university in 2002 and began teaching English to shoeshine boys.
“They came to the city to make money for their families in the countryside,” he told news.com.au
“I quickly realised they needed to get back to school.”
He set up Blue Dragon and started helping these kids into education and training. He soon stumbled upon a whole village children who had been trafficked to Ho Chi Minh City — promised wages and an education, but instead forced to work selling flowers for nothing. The charity contacted their families and got them home.
Then he discovered more children being trafficked to South Vietnam to work in garment factories, living as sweatshop slaves. The charity began rescuing the children, and Michael believes their work has started to unravel the practice.
“We’ve made it expensive for them,” says Michael. “We call the police and get the factory shut down. Then we come back again.”
It was from there that his team began bringing children back from brothels in China, dangerous work that incurred the traffickers’ wrath.
The sexual abuse of boys is not yet against the law in Vietnam, so they are targets for exploitation by paedophile rings.
“You see boys lose belief in themselves,” says Michael. “They believe they’re garbage.”
In one harrowing case from October, a 14-year-old disabled boy was beaten and raped by a neighbour. Blue Dragon paid his hospital bills, helped his family through the recovery and provided legal assistance. His attacker was sentenced to 18 months in jail for indecency — very little by international standards but a major achievement in Vietnam.
Michael hopes the country is moving closer to resolving this law. He is also working with lawyers to bring more traffickers to justice.
“It’s an important part of the healing process,” he says.
“In just about all cases of sex trafficking, the victim knows the trafficker. If you’re sold by someone you trust, how can you ever trust anyone again?”
Girls are told by boyfriends, friends and neighbours that they are going on a shopping trip to China, and then pimped out as prostitutes. Blue Dragon helps the girls recover — perhaps never 100 per cent, admits Michael, but they go on to university, careers and marriage.
Today, Blue Dragon cares for more than 1500 young people, with food, homes, jobs and rehabilitation. They are currently raising money through Roll’d in Melbourne to build a new school for 150 children in a heavily trafficked area, since kids who drop out are usually the vulnerable ones.
Michael says his team and the kids are like family, and look out for each other as they face trauma every single day.
“It’s highly rewarding because we see lives change,” he says. “The harrowing part is when it takes a long time. We know boys and girls of just 14 who are making money selling sex, after they’ve been abused. They hate themselves and think this is all they’re good for.
“Knowing that abuse is happening is the hardest part. You have to keep believing.”
Find out more about Michael Brosowski’s work at the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation here.Carole Penny Marshall[1] (October 15, 1943 – December 17, 2018)[1] was an American actress, director and producer. She came to notice in the 1970s for her role as Laverne DeFazio on the television sitcom Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983), receiving three nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy for her portrayal.
Marshall made her directorial debut with Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) before directing Big (1988), which became the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million at the U.S. box office. Her subsequent directing credits included Awakenings (1990), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, A League of Their Own (1992), Renaissance Man (1994), The Preacher's Wife (1996) and Riding in Cars with Boys (2001). She also produced Cinderella Man (2005) and Bewitched (2005), and directed episodes of the TV series According to Jim and United States of Tara.
Early life [ edit ]
Carole Penny Marshall was born in the Bronx, New York City, New York, on October 15, 1943, to Marjorie Irene (née Ward; 1908–1983), a tap dance teacher who ran the Marjorie Marshall Dance School, and Anthony "Tony" Masciarelli (1906–1999), later Anthony Wallace Marshall, a director of industrial films and later a producer.[2] She was the sister of actor/director/TV producer Garry Marshall and Ronny Hallin, a television producer. Her birth name, Carole, was selected because her mother's favorite actress was Carole Lombard. Her middle name was selected because her older sister Ronny, wanting a horse in the Bronx, was saving her pennies; her mother chose the middle name in an attempt to console her.[3]
Her father was of Italian descent, his family having come from Abruzzo,[4] and her mother was of German, English, and Scottish descent;[5][6][7] Marshall's father changed his last name from Masciarelli to Marshall before she was born.[8][9] Religion played no role in the Marshall children's lives. Garry Marshall was christened Episcopalian, Ronny was Lutheran, and Marshall was confirmed in a Congregational Church, because "[Mother] sent us anyplace that had a hall where she could put on a recital. If she hadn't needed performance space, we wouldn't have bothered."[10]
She grew up at 3235 Grand Concourse, the Bronx, in a building which was also the childhood home of Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren.[11] She began her career as a tap dancer at age three, and later taught tap at her mother's dance school. She graduated from Walton High School, a public girls' high school in New York and then went to University of New Mexico for 21⁄ 2 years where she studied math and psychology. While at UNM, Marshall became pregnant with daughter, Tracy Reiner (née Tracy Henry), and soon after married the father, Michael Henry, in 1963. The couple divorced three years later in 1966. During this period, Marshall worked various jobs to support herself, including working as a choreographer for the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera Association.[12] In 1967,[13] she moved to Los Angeles to join her older brother Garry, a writer whose credits at the time included TV's The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966).
Career [ edit ]
Marshall first appeared on a television commercial for Head and Shoulders beautifying shampoo. She was hired to play a girl with stringy, unattractive hair, and Farrah Fawcett was hired to play a girl with thick, bouncy hair. As the crew was lighting the set, Marshall's stand-in wore a placard that read "Homely Girl" and Fawcett's stand-in wore a placard that said "Pretty Girl". Fawcett, sensing Marshall's insecurity about her looks, crossed out "Homely" on the Marshall stand-in placard and wrote "Plain".[14] Marshall and Billie Hayes were the only actresses to audition for the role of Witchiepoo for H.R. Pufnstuf, produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. Marshall thought that she was not right for the part, and Hayes got the role.[citation needed]
In 1968 Marshall accepted an offer from her brother to appear in a movie he had written and was producing, called How Sweet It Is (1968). She landed another small role in the film The Savage Seven (1968), as well as a guest appearance on the hit television series That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas.[15] Marshall was considered for the role of Gloria Bunker Stivic on All in the Family, but lost the part to Sally Struthers.[16]
In 1970, Garry Marshall became the executive producer of the television series The Odd Couple. The following year, Marshall was added to the permanent cast to play a secretary, Myrna, and held the role for four years. In Marshall's final appearance on The Odd Couple, her character married her boyfriend, Sheldn ("they left the "o" off the birth certificate", she explains), played by Rob Reiner, her real-life husband.[15] The episode included Marshall's real-life siblings, Garry and Ronny, as Myrna's brother and sister.[citation needed]
While she was on The Odd Couple, Marshall played small roles in TV movies such as Evil Roy Slade (1972), starring Mickey Rooney (and produced by brother Garry); The Crooked Hearts (1972) starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., in which she played a waitress; The Couple Takes a Wife, starring Bill Bixby; and Wacky Zoo of Morgan City (1972). From 1972 to 1973, she appeared as a regular on The Bob Newhart Show. In 1974, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns cast Marshall |
I also was a bit surprised when one of the stories in the premiere – that people can alleviate pain by swearing – was straight out of MythBusters, so that anyone who's seen that episode will instantly know whether or not to believe that one. There's likely to be a lot of crossover in the viewership of the two shows, so I would hope to see Discovery make more of an effort to make sure they don't cover the same material.
Penn & Teller Tell a Lie airs Wednesdays at 10pm ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, starting tonight. It doesn't contain anything terribly offensive, though the premiere does mention the existence of sex (between alligators) and use the word "horny." It's very far from graphic, though, so I'm personally not terribly concerned about my kids watching it, but I feel I would be remiss if I didn't warn other parents so they could make their own determination.
In summary: It's a very good show, which MythBusters fans will almost certainly enjoy and which non-MythBusters fans (if there are any who read this blog) should give a try. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the season.
Photos copyright by, and courtesy of, Discovery Channel.CALGARY — Hundreds of union employees waved flags and screamed anti-Harper epithets during a demonstration that gathered across the street from the Conservative convention on Saturday, as the party supported “right to work” proposals and passed several motions that would curb the ability of unions to collect mandatory dues, maintain opaque finances and engage in partisan political activities.
Delegates also passed several proposals to bring public sector pay in line with the pensions and wages more commonly seen in the private sector.
“This is exactly our position going into the next round of bargaining,” said Tony Clement, President of the federal Treasury Board. “For too long, there have been major gaps in wages and benefits between the public and private sector…this is not sustainable, it’s not right, it’s not Conservative and it’s not in the public interest.”
That wasn’t the view of the public sector workers across the street, many of whom wore blue “Stephen Harper Hates Me” buttons and waved flags. The union protesters saw the slate or motions as a direct attack on unionized workers.
“The Harper government’s convention here in Calgary now has at least 10 resolutions aimed at destroying the unions,” said Marc Briere, the first vice president of the Union of Taxation Employees. Activists gathered despite heavy snowfall to oppose the Harper government, generally. However, he said they were also taking a stand against motions that would mandate a secret ballot in a strike vote a position that would respect strike breakers and “work with unions and employers in areas of federal jurisdiction to develop a dispute settlement mechanism to minimize or avoid work disruption.
— — — — —
Socially conservative delegates voted through a range of contentious policies that would crack down on those who exploit sex workers, outlaw euthanasia and assisted suicide, and that denounce sex-selected abortion.
Despite potentially opening up a divisive abortion debate, the delegates supported a motion that “condemns discrimination against girls through gender selection,” as anti-”gendercide” protesters circulated outside waving neon pink placards.
“Our prime minister, Stephen Harper, said that in this world you have to have values,” Rosey Rosenke, executive director of Alberta Pro-Life, told the Calgary Herald. “We want to stand up for baby girls that are being terminated.”
Sex-selective abortion has proven to be a contentious issue in the House of Commons; MP Mark Warawa has supported several motions to debate the matter, but has been blocked at least twice; he dropped his latest bid to condemn the practice in April.
Standing in stark contrast to the increasingly liberal attitudes towards euthanasia in Quebec, the Conservatives adopted a straightforward opposition to all legislation intended to legalize assisted suicide.
The Conservatives also voted to support the rights of faith-based organizations to refuse to rent out their facilities to groups or entities who oppose their beliefs.
Meanwhile, despite the efforts of anonymous pamphleteers to encourage “sane prostitution laws,” the party rejected the concept of “legalizing the purchase of sex,” while developing a plan to target johns and human traffickers. The party also supported criminalizing any third party attempting to “profit from the purchase of sex.”
— — — — —
Absent a long gun registry to rail against, Conservatives continued to affirm the rights of duck hunters with a motion that supported the legitimacy of private gun ownership, regardless of any nefarious “domestic or international pressure to the contrary.”
However, a second motion that would have deemed gun ownership a right to be removed, rather than a privilege to be earned, was narrowly defeated on the floor.
“I’m an old Tory,” said former minister of public safety, Vic Toews. “I believe there has to be a measure of gun control, [however] responsible people, though, should be entitled to own firearms.”
An embattled Mr. Toews resigned from his position as a member of parliament ahead of the last Cabinet shuffle in June.
Also of note: The party supported creating distinct budgets between the CBC’s television and radio operations. Delegates said television should be a “self-sustaining” entity, while more government funding might be necessary to run radio in smaller rural areas.
— — — — —
CPC13 was not all abortion motions and calls for criminals to be “swinging from ropes”, in the words of Calgary MP Rob Anders.
There was the odd moment of levity, in between the delegates’ call to ban sex (specifically the paid kind). To reset their electronic voting system, the Tories asked delegates whether NDP leader Tom Mulcair should shave his beard. The answer was overwhelmingly in the affirmative.
Karl Belanger, one of the NDP spies in Calgary, got his own back by distributing Ottawa Senators hockey cards with a difference. The senators in question were the expensive political kind – Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, Patrick Brazeau, Mac Harb, Raymond Lavingne, Colin Kenny and Carolyn Stewart Olsen.
Mr. Duffy’s bio says: “This former journalist scored the scoop of a lifetime when Stephen Harper appointed him in 2008.”
His trading value is pretty low however – should he escape Senate expulsion, his cost to Canadians at retirement age will be just $1.8-million – a bargain next to the $7.9-million cost of Mr. Brazeau and the $3.2-million for Ms. Wallin.
National PostOldster Member
Group RNG Master Posts 3,062 Reputation +42 Location Siracusa
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Autore Originale: Guida/Contenuto Nome Utente: Drake™
Ruolo: RNG Master (Admin)
Guida Scritta: [SM-USUM] Wondercards: Time Leap
Diritti: New Order of Breeding ©
Wondercards: Time Leap
Requisiti:
· 3DS RNG Tool
· NTR-CFW
· 7ª Gen Plugins
· Project Pokémon Wondercards
· PKHeX
Introduzione
Il funzionamento delle Wondercards in 7ª generazione segue il modello introdotto con l'uscita di Pokémon X & Y, con qualche variazione riguardante l'avanzamento dei Frames. Alcune limitazioni risalenti alla 5ª generazione vengono nuovamente riportate nell'algoritmo di produzione di queste Wondercards, infatti le Nature dei Pokémon contenuti nelle Schede Segrete non saranno manipolabili tramite l'abilità Sincronismo.
Importante: Per prima cosa bisognerà dirigersi verso il primo Centro Pokémon dell'isola di Mele Mele, più precisamente quello situato nella Periferia della città di Hau'oli. Sarà proprio qui infatti che avremo la possibilità di ottimizzare al meglio la Time Leap, poiché in questo luogo troveremo il minor numero di NPCs presenti in un Centro Pokémon.
Questo significa che saremo in grado di raggiungere più Safe Frames e Spreads desiderate, oltre ad avere una maggiore stabilità di avanzamento del Current Frame.
Inoltre, è consigliabile aver sbloccato il Festiplaza e/o aver raggiunto il Centro Commerciale situato nella città di Hau'oli per velocizzare l'avanzamento dei Frames. Vedremo in modo più approfondito anche questo aspetto più tardi. Per una panoramica più completa e approfondita su Time Line & Time Leap, vi consigliamo di consultare questa guida prima di continuare la lettura.
Preparazione
Aprite il PKHeX e caricate il salvataggio, successivamente andate su Mystery Gift.
Per importare una Wondercard premete su Import, poi cliccate il tasto destro e selezionate la voce Set.
Se invece volete esportarne una cliccate il tasto destro sullo slot desiderato, scegliete "View" e poi premete su Export.
Infine salvate le modifiche.
Nota: Non caricate due Wondercards dello stesso tipo all'interno del salvataggio perché non è un'opzione valida, inoltre queste devono essere disponibili sulla versione di gioco che userete. Tuttavia alcuni Pokémon Evento possono essere ricevuti più di una volta nello stesso salvataggio, assicuratevi quindi che la vostra Scheda Segreta lo permetta.
Ovviamente, nel caso disponiate già di Wondercards ottenute tramite distribuzioni ufficiali, passate pure alla fase successiva.
Ricerca delle Spreads
Dopo aver ottenuto il vostro Initial Seed, aprite il 3DS RNG Tool e andate in Event RNG.
Configurate la scheda come sotto:
Save Information: Specificate la vostra versione di gioco, l'Initial Seed indicato dallo Script ed il TSV relativo al vostro salvataggio.
Import: Caricate la Wondercard contenente il Pokémon interessato in formato.wc7/.wc7full.
IVs: Impostate le IVs che desiderate ottenga il Pokémon contenuto nella Wondercard.
Pokémon Traits: Specificate le caratteristiche che volete ottenga il Pokémon quali Natura, Introforza, Abilità e Sesso.
Frame Range: Inserite 478 come Starting Frame nella casella di sinistra e 500000 come Max Frame in quella di destra.
# of NPCs: Selezionate 4 come valore. Specificate la vostra versione di gioco, l'Initial Seed indicato dallo Script ed il TSV relativo al vostro salvataggio.Caricate la Wondercard contenente il Pokémon interessato in formatoImpostate le IVs che desiderate ottenga il Pokémon contenuto nella Wondercard.Specificate le caratteristiche che volete ottenga il Pokémon quali Natura, Introforza, Abilità e Sesso.Inserite 478 comenella casella di sinistra e 500000 comein quella di destra.Selezionate 4 come valore.
Nota: In alternativa potreste anche compilare manualmente le voci inerenti all'Event Setting, ma lo sconsigliamo vivamente in quanto potreste commettere errori. Onde evitare problemi, reperite la Wondercard desiderata a questo link e successivamente caricatela tramite il tasto Import del 3DS RNG Tool.
La voce "No Dex Entry" comparirà nel programma qualora vi sia un Pokémon appartenente al Pokédex di Alola all'interno di una Wondercard. Questa dovrà essere selezionata nel caso in cui non abbiate ancora registrato quella creatura nel Pokédex Regionale. Infatti l'animazione della registrazione causerà un Delay che il 3DS RNG Tool dovrà considerare per fornirci risultati corretti.
Una volta compilata la finestra di dialogo cliccate su Calculate.
Tra i possibili risultati indicati dal programma sceglietene uno, dopodiché col cursore del mouse posizionatevici sopra e cliccateci con il tasto destro; dal menù a tendina selezionate Set as Target Frame. Da questo momento in poi chiameremo il Target Frame scelto come Frame 2, per far sì che le nomee usate in questa guida corrispondano a quelle utilizzate nel 3DS RNG Tool. Nel mio caso il Frame 2 sarà: 229576.
Avanzare il Current Frame
Dato che la Time Leap non è vincolata da subito ad una calibrazione con i Safe Frames, è possibile avanzare il Current Frame a piacimento: vi basterà lasciare un margine di ∓ 20.000 Frames prima del raggiungimento del Target.
Di seguito trovate un Easy Slide contenente le tre migliori locazioni per far avanzare velocemente il Current Frame:
Festiplaza
Il Festiplaza è un luogo adibito alle modalità di comunicazione dei giochi di 7a generazione, come il Pokémon Global Link e le funzioni di scambio e lotta tra giocatori. Sarà possibile accedere a questa locazione mediante il menù di gioco, dopo che Lylia avrà guidato il giocatore verso il suo primo Centro Pokémon situato nel Percorso 1. Questa zona della regione di Alola sarà una preziosa alleata per aumentare i Frames in maniera molto più rapida grazie all'elevata presenza di NPCs nell'area.
Nello specifico, il numero di NPCs andrà generalmente dagli 11 ai 14 se il personaggio si troverà all'interno del Castello del Festiplaza, mentre si aggirerà intorno agli 8 nella parte dedicata alle strutture. Tuttavia sarà possibile aumentare gli NPCs utilizzando le funzionalità online.
Centro Commerciale di Hau'oli
Il Centro Commerciale di Hau'oli è situato sull'isola di Mele Mele ed offre diversi tipi di servizi attraverso i molteplici negozi collocati al suo interno. Tra questi ad esempio troviamo Cimeli e rarità, che, come suggerisce il nome, venderà oggetti di antiquariato come le sfere dello spaziotempo legate al Trio Drago di 4ª generazione.
Questo è il luogo più indicato per far aumentare più velocemente i Frames di gioco, in quanto si trova un'elevata presenza di NPCs all'interno della struttura. Generalmente il numero di personaggi non giocabili varia dai 22 ai 28 se il proprio personaggio viene collocato all'entrata della costruzione, come mostrato nell'immagine a fianco.
Valle dei Pikachu
In alternativa ai posti già citati, in Pokémon Ultrasole & Ultraluna è stata aggiunta una nuova zona situata vicino al Percorso 4 sull'isola di Akala. Stiamo parlando della Valle dei Pikachu, un piccolo spazio dove il giocatore può interagire con i Pikachu selvatici per farci amicizia. In questo luogo si potranno ottenere diversi oggetti, tra cui l'Ashpikacium Z e ottenere lo speciale Pikachu col Berretto Compagni.
Il numero di NPCs in questa zona si aggirerà intorno ai 15, e sarà più stabile se il giocatore verrà posizionato di fronte all'uomo vicino alla roulotte a tema Pikachu.
Arrivati in prossimità del Frame 2, mettete in Pausa il gioco con l'NTR e passate al prossimo step.
Calibrazione della Time Leap
Nell'introduzione è specificato il perché è necessario recarsi specificatamente al Centro Pokémon di Hau'oli, tuttavia in questa parte della guida vedremo nel dettaglio dove posizionarsi per eseguire la calibrazione.
Per prima cosa, è fondamentale che il numero di NPCs risulti essere pari a 4 quando ci si trova nella struttura. Questo dovrà figurare anche nel Plugin e dovrà essere utilizzato come valore per la ricerca di Frames sicuri. La posizione consona da adottare è quella illustrata nella seguente immagine:
Oltre a ciò, prima di avviare la ricerca nel 3DS RNG Tool, bisognerà raggiungere la frase mostrata nel box di testo del gioco per evitare eventuali errori durante la ricerca. La frase in questione è quella dove ci verrà chiesto di accettare o rifiutare il Pokémon contenuto nella Scheda Segreta.
Nota: Potrebbe capitare che gli NPCs indicati dal Plugin risultino essere più o meno di 4, in questo caso assicuratevi di aver posizionato il personaggio correttamente prima di tutto. Se invece il numero di NPCs continuerà a risultare differente da quello richiesto, uscite e rientrate nel Centro Pokémon, riposizionando il personaggio alle spalle del fattorino. Per essere ulteriormente sicuri del numero di personaggi non giocabili, chiudete e riaprite il Plugin per ricalcolarli.
Fatto questo, configurate la scheda come sotto:
Reset Filters: Cliccate sul bottone indicato con la freccia per azzerare le impostazioni dei filtri.
Safe F Only: Selezionate questa voce e spuntinatela.
Target Frame: Assicuratevi che in questo campo sia riportato il vostro Frame 2.
# of NPCs: Impostate 4 come valore.
Frame Range: Inserite il Current Frame come Starting Frame nella casella di sinistra, mentre lasciate il valore di default nella casella di destra. Cliccate sul bottone indicato con la freccia per azzerare le impostazioni dei filtri.Selezionate questa voce e spuntinatela.Assicuratevi che in questo campo sia riportato il vostroImpostate 4 come valore.Inserite il Current Frame comenella casella di sinistra, mentre lasciate il valore di default nella casella di destra.
Una volta compilata la finestra di dialogo cliccate su Calculate.
I risultati mostrati nella prima colonna sono i Frames sicuri (per l'appunto "Safe Frames"), necessari per generare una Time Leap certa affinché il Target Frame possa essere raggiunto in totale sicurezza.
Ora non dovremo far altro che raggiungere uno dei nostri Safe Frames lasciando il gioco scorrere normalmente, per poi rimetterlo in Pausa con lo Script una volta raggiunto il Target. Inoltre, per evitare "mezzi avanzamenti" e facilitare il raggiungimento di uno dei Frames indicati dal programma, si consiglia di mettere il gioco in Pausa un centinaio di Frames prima per poi avanzare manualmente il Current tramite la pressione del tasto Select.
Una volta fatto ciò, cliccate con il tasto destro del mouse sul Safe Frame al quale avete messo il gioco in Pausa, dopodiché dal menù a tendina selezionate Set as Starting Frame. A questo punto cliccate sulla voce Time Leap ed infine su Calculate.
Nel mio caso sceglierò come Starting Frame il valore 216148.
Dovreste ritrovarvi in una schermata simile alla seguente:
Il Prompt ci fornisce in output i dati necessari per completare il processo di RNG: annotateli da qualche parte poiché dovrete utilizzarli a breve. Per comodità ho riportato i miei dati nello schema sottostante, così da tenere sott'occhio i valori richiesti ottenuti dalla calibrazione.
Frame 1 ➥ 228207 ~ Frame 2 ➥ 229576
RNG
Ora che conosciamo i due Frames da utilizzare non ci resta che raggiungerli e premere il tasto A nei due momenti illustrati di seguito. Come specificato nello step precedente, c'è una frase particolare nella quale bisogna eseguire la calibrazione con i Safe Frames: questa sarà la stessa in cui dovremo premere A una volta raggiunto il Frame 1.
La locuzione in questione è "Questo dono contiene un Pokémon. Vuoi ritirarlo?".
Dopo aver premuto su "Sì" al Frame 1, il Frame Skip sarà innescato, dandoci così modo di raggiungere il nuovo Target Frame.
La frase alla quale premere il tasto A è quella che succede la precedente, ovvero "Hai ottenuto uno [Pokémon]!".
La teoria riguardante la Time Leap e tutte le meccaniche annesse ad essa sono illustrate nella guida introduttiva di 7ª generazione. Pertanto si dà per scontato che la abbiate consultata prima di visionare le guide specifiche ai vari processi di RNG, come consigliato anche nell'introduzione di questa guida. Le funzioni "Yes" & "No" utilizzabili dal Prompt sono quindi discusse nella medesima.
Nota: È consigliabile mettere il gioco in Pausa quando sarete vicini al vostro Target Frame. Per farlo, premete contemporaneamente Start + Select e successivamente avanzate manualmente il Frame tramite la pressione del tasto Select. Una volta che sarete arrivati al vostro Target Frame, tenete premuto il tasto A per qualche istante: in questo modo il Plugin toglierà la Pausa al gioco e contemporaneamente premerà Invio sulla frase in cui vi siete fermati nel precedente step. È fondamentale seguire alla lettera questo procedimento poiché, se premerete il tasto A rilasciandolo l'istante successivo, il Plugin toglierà solamente la Pausa al gioco e non eseguirà un'eventuale azione tramite il segnale classico di output.
Risultato
Se avete fatto tutto correttamente, otterrete il vostro Pokémon con le caratteristiche da voi scelte.
Key Words: RNG Reporter ┃ RNG ┃ Pokémon RNG ┃ Pokémon ┃ Pokémon Shiny ┃ Pokémon Cromatici ┃ 3DS RNG Tool Games: Pokémon Sun ┃ Pokémon Sole ┃ Pokémon Moon ┃ Pokémon Luna ┃ Pokémon Ultrasun ┃ Pokémon Ultrasole ┃ Pokémon Ultramoon ┃ Pokémon Ultraluna ┃ Pokémon SM ┃ Pokémon USUM How to: How to RNG in 7th Generation ┃ Come usare l'RNG in 7a Generazione ┃ How to obtain flawless Pokémon in 7th Generation ┃ Come ottenere Pokémon perfetti in 7a Generazione ┃ How to obtain shiny Pokémon in 7th Generation ┃ Come ottenere Pokémon cromatici in 7a Generazione ┃ How to obtain flawless event Pokémon in 7th Generation ┃ Come ottenere Pokémon evento perfetti in 7a Generazione Others: RNG Guides ┃ 7th Generation RNG Guides ┃ Guide RNG 7a Generazione ┃ Pokémon Time Leap ┃ Pokémon Time Line ┃ Wondercard Pokémon Time Leap
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Edited by Dragon69 - 22/2/2019, 17:19The implications of the observation that human and mouse gene expression data may be clustering by species more than by tissues can be profound. To a large degree, modern biology is built upon the empirical observation that homologous gene regulatory networks establish the identities of homologous cell-types, tissues, and organs across species – the results of Lin et al., if true, challenge these observations and the biological basis of homology. From a more practical perspective, the mouse is arguably the most important animal model for biomedical research. If gene regulation in any mouse tissue is markedly more representative of a general mouse regulatory network than the regulatory network of a corresponding human tissue, this would call into question the utility of the mouse, and perhaps any other non-human animal, as a useful model system for biomedical research.
This pattern was confirmed and discussed in greater detail in a companion paper by Lin et al. 2, which also acknowledged that this observation is somewhat unexpected. Indeed, previous comparative studies reported that gene expression data from human and mouse (and across other species more generally) tend to cluster by tissues, not by species. Lin et al. proposed that previous studies might have been biased in their focus on a few ‘specialized’ tissues that tend to express the largest number of ‘tissue-specific genes’, while the overall pattern supports less tissue specificity.
The mouse ENCODE Consortium has collected multiple types of genomic and functional data in order to better understand the potential utility of the mouse as a model system for biomedical research. To study gene expression levels, the Consortium collected RNA sequencing data from multiple tissues from human and mouse. Their comparative analysis revealed that gene expression patterns tend to support clustering of the data by species, rather than by tissue (Figure 2a in reference 1 ).
To compute per gene raw counts from the alignment files produced by Tophat 7, we used the program featureCounts v1.4.4 11 with the respective species’ GTF file specified in the “Genome and gene annotation files” section. For all runs we used the following options: “-p” - indicates that fragments rather than reads should be counted; “-C” - indicates that chimeric fragments will not be included in the summarization process; and “-s 2” - indicates that the paired-ends are reversely stranded. We next generated a matrix of 14,744 by 26 raw counts for each gene (in the ortholog table) and sample. Since the output from featureCounts identifies genes by their gene identifier (the ENSEMBL identifier in our case), whereas the ortholog table uses the gene’s common name to identify it, we used the GC content table, which contains both these identifiers to match counts to the correct row in the ortholog table. As we did when generating the FPKM matrix, we ignored the values from retired ENSEMBL identifiers, and if there were still multiple identifiers for the same common name, we used the value from the identifier that appeared first.
We used Cufflinks v2.2.1 10 to compute fragments per kilo base of transcript per million (FPKM) values and aggregate them per gene. The only option used was “--library-type fr-firststrand”. For the required transcript annotation file (“-G” parameter) we used the GTF file for the respective species described in the “Genome and gene annotation files” section. We then generated a matrix of 14,744 by 26 FPKM values for each gene (in the ortholog table) and sample. While generating this table we noticed that some of the common gene names were associated with more than one ENSEMBL gene identifier. In some cases we determined that this was due to gene identifiers that have been retired from the ENSEMBL database 3 but were retained in the GTF file (27 and 64 retired identifiers for human and mouse, respectively). These retired identifiers were ignored when constructing the FPKM matrix. For the remaining such cases we incorporated the value from the first appearance of the common name.
For each of the two species we used the appropriate GTF file to generate a table, which contains for each gene its ENSEMBL gene identifier its common name, and the GC content of the sequence covered by the union of the gene’s transcripts. To this end, we first generated a GTF file where overlapping exons from different transcripts of the same gene were merged into a single “exon” with the same sequence coverage, retaining the association with the gene identifier. Next, we computed the nucleotide content of the exons in this new GTF file using the ‘nuc’ utility from bedtools v2.17.0 9. Finally, we computed the GC content for each gene identifier by summing the number of ‘G’ and ‘C’ nucleotides in its merged exons and dividing by the sum of counts of unambiguous nucleotides in these exons.
We mapped the RNA-Seq reads to their respective genomes using Tophat v2.0.11 7 with the following options: “--mate-inner-dist 200” (i.e. inner mate distance is 200nt, based on paired-end reads with length 100nt each and an insert size of 350-450nt ); “--bowtie-n” (i.e. the “-n” option will be used in Bowtie 8 in the initial read mapping stage); “-g 1” (i.e. multi-mapping reads will be excluded from alignment); “-m 1” (i.e. one mismatch is allowed in the anchor region of a spliced alignment); “--library-type fr-firststrand” (the libraries had been constructed using the Illumina TruSeq Stranded mRNA LT Sample Prep Kit 2 ). An exception was the mouse pancreas sample, for which the mapping process stalled consistently at the same stage. For this sample we used Tophat v1.4.1 8 with the same options as above. Tophat requires a Bowtie 8 index. For human we used the Bowtie index that was packaged with the genome sequence in the file downloaded from the Illumina iGenomes page ( http://support.illumina.com/sequencing/sequencing_software/igenome.html ). For mouse we built an index using the bowtie-build utility from Bowtie v2.2.1 (v 0.12.7 for the index used with Tophat v1.4.1).
We used the FastQC software v0.10.0 ( http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/fastqc/ ) to assess the quality of the individual FASTQ files ( Supplementary Table 2 – Supplementary Table 6 ). We were concerned by evidence for GC content bias and overrepresented sequences. To examine the latter in greater detail, we mapped the sequences overrepresented in at least one sample to the genome of the respective species, using BLAT searches 6 against the hg19 (human) and mm10 (mouse) assemblies at the UCSC genome browser site ( http://genome.ucsc.edu/ ) 6. We found that in both species many of the overrepresented sequences mapped perfectly to the mitochondrial genome ( Supplementary Table 3 – Supplementary Table 6 ). For the mouse pancreas sample only, we also found many overrepresented sequences mapped to regions with rRNA repeats from the SSU-rRNA_Hsa and LSU-rRNA_Hsa families.
Following Lin et al. 2, we used the protein-coding ortholog list generated by the modENCODE and mouse ENCODE consortia 5. A file containing all orthologs from human, mouse, fly and worm was downloaded from http://compbio.mit.edu/modencode/orthologs/modencode.common.orth.txt.gz. From this list we extracted 14,744 human-mouse one-to-one ortholog pairs, for which both members were included in the transcript annotation files we used. We note that this number is lower than the ~15,106 ortholog pairs reported in Lin et al. We are not certain of the meaning of the ‘~’ in the report of the number of ortholog pairs analyzed by Lin et al. Nevertheless, we believe that a possible explanation for this disparity is a parsing error. The last two columns of the ‘modENCODE ortholog file’ represent the number of genes from each species in the ortholog group. One of the steps required to obtain the subset of ortholog groups for analysis is to select those records where the two last columns have a value of 1 (i.e. one-to-one ortholog pairs). We found that if this selection is done through a command line search that does not require that the value in the last column be exactly “1”, but rather just begins with “1”, then the result is 15,104 putative human-mouse ortholog pairs.
Based on this information we inferred that the FASTQ files were generated by CASAVA version 1.8 or higher. Thus, we could extract from the sequence identifiers the following details that pertain to the sequencing study design: machine identifier, run number, flowcell identifier, and flowcell lane number. We found that the sequencing was performed in five batches, each consisting of a multiplexed single run on a single lane on one of four sequencers ( Figure 1 ; note that two of the batches, composed of human samples only, differed only in their lane number). The design was such that only one batch contained samples from both species. The remaining four batches could be divided into pairs where each of the two batches had a nearly identical tissue composition, but a different species.
Based on the sequence identifiers found in the FASTQ files, we reconstructed the sequencing study design used to collect the gene expression data in Lin et al. 2. The sequence identifier line in a FASTQ file generated from an Illumina sequencing run can take two formats, depending on the version of the Consensus Assessment of Sequence and Variation (CASAVA) pipeline used to generate it. Prior to version 1.8 of this pipeline the sequence identifier line was of the following format (CASAVA v1.7 user guide p.88; downloaded from: http://support.illumina.com/downloads/casava_software_version_17_user_guide_(15011196_a).html
For our analysis, we used the same genome build and gene annotation files as in Lin et al. 2. The ENSEMBL 3 genome build Mus musculus GRCm38.68 was downloaded from ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-68/fasta/mus_musculus/dna/Mus_musculus.GRCm38.68.dna_sm.toplevel.fa.gz ; the corresponding transcript annotation file was downloaded from ftp://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-68/gtf/mus_musculus/Mus_musculus.GRCm38.68.gtf.gz. The Homo sapiens genome build provided by ENSEMBL 3 contains haplotypic regions that are not part of the primary assembly. To avoid these regions, genome build Homo sapiens GRCh37 was downloaded from the Illumina iGenomes page: ( http://support.illumina.com/sequencing/sequencing_software/igenome.html ). The GENCODE 4 Release 14 transcript annotation file for human was downloaded from ftp://ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/gencode/release_14/gencode.v14.annotation.gtf.gz. The chromosome names in the GENCODE gtf file did not match those in the genome sequence file, and were thus modified.
In December 2014 we asked and were kindly provided by the authors of Lin et al. 2 the names of the sequence files used in their comparative analysis. Based on this information we obtained sequence files in FASTQ format ( Supplementary Table 1 ) from the ENCODE project 1 site ( https://www.encodeproject.org/ ; some of the files were only available from early January 2015).
To visualize the data, we used the function ‘prcomp’ (with the ‘scale’ and ‘center’ options set to TRUE) to perform principal component analysis (PCA) of the transposed log-transformed matrix of ‘clean’ values (after removal of invariant columns, i.e. genes), and the ggplot2 package 13 to generate scatter plots of the PCA results. None of the first five principal components (accounting together for 56% of the variability in the data) support the clustering of the gene expression data by species ( Figure 3a and Figure S4 – Figure S5 ). However, the sixth principal component, which accounts for 6% of the variability in the data, does support such a clustering, suggesting that even though the ‘species’ and ‘batch’ variables are confounded, accounting for ‘batch’ does not remove completely the variability due to ‘species’ ( Figure S5 ). We also plotted a heatmap of the matrix of Pearson correlations between the 26 samples, using the pheatmap function from the pheatmap package v1.0.2 14 with default settings (i.e. complete linkage hierarchical clustering using the Euclidean distances). This time the heatmap shows considerable clustering of the comparaive gene expression data by tissue ( Figure 3b ).
We then considered how to account for the fact that the assignment of samples to sequencing flowcells and lanes was nearly completely confounded with the species annotations of the samples ( Figure 1 ). The consideration of ‘batch effect’ was the most important difference between the analysis that recapitulated the patterns reported by the mouse ENCODE papers (the previous ‘Results’ section) and the current reanalysis effort. Specifically, we accounted for the sequencing study design batch effects using the ‘ComBat’ function from the sva package v3.12.0 20, with a model that includes effects for batch, species and tissue. For this purpose the samples were classified into five batches, based on the sequencing study design (see methods and Figure 1 ).
Following Li et al. 16, we removed the 30% of genes with the lowest expression as determined by the sum of fragment counts across all samples. Next, due to the presence of mitochondrial genes among |
ittymänsä.
Korjaus: Nopein überkaista on 350 megabittiä, ei 250. Pahoittelemme virhettä.Coming from a promotional page for Fire Emblem If...
Fire Emblem - Nintendo's SRPG series that has been beloved by fans for 25 years. The most recent entry, Fire Emblem Awakening, sold 1.79 million copies worldwide (as of December 2014), and now, this world-beloved series' latest entry, "Fire Emblem if", will be released to celebrate the 25th anniversary.
Before Fire Emblem: Awakening came out, Nintendo said that the series might be taking a break for awhile if Awakening didn't sell well. It seems like the perfect storm of support came through, really opening up a market for the series outside of Japan. Quite a nice number to pull in, especially when considering the genre Fire Emblem falls into. Glad to see things going so well for Awakening. It paved the way for the future of the franchise!George Orwell's 1984 served as a cautionary tale for what happens when authority goes horribly wrong and when government intrudes into every aspect of its citizens life, including their own thoughts. It was a prophecy of what was (and is) to come if people did not fight back against the militant leftism – then the Soviet Union – that had ruled Eastern Europe with an iron fist.
However, the woman who should never be President (and thankfully never will be) believes that Orwell's warning was about why people should trust authority: people like herself, the mainstream media, sycophantic journalists, Hollywood, etc.
In Hillary Clinton's latest memoir What Happened, where she blames everyone but herself for her abysmal loss to President Trump this past election, the former First Lady explains how Trump is really the Big Brother of 1984 and that elitists like herself are the heroic Winston Smiths out to uncover the truth.
“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” she writes in her book. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.”
"The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust," she continued. “For Trump, as with so much he does, it’s about simple dominance.”
Hillary then explains how Trump's "war on Truth" will manifest in year's to come. “If he stood up tomorrow and declared that the Earth is flat, his counselor Kellyanne Conway might just go on Fox News and defend it as an ‘alternative fact,’ and too many people would believe it," she cautioned.
Just another reason, in a very long list of reasons, why Hillary should never be President. She claims that Trump has made us question "logic and reason" when her entire book cannot bring itself to point the finger at the most logical reason for her loss in 2016: herself.
Hillary can lament all day about the non-existent "Ministry of Truth" operating under President Trump, but the people have spoken, and 61% of them want her to just go away.Missing Jefferson City Student Found Dead in Siberia Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The search for a missing Jefferson City man in Siberia has ended.
According to our CBS affiliate KRCG, The Siberian Times is now reporting that the body of 25-year-old Colin Madsen of Jefferson City has been found.
Madsen was studying at a Russian University after going to school at Columbia College, and had attended both Helias Catholic and Jefferson City Public High Schools.
He went missing eight days ago after leaving for a morning walk.
He took neither his cell phone or a coat despite subzero temperatures.
The body was found a little more than a mile from Arshan village, where he was staying before his disappearance.
On Friday, the Siberian Times reported that the Investigative Committee, seen as equivalent of the FBI, had opened a murder investigation in the Republic of Buryatia.
Authorities said his documents and money were still with his body, and there were no signs of outward injury.
The cause of death is being investigated.The Romanian hacktivist, Guccifer 2.0 had a massive document dump late Tuesday, releasing the names, addresses, donations, and contact info to more than 100,000 top Democratic donors.
Subsequently, a large number of the donors ended up receiving top diplomatic positions and apparently, the higher the donation, the more plum the position.
This may not have been a coincidence, as Jacquelyn Lopez of Perkins Coie LLP sent an email to DNC staffers asking them to call her so they could discuss the process of handling donations from “pay to play” donors.
Yes, she actually used the phrase “pay to play” when discussing Democratic Party donors:
More shocking is that some of these donors who ended up with ambassadorships had very little — if any — foreign policy experience to have earned them the position, other than donating the Democratic Party.
Matthew Barzun was at the top of that list, raising more than $3.5 million for the DNC and after giving the Democratic Party millions in small dollar donations he received two ambassadorships – Sweden in 2009 and the United Kingdom in 2013.
Before receiving his important diplomatic position, Barzun’s previous work experience including interning John Kerry in 1989 and working as the chief strategy officer for a media website.
Another big donor was Kirk Wagner who raised more than $2.3 million for the DNC. He played a vital role in winning Florida for Obama, being described as the then senator’s “foul mouthed” de facto communications director. He’s been the ambassador to Singapore since 2013.
Cynthia Stroum gave nearly $1.5 million to the DNC and received the ambassadorship to Luxembourg from 2009 to 2011. Before her diplomatic position Stroum touted herself as an entrepreneur who came from a wealthy family in Seattle – her claim to fame is that she invested in a Tony nominated Broadway musical and Starbucks when it was still a small company.
Here’s the entire list of donors who received top diplomatic and government positions:Here at Sport Witness we are not big fans of the Illuminati conspiracies, but this story is spreading really fast in Brazil and we thought you should be aware of the dark secrets of the World Cup. Just grab a beer (a coffee, please Lucas... it's morning in Europe!) and enjoy the story.
Neymar's injury wasn't real. At least that's what some internet Sherlocks are claiming. Actually Neymar didn't even go to the hospital on that Friday night after the win over Colombia. That was someone else. Not aliens though.
The "player" arrived to the hospital covering his face. Of course it makes sense, since he was supposed to be in a lot of pain. But that would be only a good excuse for the faker.
The biggest "evidence" that made this story spread so quickly was Neymar's tattoos. Theoretically, the person in the hospital didn't have any tattoos in his arms. That's what the image (easily photoshopped, we know) and the videos show.
SEE...!??!
The Brazilian Football Association officially confirmed that all the logs from Neymar's entry in the hospital were deleted. Security reasons, they said.
When Neymar got into the hospital, a nurse filmed him. She was fired the day after. Well... you don't need a conspiracy theory to prove that she is a nurse, not a security camera. She never gave an interview after that, though.
Four days after the injury, Neymar was caught walking normally. ESPN Brasil's exclusive video shows how he didn't seem to be suffering from any pain.
Brazilian humour website Jesus Maneiro found another proof that confirms all this theory. Take a deep breath before seeing the image that shows the truth:
This theory is spreading like wildfire in Brazil without many people stopping to ask 'Well, why do that in the first place?'. In the aftermath of the fateful match there are many fingers being pointed and many theories springing up.
This one appears to be the craziest of the lot.
From Lucas Sposito, Sports Witness' man in Sao Paulo.
Follow us on Twitter @Sport_WitnessCries from rail opponents have only become emboldened by the project’s string of missteps including gross spending increases, damning audits, rusted support columns, and faulty track pads that needed replacing years before the rail is ready for service. Cathy Bussewitz/AP
Traffic in Hawaii’s capital is terrible, but construction on a rail system may now cost as much as $13 billion while alleviating road congestion by as little as one percent.
Despite a famously laid-back culture, Honolulu’s traffic is about as bad as it gets. In a bid to unsnarl its highways a bit in 2011, the city embarked on a $5.2 billion Honolulu Rail Transit Project. At the time, the planned 20-mile elevated electric train line was expected to ease traffic congestion on Hawaii’s most densely populated island by 18 percent, with the first trips planned for 2017. Fast forward six years and the still-sputtering project looks very different. The city now estimates that the rail will cost $10 billion—almost five times the city’s annual budget and twice the original project cost estimate—while civil engineering specialists forecast a price tag closer to $13 billion. Per capita, the Honolulu rail could become the most expensive transit project in U.S. history, according to the conservative public policy think tank Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. What’s more, the funding source of at least $3 billion in projected costs remains unseen. Meanwhile, the city’s traffic problems have worsened and state lawmakers are left divided and scrambling to craft a plan to pay for the cash-strapped project. All told, 75 percent of the contracts needed to bring the project to completion have been awarded, and the first planned trips along the full track are no longer expected to run before 2025.
So when is it too late to quit a major public-infrastructure project gone awry? “The project is objectively terrible,” says Panos D. Prevedouros, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Hawaii, whose two failed campaigns for mayor embraced an anti-rail platform. “It reminds me of some proclamations that Trump makes with the beautiful wall he wants to build. Well, in this case, it’s the beautiful train. But it is not beautiful. It’s useless for our population.” “We are told it will reduce traffic by one percent,” says Ann Kobayashi, a member of the Honolulu City Council. Honolulu city officials predict that traffic congestion will spike by 23 percent in 2030 if the rail is not built. With the rail, a 21 percent increase in traffic is projected, so long as rail ridership reaches the city’s forecast of 116,000 daily passengers—a number widely criticized as inflated. An independent review of the project ordered under former Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle found that the rail would likely garner a substantially smaller number of daily riders—too few to keep the project in operation. “We are told it will reduce traffic by one percent,” says Ann Kobayashi, a member of the Honolulu City Council. “To spend $10 billion to reduce it by that little, does that make sense? If you’re asking me, no, it doesn’t. There’s something wrong here.” With five miles of track left to build and billions of dollars in funding left to find, some city leaders are proposing that the city abandon the beleaguered railway. Kobayashi has joined several other city leaders in saying that it's time to consider nixing the project or shortening the rail line to make it more affordable. She supports a proposal that would outfit the elevated rail line with electric buses, which are less costly to operate.
“If we were a business I think this would have been abandoned because businesses won’t keep throwing good money at bad, they want to stop the bleeding,” says Kobayashi. After failing to forge a deal to foot the bill for the project by the close of the 2017 legislative session, the Hawaii state legislature is scheduled to convene a special session in late August to hammer out a plan to fill the multi-billion dollar funding shortfall. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... Community outrage over cost overruns and the ensuing political stalemate have quickly become palpable at public hearings and on the pages of local newspapers. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently referred to it in a headline as an “epic fail on rail.” The situation prompted former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post last April, calling on President Donald Trump to axe the federal government’s plan to help fund Honolulu’s rail. The feds have chipped in to the project $1.6 billion, about $800,000 of which is unspent. “Honolulu’s rail project does not deserve a single dollar more from the federal government,” reads the ad by Cayetano, a Democrat and harsh critic of the transit plan: It has become a poster boy for how politics, incompetence, disinformation and outright lies are at the root of wasteful rail projects which do little for the public except raise taxes… If built, this will change the beauty and ambience of the city forever. A half-century long debate over the elevated rail line’s viability ostensibly concluded nine years ago when voters in Hawaii approved a referendum to green light construction. But concerns persist and the cries of opponents have only become emboldened by the project’s string of missteps including gross spending increases, damning audits, rusted support columns, and faulty track pads that needed replacing years before the rail is ready for service. The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation has since engaged in several cost-control measures, including the hiring of a new chief financial officer and more rigorous reviews of change-order requests from contractors. However, on top of concerns over cost and infrastructure, naysayers remain unsettled by how the mammoth platform of steel and concrete might reshape the identity of this isle of golden beaches and, undeniably, jammed highways.
“I just think our island is too small for a railroad,” says Kobayashi. Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell supports the completion of the $500 million-per-mile elevated rail line through a 10-year extension of a state general excise tax hike to 2037. The alternative, city officials warn, would be a property tax hike of up to 14 percent. The prospect of trimming costs by shortening the rail system, Caldwell’s office says, is unfeasible because it would lead to decreased ridership and thus place more of a burden on the city for operation and maintenance costs. “It will be completed,” Caldwell’s Chief of Staff Gary Kurokawa says. But if it isn’t, it will only be the latest in a string of mass transit projects cut off from government funding. In 2010, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie scuttled a project to alleviate commuter travel delays between New York City and the Garden State by building a new rail tunnel underneath the Hudson River, citing concerns that taxpayers would be socked with $5 billion in cost overruns. A Government Accountability Office report later disputed those numbers, finding that the $8.7 billion project would cost, at most, $10 billion. The cancellation of the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, forced the state to abandon $3 billion in earmarked federal dollars. A half-billion dollars already spent on construction was called a loss. Baltimore’s $2.9 billion Red Line, which was scrapped by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan in 2015, provoked legal challenges from the ACLU and the NAACP because the rail line would have helped African Americans in low- and middle-income neighborhoods gain access to more options for jobs, housing and school. Hogan, who criticized the project as too costly, instead launched a program to improve the city’s bus service. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation into whether the project’s termination posed possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act closed this month without finding. Meanwhile, on an other U.S. island, Puerto Rico’s 11-mile Tren Urbano has now been in operation 11 years but only attracts a third of the rides it needs to break even. After years of planning, the rapid transit system was built at nearly 80 percent over-budget. It continues to lose about $50 million a year. This financial drain has intensified Puerto Rico’s massive debt crisis, triggering warnings from U.S. government officials that failure to keep Tren Urbano in operation could mean that the territory would lose federal funding. Prevedouros points to the Caribbean's mass transit boondoggle as a cautionary tale. “It checks all the boxes of compatibility,” says Prevedouros. “There are a lot of interesting parallels between San Juan and Honolulu, but I think we’re going to hit it out of the park with this one. Honolulu is going to be beyond platinum and gold level of failure.”Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
Nov. 10, 2014, 11:14 PM GMT By Eun Kyung Kim
A video of a dad making a pint-size Iron Man costume to help his sick newborn "feel brave” is resonating with thousands of other parents, especially those who also have waited out emotionally draining months in a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.
Today
Eric Hart’s little son, Collier, has been hospitalized since his premature birth in July. When the baby’s first holiday, Halloween, approached, Hart asked the nurses whether it was okay to dress his son up in a costume.
“I came up with Iron Man because he’s been hooked up to all those machines and wires, and that’s similar to what Iron Man went through,” Hart told TODAY.com.
A professional prop maker, Hart found a pattern online and scaled it down to infant size. It took roughly three to four hours over several days to make. He made the face mask out of foam; a red onesie and some yellow fabric on the baby’s wrists made up the rest of the costume.
“We thought we’d dress him up and take some pictures for the grandparents, the family and some friends,” said Hart, 35. “I figured I’d put the little mask on top of him just long enough to take a picture.”
Hart wanted the costume to help his son "feel brave" while in the hospital. Today
But once he posted the video of the entire process, “people suddenly are watching it all over the world," said Hart, who has received numerous email messages and tweets from parents providing encouragement, or sharing similar battles involving their own children.
“It just resonates with them of being able to find a small moment of joy during months and months of physical and spiritual exhaustion,” he said.
Hart said he's not sure when Collier, who has other medical problems not related to his premature birth, will be able to go home or what his son's future will hold outside of years of additional medical treatment.
Hart modified an online template to create the costume. Today
“There are a lot of times when the baby is sedated, and you can’t interact, so this is something we could actually do and say, ‘We may not be normal right now but this is our new normal,’” he said. “Even though we’re in the hospital, we’re trying to do everything that a regular family would do and celebrate all the holidays.”
Hart said he and his wife wanted to be able to capture this holiday-related milestone to give some sense of structure to their son.
Collier Today
"When he’s older, he’ll be able look back and hopefully see that his parents have basically been giving him a normal life ever since he started," he said. "We never thought of him as an interruption over this medical thing."
Follow TODAY.com writer Eun Kyung Kim on Twitter.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Opposition activists have blamed government forces for the killings
The conflict in Syria has reached "unprecedented levels of horror", peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has told the UN Security Council.
The UN-Arab League envoy said Syria was being destroyed "bit by bit" with grave consequences for the wider region.
He was speaking hours after evidence emerged of a fresh massacre in the northern city of Aleppo.
At least 71 bodies were found by a river in the western Bustan al-Qasr district, opposition activists said.
Most had their hands tied behind their backs and gunshot wounds to the head.
The Security Council simply cannot continue to say: 'We are in disagreement, therefore let's wait for better times.' I think they have to grapple with this problem now UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi Brahimi: 'UN must act on Syria'
Mr Brahimi has been trying to find a solution to the crisis based on a peace plan approved at an international conference in June 2012.
The UN says the conflict has left more than 60,000 people dead.
The BBC's Barbara Plett at the UN says Mr Brahimi delivered a blunt assessment of the situation in Syria that reflected his frustration with the deadlock in the Security Council.
"Unprecedented levels of horror have been reached. The tragedy does not have an end," Mr Brahimi told a closed meeting of the 15-member council, according to diplomats.
"The country is breaking up before everyone's eyes. Only the international community can help, and first and foremost the Security Council."
Speaking later to reporters, Mr Brahimi said the Syrian government and the opposition were, between them, destroying Syria "bit by bit".
"The region is being pushed into a situation that is extremely bad," he said.
"That is why I believe the Security Council simply cannot continue to say: 'We are in disagreement, therefore let's wait for better times.' I think they have to grapple with this problem now."
Gruesome discovery
The UN Security Council has been divided over Syria for months.
The US, UK, France and other Western powers have pushed for resolutions that threaten sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad's government.
However, Russia and China have vetoed such resolutions three times. Moscow - a close ally of Syria - also refuses to back calls for Mr Assad to step down.
Earlier, video footage of the gruesome discovery in Aleppo was posted by activists on YouTube.
It showed a large number of bodies strewn in and around the banks of the Quwaiq river, which skirts the western side of Aleppo.
The bodies were caked in mud and showed signs of rigor mortis. There were also signs of blood having poured from many of the heads.
The government and opposition have blamed each other for the killings.
The district of Bustan al-Qasr has been hotly contested since fighting broke out in Aleppo last July, correspondents say.The Dow Jones industrial average — the benchmark U.S. index of blue chip stocks — has closed above the 20,000-point mark for the first time ever.
The most famous stock market average in the U.S. crossed the symbolically significant level when markets opened on Wednesday, the third working day of the new administration. The index ultimately finished the day at 20,068.51, up 155.80 points.
"In and of itself, it is just a number," said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial told AP. "But what it does is it lifts market expectations, in essence, to continue moving higher."
New U.S. President Donald Trump has rolled out orders overturning Obama policies every day this week, including moves to pull out of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and a move to ease regulatory burdens on businesses.
"Trump's been on the job for five days and he's a man of action," said Brian Battle, director of trading at Performance Trust Capital Partners in Chicago told Reuters. "That should get everyone confident he'll get those three other things done... which is taxes, trade and regulation."
Calling it a "huge day for the markets" chief strategist Colin Cieszynski at CMC Markets told CBC News in an interview the 20,000-point milestone for the Dow was more than just a "big psychological barrier" but a sign of widespread economic optimism.
The broader S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index also closed at new all-time highs for a second consecutive day. "We're getting some really great breadth as the broader indices are following the Dow higher," Cieszynski said.
Part of that is a so-called "Trump bump" as investors digest the reality of a new pro-business president, he said.
The TSX also eclipsed its own all-time closing record of 15,657 that the benchmark Canadian stock index set back in 2014, before falling back to close at 15,643.84 for a gain of 33.15 points.The all-time intraday high still sits at 15,685, set on Sept. 3 that year.Chicken glorious chicken! I am not a fan of chicken generally. It’s as flavorless as a meat can be without added amazingness in the form of aromatics and flavor boosters. I love balsamic vinegar, though, and garlic is a must, if for no other reason than to keep the sparkly vampires at bay.
Tip: Crispy snap peas are an amazing addition to this dish. The cool crispness of the peas works wonderfully with the moody, earthy flavors of the mushrooms and vinegar. Green beans are another perfect addition.
This recipe freaked me out a little so I took only one picture of the process (I am sorry for I am lame). I get so caught up in trying to do things the right way that I’m lost in taking notes and moving to the next step. I am such a spaz!
Tip: Since balsamic vinegar is not Atkins Induction Friendly (it contains a scant amount of sugar), neither is this recipe. It still clocks in at a low 2.9 carbohydrates.
Tip: Don’t add a gum or thickener to the sauce. It reduces on its own.
I was ‘sleepless in Denver’ last night, so excuse me while I take some liberties with this post. Things that normally don’t make me laugh are totally cracking me up at this moment. Lack of sleep has the same effect on me that alcohol used to in college: I think everything is 10 times funnier than it probably is.
Tip: Need to cover a lidless pan on the stove top? Use a cookie sheet, but be careful to use an oven mitt when handling the makeshift pan cover. It heats up faster than you’d think.
The flavor? Surprisingly mild for the balsamic and the garlic, but if you cut the chicken and get mushrooms and sauce in each bite, you’ll love life with your chicken just that bit more.
Balsamic Chicken with Mushrooms
4 large chicken breasts
4 Tbsp coconut flour
1/4 tsp organic sea salt
1/4 tsp fresh-milled black pepper
2 cups sliced, fresh mushrooms
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsp olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp thyme
1 cup organic chicken broth
Rinse breasts and pat dry. Now do the same with the chicken. (Ha ha ha!)
On a cutting board, remove and discard the membranes. Slice chicken lengthwise into 3 strips. Dredge in coconut flour mixed with salt and pepper.
Heat the oil in a 12″ skillet on the stove over medium heat. Cook garlic until caramelized, about 1 minute. Remove the garlic to a bowl. Add the chicken to the pan. Fry for 3 minutes on each side, first on the top and the bottom, and then on each side. Add mushrooms, garlic, thyme, balsamic vinegar and chicken broth. Cook, covered, for 10 minutes. Remove chicken from the pan and keep covered with foil until serving. Cook the sauce until reduced, uncovered, for 5-10 more minutes. Serve over chicken.
Makes 6 servings (2 strips each plus mushrooms and sauce).
Nutritional information: Calories: 351, Carbohydrates: 3.4 g, Fiber:.5 g, Net Carbohydrates: 2.9 g, Protein: 45 g, Fat: 16 g
Here served up with lettuce for a summer salad bit of pep.Social Media Use in the Classroom Posted: 10/02/2013 | Tags: education resources With so many distractions facing students today, few educators have considered implementing social media into their lesson plans. After all, Twitter will do little to help students with their algebra, and a chemistry project probably can't be completed through Facebook.
The effectiveness of blended learning Posted: 10/02/2013 | Tags: education resources | Author: Chad Fisher A blended learning course combines online components with in-class or offline components so that students are supported in both platforms. The research about blended learning and its effects on students shows a range of opinions.
What you should know about charter schools Posted: 06/26/2013 | Tags: education resources | Author: Matt Bromley In 2012, Washington State became the 42nd state to allow charter schools, and by a narrow margin. If charter schools are meant to provide high quality education, why is there such a debate around them, and why don't all states allow these types of schools? Find out what you should know about charter schools.It’s not that I don’t have any sympathy with Cait Reilly, the young woman who this week won her appeal against the back-to-work scheme which saw her spend a fortnight in Poundland. Not at all: which of us doesn’t, after all, merely select the occupation we most desire, and work at it as and when we wish, for whatever pay we deem acceptable?
It’s not as though anyone in work ever performed a menial task for an employer; it would be obscene to request anything different from an unemployed graduate. When I carried sacks of salt from one room to another in Ayrshire’s finest bakery, aged 17, or poured the (horse-free) goo into the Kandy Bar’s meat-pie cases, at least I could tell myself: “This is what I want to be doing. I’m expressing the real me.” This is true, Ms Reilly will be pleased to hear, for each and every one of us.
Even now, beyond the high noon of my (other) career, teetering at the edge of the vicious incline towards the twilight of redundancy and the night-fall of death, I look back at the 14 years in the same office, and reflect that not once did I have to carry out an activity I didn’t enjoy. And if ever unemployed, we would never take a work experience position that didn’t fit with our career expectations. Certainly not at the behest of some poxy civil servant in a Job Centre.
As Ms Reilly said: “I hope the Government will now take this opportunity to rethink its strategy and do something which actually builds on young unemployed people’s skills and tackles the causes of long-term unemployment.” Quite right. Ms Reilly is a geology graduate, I believe. It was so wrong of the Government not to craft a back-to-work scheme for her involving rocks, and their deconstruction.
OK, I’m not facetious by nature, so let’s drop that. I don’t wish Ms Reilly ill – she now works part-time in a supermarket, so we shouldn’t doubt her desire to work. We might, perhaps, wonder – her degree could help here – on which planet she believes herself living, where people only work at jobs that suit their temperament, and no one with a degree is ever asked to combine work experience with giving something back. Someone, after all, has to sweep those supermarket floors (and fill pie cases with meaty goo). It is not unreasonable for those who pay benefits to expect those in receipt of them to take part in schemes designed to ensure that those recipients do not lose the habit of turning up to work and delivering to an employer’s expectations. How long did this geology graduate expect to receive our money, while performing only those voluntary tasks that suited her plans? For ever?
Save anger for the usual suspects: lawyers. Right on cue, after the judgment, comes the statement from Ms Reilly’s solicitors. “All those people who have been sanctioned by having their jobseeker’s allowance withdrawn for non-compliance with the back-to-work schemes affected will be entitled to reclaim their benefits,” came the gleeful announcement. Think of all the legal work that will involve!
I’m sure the legal draughtsmen in the House of Commons tested the Bill for water-tightness. But it seems now inevitable that any vaguely contentious Act will immediately be challenged in the courts (at least this wasn’t a decision by a European Court, by the way: this nonsense is home-grown).
Thus: 15 minutes of fame for Ms Reilly (whose most fitting career move, regardless of her geologic disposition, would have been selection as Labour’s candidate in Eastleigh, as the living emblem of that party’s approach to welfarism), more money for lawyers, and, undoubtedly, a political blow for the Coalition. It’s a bigger blow, however, for something more important: faith in politics as a machine to change society.
Mr Cameron told us that his would be a Government on the side of people who do the right thing. He meant that, I’m sure, and in Iain Duncan Smith has a welfare reformer motivated more by social justice than nearly any politician since Beveridge. The IDS reforms are intended to end the scourge of worklessness, but it’s not wrong to take satisfaction, also, at their rebalancing of the fairness quotient between taxpayer and claimant.
But it all comes to nothing, doesn’t it, if any change or political decision – job-finding schemes, examination reform, the expulsion of the foreign and malevolent, the ban on prisoner voting – is instantly taken up and attacked by the activist lawyer, who no longer cares that his views would never win majority support in a ballot.
He knows that the ballot – like the comment sections under newspaper columns – is a displacement activity, is mere catharsis, for powerless, little people who get up at the crack of dawn and work at whatever bloody job they can get their hands on. What does the activist lawyer care for the views of people like us? Power doesn’t flow from the voter, as he’s well aware. Increasingly, it flows from the courts.How well do you know Givanildo Vieira De Sousa? Or how about Frederico Chaves Guedes and Jose Paulo Bezerra Maciel Junior? Not in the slightest, you might think, but the trio are actually among the most celebrated footballers on the planet. They are certainly familiar to Brazil coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, who will be counting on each of them in this month's 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup. After all, behind the lengthy full names lurk three of A Seleção's most potent attacking weapons: Hulk, Fred and Paulinho.
Nicknames have always been serious business in football and, as those examples show, nowhere is that truer than Brazil. They have long been integral to Brazilian sporting culture, and with the country gearing up to host the Festival dos Campeões (Festival of Champions), FIFA.com lifts the lid on some of the other colourful monikers due to grace the tournament – those of competing teams Uruguay, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Japan, Nigeria, Tahiti and the hosts themselves.
True to form, Brazil boast a whole range of aliases, with A Seleção ('Selection' in Portuguese) the most familiar to fans around the world. The five-time world champions also go by Canarinhos (Canaries) and Auriverdes (Green and Gold), both terms inspired by the colour of the team's strip. Interestingly, Brazil have only worn yellow since the 1950s, having draped themselves in white until that colour was banished for good in the wake of their painful defeat by Uruguay in the final of the 1950 FIFA World Cup™ on home soil.
Their South American rivals also owe their nickname to the hue of their shirts, Uruguay fans labelling their heroes La Celeste in recognition of their light blue uniforms – a colour worn since 1910 in a tribute to now defunct local outfit FC River Plate, one of the country's first great clubs. The national side are likewise known as Los Charrúas, a moniker that references the Amerindian people who settled on land now belonging to Uruguay and Brazil in the 19th Century.
Over in Europe at around the same time, Victor Emmanuel II was busy helping to unify Italy, and he became the country's first king in 1861. A member of the House of Savoy, whose livery colour is blue, he is the reason La Nazionale wear their particular shirts and why Cesare Prandelli's troops are nicknamed Gli Azzurri (the Blues). Indeed, blue does not figure as one of the country's official colours, the flag of Italy being made up of red, white and green.
So too is the flag of Mexico, but, unlike the Italians, the North American side opted to base their strip on that very same colour scheme – and hence their nickname El Tricolor, which is often shortened to El Tri. Since green enjoys the upper hand over red and white in their uniforms, Mexico have gradually come to be known as La Verde as well, or even Los Ratones Verdes (Green mice) when their faithful supporters are a little less impressed with the team's performances.
In a similar vein, the Super Eagles of Nigeria – so called due to the country's coat of arms – found themselves rechristened the Super Chickens by certain critics after their disappointing start at the 2013 CAF Africa Cup of Nations. "I challenge my players to do better, to prove people wrong and get rid of this ridiculous name that's been attached to a team that's always been considered a powerhouse of African football," commented Nigeria coach Stephen Keshi. The message clearly worked, as his side went on to win the competition, booking themselves a trip to the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013 in the process. It was not the first time that Nigeria had undergone a change of identity either. The national side were originally known as the Red Devils in the 1950s and became the Green Eagles following independence in 1960, before earning their'super' sobriquet after winning the continental title in 1994.
Even more recently than that, Japan were handed their Samurai Blue alias on a plate by the Japan Football Association (JFA) just a few years ago. "We needed a nickname to support our team during the 2006 FIFA World Cup," explained JFA communications officer Megumi Fujinoki. "So to choose a name, we put five options to a vote by the fans and they picked Samurai Blue." The winning candidate, of course, harks back to the warriors who ruled feudal Japan for nearly 700 years.
The martial theme resonates in Tahiti as well, with the |
cases of violence against women, besides threat of physical attack, the intimidation can be far more insidious, communicated to the victim and her family through elders, powerful or influential men, and thugs in the community.
Grover said a fast-track court should have recorded their statements and promptly examined them as witnesses. “The delays proved to be fatal to the case,” she said. Out of seven women who reported being gang raped, one died and at least three turned hostile. One woman is still willing to testify, but Grover along with civil society groups had to relocate her and her family out of the state for her safety. Meanwhile, they are waiting for the Allahabad High Court’s decision on their application to transfer the case out of Muzaffarnagar district.
Barriers to an Effective Witness Protection Scheme
A key barrier to an effective witness protection scheme in India is also the lack of independence and accountability of the police. In Barkha’s case, police took eight months to file a First Information Report after a court order. Forced to live hundreds of miles away from her village, unable to follow up on her case, Barkha says she has lost hope for justice.
If Barkha and others like her receive protection and support after they file complaints for rape, sexual assault, and other violent crimes, they would have a greater chance to obtain justice. For this to happen, the government will need to enact an effective witness and victim protection law and ensure it is adequately funded.Getting there will also require bridging generational and tactical divides, activists said.
On the one hand, a new crop of young activist groups has brought energy and attention since Mr. Brown’s killing. On the other hand, it is the older, more established civil rights leadership that has the resources and knowledge of how to push concrete measures. Yet some of the younger activists remain skeptical of their older counterparts and of participating in traditional politics. There also remain questions of how militant or peaceful the groups want to be.
“It’s been a little disjointed,” said Alisha Sonnier, 19, the president of Tribe X, a youth activist group in the St. Louis region that formed after Mr. Brown’s death. “At the end of the day all of us are dealing with similar feelings and similar emotions. There’s a disjointment in how we feel we should go about it.”
On Friday afternoon, Ms. Sonnier’s organization led about 100 protesters through the Galleria in suburban Richmond Heights. They chanted and sang for about an hour, adjusting their slogans and lyrics to fit the moment (“Hands up! Don’t shop!” for instance, and “No true bill set our soul on fire,” sung to the tune of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” from “The Christmas Song.”) Dozens of police and security personnel trailed the protesters but did not make any arrests. Several stores closed before the management eventually closed the entire mall. Similar protests led to closings at two other area malls later Friday.“One of the few ways to be heard and have people listen to you is to have an economic impact,” Ms. Sonnier said. “If you want to really affect people, especially those who are in power, you got to hit their pocket. We as a people cannot allow people to keep making money and a business to go on, and we can’t even get justice when our people die.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was planning to start a countdown to a decision by the grand jury in New York that is looking into the case of Eric Garner, 43, who died after being placed in a chokehold while the police attempted to arrest him for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally on July 17, said he had learned a lesson from the Trayvon Martin case.It can feel like a draining and dispiriting scavenger hunt, following an American TV show through the jungly schedules of domestic broadcasters. You think you've got Larry David's comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm cornered at 11.20pm on a Tuesday night, but a blink, a second glance, and it's moved on. Challenging drama Breaking Bad and the wonderfully crude sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia scurry from obscure British channel to obscure British channel, eventually tumbling off our scheduling precipice entirely. ITV4, meanwhile, is for more than a year the home of Friday Night Lights before the high-end sports serial is jettisoned, without explanation, at the end of a second series of five. You're left panting, wounded and wondering: but what did Erin decide to do about the baby?
It's much worse, in a way, when a beloved show is snatched beyond reach like this than when it is cancelled completely, because of the tormenting knowledge that somewhere out there the story continues to unspool without you. On message boards across the internet there are mournful little pleas for information from British viewers: "Any word yet about series three? Any clue? Anything?" It is as if these people are searching for lost pets.
Last month, without fanfare, the first series of American show Community was released in the UK on DVD; belated amends, perhaps, for the fact that this sitcom, arguably the best on mainstream US telly, has been ignored by British terrestrial channels since it began in 2009, buried instead on a remote digital station called Viva. (Inevitably inane tag-line: "Up Your Viva.") It would be churlish not to point out that we do get lots of goodies from America: Glee has been a great success for Channel 4, the Beeb were commendably quick to pick up Mad Men for BBC4 and Sky Atlantic, which debuted in 2011, seems to be trying to cram as much above-average US programming into its schedules as possible to make up for the years of collective neglect. But there are still forsaken gems out there, undervalued or ignored by domestic channels and requiring some serious effort to see. Which are worth the hunt? And where is it best to look?
TV
An easy place to start… you'd think. The best American produce too often seems to be sprinkled at random across channels and time-slots. A watchful eye on the schedules of peripheral Murdoch channel FX, as well as three run by Richard Desmond – Channel 5, 5 USA and 5 Star – should pay off. Beguiling zombie drama The Walking Dead (high production values, a stellar graphic novel as its source, Andrew Lincoln playing a thickly sideburned cop, currently in its second series) shows first on FX before repeating on Channel 5. Meanwhile, Sons of Anarchy, the often violent, frequently touching story of a squad of Hell's Angels, began broadcasting on 5 USA in spring last year and is now into its third series. Channel 5 owns the rights through to the fourth series; if you've missed it to date, you can catch up on the first three on DVD – and be thankful it's that easy. Big Love, an offbeat, Bill Paxton-led drama about a Mormon man married to three women, has staggered all over the schedules. It was on FX for a bit, then 5; its fifth series premieres this month on Sky Atlantic. Watching it has been almost as complicated, you suspect, as a polygamist's home life.
Dave Elliott, sleuth-like editor of GeekTown.co.uk (a must-visit for those trying to keep track of US TV), maintains a handy tracking index of American programmes on his site. But even paying attention to the changing whims of British broadcasters he has often been frustrated in his pursuit of favourite shows and cites two – Chuck, a romp about a reluctant spy, and Breaking Bad, a tightly written drama about a chemistry teacher turned drug baron – as particular sore spots. Chuck's fifth series is its last, says Elliott, "but Sky have decided not to buy it. As it's a final season, there's less incentive for another channel to pick it up at such a late stage. It's possible we may not see it at all in the UK."
The critically acclaimed Breaking Bad has endured even more disrespect. Its critical success in the US (guesses Elliott) has meant the price per episode for UK broadcasters has gone up; Elliott thinks this might be the reason why FX dropped the show after its first season. "Then, with Channel 5's bizarre scheduling of season two – originally running it late at night… over two weeks… over Christmas – you end up with a show that's very expensive to buy but which has already aired on two different channels."
Not, in other words, of great appeal to a new buyer, however many fans are left stranded in the middle of the story. They must look elsewhere…
DVD
There's nothing more satisfying than chewing through an American TV boxset, letting episode run into episode and then (eyes watering from viewing-fatigue, the day having come and gone while you've been watching) thinking what the heck, just one more. Community, its first series just released on DVD by Sony Home Entertainment, is perfect for this: 22-minute episodes that go by at an unceasingly fast clip, charting the dubious higher education of a group of misfits at a community college in Colorado. Pop-culture references abound; in Joel McHale's Jeff the series has introduced a never-ruffled-but-always-baffled central figure to rival Seinfeld's Jerry or Cheers's Sam. The show even gifts a renaissance to long-lost comic actor Chevy Chase, who appears here as an aged hippie called Pierce. The episode in which the sexagenarian Chase dresses in a wig and a muscle suit and takes mind-altering drugs is a highlight of the first series, as well as being fairly representative of the programme's eccentricity.
Buy it – and hope the distributor goes on to release DVD sets of series two and three. Because this is by no means a certainty, the release policy of British distributors being as confused and capricious as that of our broadcasters. The first series of Friday Night Lights, a knotted, angst-ridden drama about a small-town American football team in Texas, is available on DVD and is well worth buying, even if you have no interest in or knowledge about the source sport.
Those of us awaiting a continuation of the story since ITV4 ditched the show some years ago have been left with little choice but to turn to imported discs. Series two and three have been released on DVD in France, and are available on Amazon; they should play on most UK DVD players, the French-language subtitles easily switched off. To continue the story into its fifth and final series, Lights fans will have to import DVDs of that and season four from America; same too, most likely, for those who want to see beyond series three of Breaking Bad or series four of Chuck. Getting American DVDs to play on British players can be a risky, warranty-busting business, involving the scouring of the internet for information that this newspaper would never endorse. So don't do it.
Easier to turn to another terrific US comedy that has inexplicably failed to find a home on British TV. Parks and Recreation is a mockumentary about co-workers in a minor wing of American local government and their hapless efforts to build a town playground and attend to other municipal tasks overseen by Amy Poehler's cheerfully deluded civil servant, Leslie Nope. Poehler glues the thing together, but in supporting characters April (Aubrey Plaza) and Andy (Chris Pratt), Parks tenders an irresistible will-they-won't-they subplot, this pair serving as a kind of childish, deadpan Ross and Rachel (Friends), an infinitely less cheesy Niles and Daphne (Frasier). Series one has been released on DVD. Two and three? Fingers crossed.
On-demand TV
If you pay for some sort of TV subscription package – via BT, Sky or Virgin – chances are you'll have access to blocks of programming that can be reached through some fiddling with the remote control. Content will sometimes be free to watch and sometimes charged at a pay-per-episode rate, but what's available and what's not is as disordered, in its way, as anything listed above. Still, worthy of note is the fact that BT's on-demand service is currently showing the first three series of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Filmed in deliberately low-budget fashion and set largely in a dingy bar on the American east coast, it is a comedy about five unabashedly self-centred scumbags (one of them played by Danny DeVito) and their increasingly awful methods of making life difficult for one another. It's loud, mean and brilliantly funny. Series one is available on DVD; iTunes, meanwhile, goes further than anyone with series one to six available as part of its video-streaming service...
Online streaming
This isn't a cheap option, generally working out at £2.50 per episode or £20 per series, but Apple's iTunes software offers instantly accessible video feeds – or streams – of certain American shows. Though the US version of The Office currently broadcasts on the Comedy Central channel, iTunes is the only place you can see it up to series six. Too easily dismissed as a lesser sibling of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's BBC original, the US incarnation has evolved since a so-so debut series to have a magic entirely its own. Gervais's cringeing David Brent is here replaced by Steve Carell's subtler, more sympathetic Michael Scott; great texture is added in the later series by the addition of first-rate actors Ed Helms (The Hangover), Amy Ryan (The Wire) and Ellie Kemper (Bridesmaids).
Looking ahead, online streaming service Netflix – a big media-distributing force in the US – will launch in the UK next year and do so bearing an exciting exclusive to lure in new customers. Adored by viewers and critics before its cancellation five years ago, smart, bouncy sitcom Arrested Development, about an extended family of eccentrics, and the career-launching platform for actors Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, will return as a Netflix-only offering sometime in 2013. If priced in accord with the US service, a monthly subscription to Netflix would cost about £6; though the company's roster of TV beyond Arrested Development has not yet been revealed (there has been vague talk of "unlimited TV shows"), this would seem a perfect opportunity to redress the abandonment suffered by British viewers over the years. Will we finally get access to the third series of Friday Night Lights? Will Chuck conclude? How?
Time – and, it's hoped, several hundred hours staring at a screen, dribbling, happy – will tell.
Great shows you might have missed – and where to find them
BREAKING BAD
Drama. Stimulants in suburbia.
See it On DVD and iTunes, series one and two are available.
Looking ahead Channel 5 has said it has no plans to air series three or four. A fifth, final series has been commissioned in the US.
PARKS & RECREATION
Sitcom. Town-hall frolics.
See it On DVD, if you can find it. Series one is currently out of stock on Amazon.
Looking ahead Never broadcast on UK TV; no suggestion it e ver will be. In the US, it is currently in its fourth series.
COMMUNITY
Sitcom. College capers.
See it On DVD, after initially showing on MTV stablemate Viva.
Looking ahead Logical to expect a DVD release for series two. In the US, a third series is under way, though cancellation rumours abound.
THE OFFICE
Sitcom. Brent bettered.
See it On Comedy Central (fifth series). Series one to five out on DVD; six streams on iTunes.
Looking ahead Thriving in America and half way through an eighth series, despite departure of lead Steve Carell.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Drama. Sporty suspense.
See it With difficulty. Series one is available on DVD (though out of stock on Amazon). Streams of series one and two are on iTunes.
Looking ahead We are so far behind that, in the US, it finished a fifth, final series in February.
CHUCK
Action-comedy. Undercover geek.
See it UK viewers have been left hanging at the end of series four, first shown on Sky Living. Series one to four on DVD and iTunes.
Looking ahead Fifth series (now showing in the US) will be its last.
THE WALKING DEAD
Sci-fi. Undead drama.
See it On FX, currently airing a second series; repeat expected on Channel 5 next spring. The first series is out on DVD and on iTunes.
Looking ahead Record-breaking US cable ratings for series two meant a third recently announced.
IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
Sitcom. Tavern brawls.
See it On iTunes, home to series one to six. Series one is out on DVD; one to three are available on BT on Demand.
Looking ahead A seventh series almost finished in the US; at least two more will follow.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Sitcom. Playful parenting.
See it On DVD and iTunes, where series one to three are available.
Looking ahead Netflix launches a UK streaming service next year; by 2013, new Arrested episodes are promised.
BIG LOVE
Drama. Polygamy problems.
See it On Sky Atlantic, the fifth series beginning on 16 December. Series one and two available on DVD, with series three out in January; episodes also available on Sky's Anytime Plus.
Looking ahead The fifth is Big Love's last series.
SONS OF ANARCHY
Drama. Trouble on two wheels.
See it On 5 USA, with broadcast of the fourth series planned next spring. Series one to three on DVD and iTunes.
Looking ahead C5 is likely to show series five, as yet unfilmed.Two out of three Americans see the Second Amendment as a safeguard against tyranny. What?
The notion that an individual right to bear arms guarantees the American people against government tyranny is of course an old one. Given its apparent validation in the Second Amendment of the Constitution itself, it's not surprising that the notion has survived in some way through to the 21st century. Given its defiance of history and common sense, though, what should be surprising is that it's survived to remain so widespread.
If America experienced a widespread political uprising today, it would bear little resemblance to Lexington and Concord in 1775, with well-disciplined minutemen assembling on the town square to defend liberty against the redcoats. It would more likely be a larger scale reenactment of the "Bleeding Kansas" revolt of 1854 to 1861, when small bands of armed zealots unleashed an orgy of inter-communal violence, unbounded by any laws of war or human decency.
There is, we all know, a Second Amendment right to gun ownership. Under our constitutional form of government, the Supreme Court has the authority to decide what the Constitution means, and after decades of judicial ambiguity, in District of Columbia v. Heller a majority of the justices found an individual right to gun ownership, unrelated to membership in a state militia. But the Heller decision also makes it clear that this is not an unlimited right, and that it may be subject to extensive government regulation.
A citizen uprising today would probably not involve like-minded constitutionalists taking up arms to defend democracy and liberty.
However, in recent years, the belief in widespread gun ownership as a defense against tyrannical government has become an alluring idea, gaining traction with members of Congress as well as fringe conspiracy theorists. As Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma put it just last week, "The Second Amendment wasn't written so you can go hunting, it was to create a force to balance a tyrannical force here." And if this is insufficiently incendiary, one only need look to the doctrine of the "Three Percenters," with its ominous warning that "all politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war."N-acetyl-4-aminophenol (acetaminophen/paracetamol, NA4AP) is one of the most commonly used over-the-counter analgesic and antipyretic drugs. Recent studies have reported anti-androgenic effects of NA4AP in vitro and possible associations between intrauterine exposure to NA4AP and the development of male reproductive disorders in humans. NA4AP is also a major metabolite of aniline (phenylamine), representing 75-86% of the aniline dose excreted in urine. Aniline is an important large-volume intermediate in several industrial processes. Besides individuals in various occupational settings with aniline exposure, the general population is also known to be ubiquitously exposed to aniline. In this article, we provide an overview of the recent literature concerning the intake of NA4AP during pregnancy and the possible anti-androgenic effects of NA4AP as well as literature concerning its known metabolic precursor aniline. We also present new research data, including the first human biomonitoring data on NA4AP excretion in urine, showing ubiquitous NA4AP body burdens in the general population at a wide range of concentrations. We found a small but significant impact of smoking on urinary NA4AP concentrations. We further present preliminary data on NA4AP excretion after therapeutic acetaminophen use, after aniline exposure in an occupational setting, and during a controlled fasting study (excluding oral exposure to both aniline and acetaminophen). Our findings indicate exposure to aniline (or aniline-releasing substances) as well as nutrition (next to the direct use of acetaminophen as medication) as possible sources of internal body burdens of NA4AP.Nov 01 2015 by Morgan Smith
1. The Bagels.
Dunellen Bagel
The bagel is a New Jersey staple, best before class, on a Sunday morning, en route to a tailgate or any other occasion that calls for delicious food. If a bagel hierarchy ever existed, New Jersey bagels would be the Alpha bagels, and everybody else would be sad posers. The soggy, thick dough most states pass off as bagels will never compare to the warm, crisp outsides and fluffy insides of a New Jersey bagel. Our toppings and spreads cannot be beat - Taylor Ham, anyone?
2. Giants/Jets Tailgates.
New York Daily News
Watching your favorite teams through the TV screen isn't the same as attending a giant parking lot party with a few thousand of your closest friends, including barbecues and live marching bands.
3. Evenings spent at the diner.
The New York Times
Diners are a New Jersey staple. New Jerseysians tend to be faithful to the one closest to their hometown. We find comfort in the homemade food, quirky specials and friendly waitstaff. Where else are we supposed to hear the local gossip and enjoy a nice order of Disco Fries at 2 a.m? Even if dining halls were open 24 hours a day, nothing compares to coming home and enjoying a meal at your diner.
4. Long drives on the Parkway.
SHL Trip
The Parkway is the perfect place to think. Pop in an old "Boys like Girls" CD, hop on the highway and let the beautiful trees lining this scenic route carry you away. Walks around an enclosed college campus don't compare to the freedom of driving down the Parkway.
5. The shopping.
CNBC
Garden State Plaza, Short Hills Mall and Woodbridge Center, anyone? You're lying if you say you don't miss wandering around these fashion meccas for hours and blowing all of your babysitting money on new digs.
6. Not having to pump your own gas.
FMG, Inc.
Need I say more? We're spoiled.
7. Wawa.
The Odyssey
This life-changing eatery/grocery store/convenience store mash-up has its roots in New Jersey. It's hard to replicate the beauty that is Wawa, where you can order (practically) any delicious food item at the touch of an online menu and pick up any necessities in the meantime. Wawa's signature shakes and annual Hoagiefest all have their special place in the heart of New Jerseyians. It's such a chore to go to different stores to complete these tasks.
Lead Image Credit: Toni Mikulka
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Want more Fresh U? Like us on Facebook!Revised tobacco control law to protect citizens from tobacco smoke came into force in the end of 2014 in Latvia clearly establishing citizens’ rights to be protected from tobacco smoke. The aim of the law emphasizes the rights of non-smokers to live in an environment free from tobacco smoke over smokers’ rights to smoke. In addition to the earlier restrictions on smoking in public places, the new law prohibits smoking in any other public place, if someone objects. Following the law on Children Rights Protection stating that smoking in the presence of a child is regarded as a physical violence, the tobacco control law now clearly states that smoking in the presence of a child is prohibited. The revised law applies also to electronic smoking devices, containing nicotine or not.
The Ministry of Health believes that the new approach and the philosophy of the law will help to push forward even more stringent rules in the future to fulfill obligations of the WHO FCTC and its guidelines. For the first time Latvia has established in the law, that tobacco harms people and that there is a possibility for them to protect themselves from this harm.For much of modern human history, the most ominous calories in our food were said to come from fat. It seemed obvious. Fat makes you fat, right? Cut the fat out of your diet and in no time you’re a beautiful waif. Then, somewhere around the time that French fries became Freedom fries, the focus shifted to the dreaded carbohydrate. Carbs, we were led to believe, skipped the digestive tract and went straight to your ass, and not in a good way. A diet rich in egg yolks and bacon grease was not only good for the heart, but for the scale.
Ah, how times change. A reality star is the president. Britain is leaving the European Union. Nearly every man is a sex harasser. And now it’s sugar that's fucking up everything about your life.
Whether it’s cancer, obesity, acne, or whatever is happening on Steve Bannon’s face, there's someone out there saying it’s sugar’s fault. The New York Times declared earlier this year: “If Sugar Is Harmless, Prove It.” The Guardian asked, “Is Sugar the World’s Most Popular Drug?” (no, that would be caffeine, but thanks.) Last year, The Wall Street Journal said that our sugar consumption was “a matter of life or death.” Dio mio! The New York Post last year went topical, publishing a piece the day after Halloween that said a “lethal dose” of candy corn was “1,627 pieces.”
Well, that sucks, because sugar is goddamn delicious, and I want to stuff my face with most of what I’m supposed to be giving to trick-or-treaters tonight.
There's a lot of misinformation swirling around out there about sugar. Despite what certain science writers and doctors say, it’s not the sole cause of obesity. It’s not addictive, and eating a marshmallow Peep will not bring on sudden death. So what's true about sugar, what's kinda true, and what's a hot steaming pile of bullshit that made you swear off your favorite ice cream forever when really, you should just learn portion control? Let's look at the science behind all of it to get a little smarter about the sweeter parts of life.
Yvette d'Entremont joined us to talk about sugar on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
Myth 1: Sugar is habit-forming, like a drug
If your Facebook feed looks anything like mine, it’s clogged with stories from dubious sources on how you can break your addiction to sugar. I’ll never forget when, a few years ago, I saw on my feed a story in the Times that compared the sweet white powder to drugs. “Sugar stimulates brain pathways just as an opioid would, and sugar has been found to be habit-forming in people,” the article went. Um, what? I’ve never snorted sugar, but I don’t think that’s how that works.
Sugar is not a drug, nor does it act like one in your system.
First, let’s clarify some things. There are many different types of sugar. There’s fructose, which is the simple sugar in honey and fruit. Sucrose is your typical table sugar and is also present in many fruits. Lactose is the sugar that naturally occurs in milk. Sugars are simple carbohydrates, and every complex carbohydrate in existence is broken down into sugars in your body. It’s what the calories in everything from kale to quinoa are broken down into. Sugar tends to be processed by the body very quickly.
But let’s get this straight. Sugar is not a drug, nor does it act like one in your system. Studies based on models in rats may support this simple conclusion, but studies in humans are more conclusive and suggest otherwise. A review study published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in 2014 aimed to find out if eating patterns were similar to those of addictive behaviors. The study found that though eating in general could mimic addictive behaviors, it was inappropriate to deem sugar in all its incarnations an addictive substance.
As we pointed out in this review, there is very little evidence to indicate that humans can develop a “Glucose/Sucrose/Fructose Use Disorder” as a diagnosis within the DSM-5 category Substance Use Disorders. We do, however, view both rodent and human data as consistent with the existence of addictive eating behavior.
Translation: our addictive behaviors aren’t linked to any one component of food like sugar or fat, but we can can develop addictive eating patterns to food in general, and food has multiple components. Think about everything that you enjoy that tastes sugary. With few exceptions, most of those things contained other types of calories. Cookies. Cupcakes. Ice cream. But they also have a good deal of fat (and even some protein, and maybe even vitamins!). So yes, you can develop an unhealthy relationship with food that involves overeating and binge eating. Some of that food contains sugar. Some of it has fat. If that happens, your doctor, a registered dietitian, and possibly a psychiatrist are legitimate places to turn to for help in with your eating habits. However, sugar itself is not the culprit of these conditions, even if you have a little bit of it under your nose after snorting down a donut.
Myth 2: Excess sugar is way worse for your health than fat
&
Myth 3: Sugar causes Alzheimer’s disease
Like I said, being anti-sugar is very fashionable these days. The anti-sugar crusade is a charge that many in the health and fitness community have taken up. In doing so, they’ve missed the bigger picture: excess calories, no matter if the source is fat or sugar, can cause obesity.
Take Mark Hyman, the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine (whatever that is), and prominent anti-sugar advocate. As of late, Hyman’s work seems to be dedicated to demonizing sugar; his position at the venerated Cleveland Clinic and frequent media appearances make him one of the most reputable anti-sugar physicians out there.
In a 2016 article on the Cleveland Clinic’s website titled “Sugar or Fat: What’s Worse for Your Waistline?” Hyman writes: “Surprisingly, new research shows that eating healthy fats can help you burn more calories than eating the same amount of carbs.” But the link in the article leads to a press release from the National Institute of Health that says: “NIH study finds cutting dietary fat reduces body fat more than cutting carbs.” Hm. This seems to indicate the exact opposite thing that Hyman is claiming.
Let’s deconstruct what’s going on. The study Hyman is referencing, which was published in the September 2015 edition of the journal Cell, was titled “Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity.” I can sometimes understand if a non-scientist gets lost in the confusion of scientific language, but Hyman is a doctor who seems to glean contradictory findings from the studies he’s writing about.
Excess calories, no matter if the source is fat or sugar, can cause obesity.
This is par for the course for Hyman, whose livelihood depends upon demonizing sugar and promoting the “eat fat, get thin” model (in fact, Eat Fat, Get Thin is the title of one of his books). Why would the author of The Blood Sugar Solution (available on his website for $19.99, along with vitamins, all-natural supplements, “detoxification kits,” kits that regulate male hormones, kits that regulate female hormones, and DVDs) admit that excess sugar and excess fat have an equal impact on weight loss? Well, if I have to spell out the answer for you then… you’re probably not getting it.
Hyman does his most prolific and idiotic writing on his own website. In one blog post, he argues that consuming an excess of sugar can lead to Alzheimer’s disease. “Scientists now call Alzheimer’s disease ‘Type 3 diabetes,’” he writes, not naming any of the scientists who allegedly do this (he also says diabetes is can be "reversed" by eliminating sugar from your diet, but I'll address that later). He goes on to claim that “recent studies show people with diabetes have a four-fold risk for developing Alzheimer’s,” citing a study published eight years ago in Endocrine Reviews. Interestingly the review study, titled Cognitive Dysfunction and Diabetes Mellitus, did not show a four-fold increase in risk for Alzheimer’s for diabetic patients. Some studies included in the review showed a four-fold increase for mild cognitive impairment, but Hyman, a medical doctor, would know the difference between this and Alzheimer’s. The review study found that some studies showed no increase in Alzheimer’s and some studies demonstrated, at most, up to a 1.7-fold increase in incidence of Alzheimer’s in people with diabetes compared to people without the condition.
But Hyman isn’t content to stop there: “Here’s the bad news/good news. Eating sugar and refined carbs can cause pre-dementia and dementia," he writes. "But cutting out the sugar and refined carbs and adding lots of fat can prevent, and even reverse, pre-dementia and early dementia.”
Hyman espouses this information without qualifiers or data, putting his own biases and conclusions about the Endocrine Reviews study before the actual data in it. The robust study, which pulled for review a few hundred articles on the relationships between diabetes, hyperglycemia, and hypoglycemia, suggests a number of possible reasons for the slight rise in Alzheimer’s disease cases, and says that the potential link between Alzheimer’s and diabetes is from the abnormal processing of insulin that comes as a part of diabetes, regardless of sugar intake.
Furthermore, studies have shown time and time again that for losing weight, the only number that counts is total calories. But Hyman does not sell his books, supplements, kits, and DVDs by telling you to count calories. He sells books by telling you that sugar is killing you in ways that the data says it isn’t, medical ethics be damned.
So why then do we keep hearing that we have a sugar problem? According to a 2016 Pew Research analysis of USDA sales data, we’re consuming more of almost everything than we were in the 1970s, to the tune of about 450 calories more per day. However, our sugar consumption peaked around 2000 and has dropped since then, and it’s only marginally higher than it was 50 years ago. Our fat and oil consumption increased by about 200 calories per day and, over time, those calories add up.
But hey, there’s not a lot of money to be made in writing a diet book that says “maybe just eat fewer calories.”
Myth 4: Sugar can make kids hyper and give them ADHD-like symptoms
It’s easy to blame sugar for your child’s hellish behavior. Unfortunately, science says that sugar is not making your child crazy. It’s probably just you.
Kidding! But in a 1994 Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology study, parents were told that their children were given a placebo or actual sugar asked to report on their children’s behavior. The parents who were told that their children were given sugar reported that their allegedly sugar-sensitive children were bouncing off the walls. However, all of the children in the study were actually given a placebo. Sugar sensitivity, in terms of it causing a slew of psychiatric ailments, is not a thing, and there certainly does not seem to be a causal link with ADHD. If that was the case, doctors would have long called for a ketogenic diet for the treatment of severe ADHD symptoms as they do for some other medical conditions, but this isn’t the case.
Furthermore, the amount of overall sugar in a child’s diet hasn’t been found to have an effect on ADHD, according to a double blind placebo controlled study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Overall, there was no change to behavior or cognitive skills dependent on sugar dose:
The absence of effects in our study could have resulted from the use of insensitive measures or an inadequate statistical power to detect small differences, but neither explanation seems likely. The measures we used have proved to be sensitive to hyperactivity, attention deficits, and the effects of medications and foods in earlier research.
If your kid’s acting hyper after you gave them sugar, maybe your kid’s just an asshole.
Myth 5: Some types of sugars are healthier than others x-quote>
In a Refinery 29 video from last year, a producer named Lucie Fink documented her experience of giving up sugar for five days. Oh, the suffering people will go through for journalism! The video, which has garnered more than 800,000 views, begins with Fink explaining that the documentary Fed Up taught her that “sugar is the new cigarettes.” So she went cold turkey on her sweet tooth and “cut out” “sugar” entirely (the reason why I used scare quotes here will become clear in a second).
It’s important to note here: Fink is not presenting herself as an expert, but as someone who’s trying to learn. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that she’s wrong — a lot.
Fink arbitrarily decided that fruit sugars were okay to eat but added sugars were off-limits. It’s a commonly held misconception that sugars from fruit are “better for you” than sugars from, say, jelly beans, but that’s only because an apple has much less sugar than jelly beans (to wit: an apple has, on average, 19 grams of sugar, while 100 grams of jelly beans has 70. Also, the apple also comes with fiber, vitamins, and minerals, while jelly beans do not). The simple sugars in each are metabolized in the exact same way. Your pancreas really doesn’t care where you get those sugars from, just if you’re getting them or not (there are some rare cases in which the type of sugar makes a difference, but for most of the population, sugar is sugar. I implore you to ask a diabetic: fruit sugars |
, the department said. While one died, the other two have since recovered. The department did not identify the patients, nor say exactly how it thought the three people were exposed to the infected rat urine. Typically, humans get infected through contact with tainted water.
One of the people who fell sick lived in an apartment building on the block that city officials said was known for its rat infestations, while the other two were known to frequently visit the block.
The mayor’s office noted that the building’s landlord is accused of 79 building code violations. On Wednesday city workers cleared out garbage, plugged holes and set traps in the infested apartment building.
The Red Cross was helping to relocate residents of eight apartments the landlord had illegally created in the basement, the mayor’s office said.
Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, blamed the death on the building’s landlord, Ved Parkash, whom she had publicly shamed in 2016 as the fourth-worst landlord in the city in an annual list. Reuters was not immediately able to reach Parkash for comment.
The death prompted Ruben Diaz, the Bronx borough president, to lament the city’s centuries-old efforts to curtail its persistent rat population.
“It is unfathomable to me that in this day and age, in one of the most expensive cities in the world and at our most technologically advanced point as a civilization, the city cannot mitigate the rat problem,” Diaz said in a statement.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are 100 to 200 cases of leptospirosis each year in the country. New York City only sees one to three cases a year, the city’s health department said.(Fredrik Von Erichsen/AFP/DPA)
Allan the rabbit was just 9 weeks old when he was bludgeoned to death inside a Danish radio studio.
He later became dinner.
The gruesome stunt went down Monday at Radio24syv, at the hands of host Asger Juhl. The slaughter was broadcast live. Believe it or not, Juhl says he wasn’t trying to fly in the face of animal welfare: According to the station, the killing was intended to raise awareness about the plight of animals who are slaughtered for food in Denmark.
The station hoped to foster a conversation about the “widespread hypocrisy in our relationship to animals,” according to Reuters.
“Many people are outraged by what I did, at the same time many of these people will eat meat. And when they eat meat, an animal will die,” Juhl told the BBC in an interview. “You cannot say: ‘It’s terrible to kill an animal’ and then eat meat. These things are connected.”
[Texas hunter who paid $350,000 to kill an endangered black rhino has bagged his prey]
This is Allan before the killing:
“Jeg har faktisk mere respekt for dyreliv, end jeg har for menneskeliv”Sådan sagde stifteren af Facebook-gruppen”… Posted by Radio24syv on Monday, May 25, 2015
This is Allan after the killing:
Så er Asger Juhl og Kristoffer Eriksen ved at tilberede kaninen Allan, som de slog ihjel tidligere i dag. Posted by Radio24syv on Monday, May 25, 2015
“We knew we would be accused of provocation,” the station said in a statement, according to Reuters. “And yes, we indeed wanted to provoke the public and to stir a debate about the hypocrisy when it comes to perceptions of cruelty towards animals.”
Provoke it did. The station posted the audio of the radio segment, complete with the sound of Allan being struck repeatedly with the bicycle pump.
Listen at your own peril:
Var det synd, at vi slog kaninen Allan ihjel for at få kød på middagsbordet?Vi tog debatten om danskernes hykleriske… Posted by Radio24syv on Monday, May 25, 2015
According to Jorgen Ramskov, chief executive of the station, Danes don’t realize that the meat they buy at a supermarket is also killed in gruesome ways.
“We have some animals that we have decided that we care about their animal welfare and that discrepancy we wanted to address,” Ramskov told Sky News. “The rabbit is something you can eat, but also an animal we care a lot about. Why don’t we care for a piglet, why don’t we care for a small cow, or lamb?”
The station noted that the killing was done after consultation with a zookeeper who advised them on how to kill the animal “instantly” without causing it to suffer.
[New York court rules that Tommy the chimp is not a ‘person’]
“What I did, I called up a zoo in Denmark — a guy who kills rabbits, to feed them to the predators in the zoo,” Juhl said in the BBC interview. “He uses an iron stick. I didn’t have a stick but I did have a bicycle pump made out of iron. It’s the exact same thing.”
Still, some people were not amused.
“Don’t try and justify it you heartless bastards, the only reason you killed a small, defenseless animal on air is to boost your ratings,” one Facebook commenter wrote, according to the Guardian.
“You could probably easily have had the debate on air without having to kill an animal,” another commented.
There’s now a Change.org petition to have Juhl dismissed from the show. The petition has been signed by more than 1,000 people.
[The long battle to remove elephants from the Ringling Bros. circus]
Juhl says he and his family have been on the receiving end of death threats as a result of the backlash.
“I was not prepared for that,” he added.
As for Allan: He was turned into a “nice” meal, according to Juhl.The All India Motor Transport Congress says 70% of the vehicles of their members are off the roads.
Kultaran Singh Atwal, a transporter, owns seven trucks. Now, he says, he is forced to keep five of his fleet idle due to demonetisation, as he has been deprived of the minimum Rs 20,000 cash per truck per trip that he requires as running expenses.Mr Atwal is not an exception. There are many like him. With the government's curbs on withdrawal of money and exchange of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, the motor transport business is suffering, since 80 per cent of the business is cash-based.The All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) -- a representative body for 9.3 million truckers, and more than five million bus operators, tourist taxis and maxi cabs -- says 70 percent of the vehicles of their members are already off the roads.The association warns that if the situation is allowed to persist not only the supplies of essential commodities like milk, fruits, vegetables and medicines will get increasingly affected but it will also cripple the lives of 200 million people directly or indirectly dependent on this industry."Under the Finance Act, I'm allowed Rs 35,000 per truck per trip in cash for expenses on diesel, octroi, etc.," Mr Atwal, who is the Chairman of AIMTC, told IANS. "How can I survive when there is an overall withdrawal limit of just Rs 50,000?" he queries."The government must hike the withdrawal limit or allow cheque-based transactions in our sector."Echoing similar sentiments, Bal Malkit Singh, advisor and former President of AIMTC, says: "Our operations are getting badly affected as the withdrawal limit of Rs 50,000 that we have been given is very little."What is happening in the process is the supply chain has been hit. "Movement of products is slowing down. Supplies of essential commodities like food, pulses or any export consignment is either getting slow or even coming to a halt in some places."What the truckers association has sought to drive home is that this industry contributed 4.8 per cent to the country's gross domestic product in 2015-16, which amounted to Rs 544,800 crore. This is a little over Rs 1,492 crore daily.With 80 per cent of the transactions in cash, Rs 1,194 crore is what the industry needs daily to sustain operations -- the bulk of which is just not available today.The fortunes of truckers is also linked to that of the trading business in India, which is facing its own set of woes. With bulk purchases in mandis almost drying up, delivery of products also becomes redundant."The lack of cash flow in the markets is equally affecting us traders and the transport sector as well, since both these businesses totally function on cash," said Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General of the Confederation of All India Traders."Our businesses have seen an overall drop of 75 per cent due to the demonetisation. There is a lack of money flow in the markets," Mr Khandelwal told IANS. "After demonetisation, around 60 per cent of freight is not in movement," added Naveen Gupta, the association's Secretary General.Mr Gupta said there is also a sharp drop in long-haul movement because, apart from diesel and tolls, all the other expenses, like the daily expenses of drivers, local taxes are also paid in cash. "The ones plying are the short-haul vehicles, which are either running on diesel bought with leftover old currency and because there is an exemption on tolls," Mr Singh added.This article is based on a lecture given to the students of the Southern New Hampshire University Shakespeare course in 2012.
“Why study Shakespeare?” is a question which may seem too obvious to ask. A lot of the discussion around Shakespeare in our society generally treats him as a given, a touchstone of value which we all agree on, and to which other things can be compared. Indeed when talking about other authors, the implicit question in English Literature courses is often “Why study this instead of Shakespeare?” Shakespeare is what we use to question other things, not something we question itself. But it’s worth pausing over the arguments which are put forward for spending so much time on the writings of a glove-maker’s son from Warwickshire who died four hundred years ago.
Perhaps the most frequent argument rests on a notion of literary value. Almost all academics, students and theatre-goers have opinions on what makes a good play or poem, and it was often through our enjoyment of literature that we became interested enough in it to undertake academic study. The pleasure we feel in reading, hearing or seeing, motivates to find out how it works, or simply to sign up to a course of study which will allow us to wallow in this feeling several hours a day and call it work. Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language, if not in recorded history.
In fact, he is often praised as more than a great writer, but as a philosopher whose insights into human nature transcend the time and circumstances in which he wrote. Shakespeare’s plays, according to this view, should be studied because they contain timeless truths which will always be valid. It’s not difficult to find these kinds of statements from scholars in the humanities. In The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher and Classicist Allan Bloom wrote that “Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are participating in essential being and forgetting their accidental lives.” The literary scholar Harold Bloom declared that Shakespeare’s “aesthetic supremacy has been confirmed by the universal judgement of four centuries” and claimed “Shakespeare is the Canon. He sets the standard and the limits of literature”. Bloom (H) offers Shakespeare as the pinnacle of human artistic conception, somehow definitive for everything that came before him as well as everything that will come after him. Both seem to present his writings as a metaphysical phenomenon, a way of accessing a more authentic reality than it usually available to us. Peter Brook went even further, or perhaps just said it more simply, when he declared that Shakespeare is “coterminous with reality.” What Shakespeare is, is what there is.
In its milder form, this attitude underpins the assumption that the regional theatre down the road will put on a Shakespeare play each year, rather than one by Dekker, Heywood, Marlowe, Webster, Jonson or any of the other playwrights who were around in Early Modern London. Or why there’s a Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, but no Royal Noel Coward Company in London. If you want to study Great Books, says this attitude, he wrote the Greatest; if you like literature, his is the most literary. The quality of being like Shakespeare is what “literary” means.
Alternatively, some people take the view that Shakespeare may not be the most transcendent artist in all of human history, but so many people thought he was that he is inextricably woven into Western culture. Working on major figures in English literature, you frequently bump up against their engagement with Shakespeare. It doesn’t take long when studying – to grab a handful of names – John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Johnson, George Bernard Shaw or Charles Dickens before you need to take account of the very different ways they felt influenced by Shakespeare. In a wider sense, British culture has invented a series of Shakespeares to suit its own needs over the years, projecting its own concerns and anxieties onto its central literary figure. Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare both give fascinating accounts of the way he has been claimed by different political and social groups. There’s been Shakespeare the royalist, Shakespeare the republican, Shakespeare the capitalist, the libertarian, the stern moralist, the sighing sentimentalist, the champion of women’s rights, the scourge of the Spanish, the lover of all mankind, the lover of men. We’ve seen Marxist Shakespeare, classist Shakespeare, aesthetic and pathetic, Ricardian, Stoppardian – Shakespeare the radical preacher, the Sunday-school teacher, the Technicolor multiplex Hollywood feature.
Taylor coined the term “Shakesperotics” to embrace “everything that a society does in the name – variously spelled – of Shakespeare”, declaring that in writing a history of Shakespeare he had found himself investigating “the history of the theatre, of publishing, censorship, journalism, education, morality” and then to “economics, politics, ideology”, the “total and material structure” of societies. For Taylor, studying Shakespeare is a window onto the complexities and paradoxes of cultural history. In this view, Shakespeare is less a man or a collection of plays than a set of identifiable threads running through the weave of a society, so tracing them can help us understand the overall pattern. Or they can be followed in order to throw up surprising and unexpected whirls and knots in the pattern, which don’t fit with what it says elsewhere.
It’s possible to take this one step further, and suggest that because Shakespeare has been such a dominant part of our understanding of ideas like nationhood, masculinity, cultural value and creativity, it’s important to study him in order to critique these ideas. If Shakespeare is one of the sources of authority wielded by those in power, then learning about the history of Shakespeare can provide us with the tools to resist that authority. Lawmakers quote Shakespeare in their speeches, generals cite him when addressing their troops and judges refer to him when giving their opinions. Just in the last month I’ve read a British member of parliament quoting – well, misquoting actually – Henry V when talking about hostile negotiations with Europe, a management consultancy firm offering training based on insights from Macbeth and a newspaper commentary dismissing a sexual harassment case as “just lusty behaviour – in the Shakespearean sense”. All of these are using Shakespeare as a way to present their contingent (and unpleasant) opinions as natural, inevitable and firmly rooted in history. He’s brought in to validate their desires and interests – Shakespeare provides a licence for them to do what they want to other people. This is Shakespeare as a language – the language of power. And we’d better learn to speak it if we don’t want to be subjected to that power.
And finally, there’s the pragmatic – or even cynical – argument that Shakespeare looks good on a resume. You may not like it, you may not enjoy studying it, but it’s widely regarded as a thing that clever people do, so it’s worth chalking up a course in it. We might take the view that, like a Classical education in the nineteenth century, it’s difficult, pointless and requires us to put in immense effort for very little reward. But employers are impressed by people who’ll undertake difficult and pointless tasks for very little reward. So maybe a Shakespeare course is a useful economic signal – “Over here! Pick me! I’m really good at subordinating my own feelings to the grinding toil of modern life! I’ve got a certificate here to prove it!” Or perhaps it’s more of a macho brag – “You think you can beat me? You think you can hurt me? Listen pal, I did Shakespeare to myself in college.” Richard Sennett has written persuasively about the way modern capitalism valorises the instrumentalization of the self, the performance of flexibility in the face of rapidly shifting tasks and crises. Shakespeare could be framed as another crisis in the modern worker’s narrative arc.
Of course we don’t spend our time articulating why we think it’s worthwhile studying Shakespeare, we tend to get on and do it. But the underlying principles will inevitably shape what we get on and do, the ways we do it and what we think we’re left with when we’ve done. And the possibilities I’ve sketched above may all be part of our justification at the same time, to differing degrees or in differing situations. As ever at Quite Irregular, I’m interested to hear other people’s experiences and perspectives: what was it that caused you to take a Shakespeare class, or teach one? When have you studied Shakespeare and why?
AdvertisementsIt’s been ten years since The West Wing finished airing, and its influence remains palpable. A new generation of fans have emerged, thanks to the entire series streaming on Netflix, and its perennial relevance when it comes to tackling important political issues. The Emmy-winning series managed to turn potentially dry subjects—such as racking up votes in Congress, or appointing someone to the Supreme Court—into something as dramatic as anything you’d see from a high flying crime drama or a medical show.
Much of that can be attributed to the success of Aaron Sorkin’s machine gun-paced dialogue, combined with long term Sorkin co-collaborator, Thomas Schlamme’s use of the ‘walk and talk.’ Sitting and talking makes for dull television, but watching suited people walk and talk at breakneck speed? Now there’s an idea that’s both easily lampooned (most famously, when Sorkin guest starred on 30 Rock), and also compelling to watch.
At times, the show seemed like an old fashioned liberal fantasy with occasionally problematic moments (its lack of diversity being most prominent), but its mixture of political duelling, and personal dramas, demonstrate why it continues to inspire a generation of people to become more politically active. Here are our picks for the 20 best The West Wing episodes.
20. “The Debate” (Season 7, Episode 7)
“The Debate” offered up something fairly original for network TV. It featured an hour-long debate between Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick, broadcast live in two separate tapings for East and West Coast audiences. It played out just like a regular Presidential debate, albeit with the negotiated rules dropped early on in the episode. Nearly 10 years old, many of the topics covered are the kind you’ll have seen in recent debates. For better or worse, ts timeliness never fades.
19. “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” (Season 1, Episode 19)
It’s easy to lose focus in any job, and it turns out that it’s no different for the POTUS. A damaging memo has been leaked suggesting that President Bartlet is weaker than he should be, and controlled by the efforts of his Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (played by John Spencer). The turning point comes when Leo writes one simple plan for the future—‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet.’ The senior staff are energized once more, and the audience is carried along just as enthusiastically. Raising the level of public debate on an issue, regardless of what political battles may be lost, is just the kind of thing you want to see from the real life leaders.
18. “Shutdown” (Season 5, Episode 8)
Season 5 had a rocky time, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s departure, but there was still room for some iconic moments. “Shutdown” laid out just what happens if bi-partisan cooperation fails while negotiating the federal budget, leading to the government shutdown. President Bartlet staunchly refuses to back down in his aims, still not fully recovered from the shock of his daughter’s kidnapping. Josh returns from being benched to save the day by, essentially, embarrassing the opposition into resolution. It’s a decisive moment for the administration as Bartlet fully regains control, and it’s also an educational hour, as it demonstrates how things unfold (and fail) within the federal government.
17. “Election Day Part II” (Season 7, Episode 17)
The original course of the 7th season had Arnold Vinick winning the Presidency, but this was changed when John Spencer tragically died midway through shooting the season. Deemed to be too bleak to have a Republican victory, as well as the sudden death of a much loved character, the last few episodes of the season focused on Santos’ victory and the staff dealing with the death of Leo. This episode ably captured the bittersweetness of it all. As a viewer, you end up feeling elated for Josh finally winning his campaign, getting together with Donna after seven long years, but also broken by the death of his mentor and father figure, Leo.
16. “Isaac and Ishmael” (Season 3, Episode 1)
The West Wing was always careful to avoid actual political issues, happy to exist in its own parallel universe. But after the events of September 11, that changed for one episode. Aaron Sorkin opted to write an episode about terrorism with the Senior Staff explaining to a group of teenagers the difference between extremism and religious belief. It didn’t tie into the rest of the show’s storyline, working as an one-off play of sorts. While a little overly preachy at times, it was an important message, and its themes continue to be relevant today. Impressively, it was written and produced in less than three weeks.
15. “Twenty Five” (Season 4, Episode 23)
Aaron Sorkin left the show at the end of Season 4, and he went out with style. “Twenty Five” ended the season with the White House in disarray. The President’s youngest daughter, Zoey, has been abducted. With the Vice President having resigned an episode earlier, the President chooses to step down temporarily, using the 25th Amendment to pass the power along. That leads to the Republican Speaker of the House taking over his duties. Played by John Goodman, Glen Allen Walken sums up the liberal stereotype of a brash Republican, but it leads to an incredibly tense conclusion to the season, and Sorkin’s reign. “You’re relieved, Mr. President” is a near spine-chilling command to hear, as the broken Bartlet steps back.
14. “Posse Comitatus” (Season 3, Episode 21)
Demonstrating that the series isn’t always a liberal fantasy, “Posse Comitatus” shows President Bartlet ordering the assassination of the defense minister of the fictional country of Qumar. It’s as controversial as it sounds, leading to some significant repercussions later on. Here, we see the assassination, interspersed with a musical performance of “War of the Roses.” It’s some exceptional cutting work by the crew, reinforcing the view that even the most idealistic of leaders sometimes make unpleasant decisions. To further add to the suffering, CJ’s potential love interest is gunned down while attempting to thwart a robbery. Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” in the background makes it all the more devastating.
13. “20 Hours in America” (Season 4, Episode 1 and 2)
What do you do when you’ve ended a season with dubious assassinations and other horrors? Take a break from it all and leave some of the main characters stranded in rural Indiana. The Season 4 opener left Toby, Josh, and Donna stranded by the motorcade, and forced to make their own way home. For the most part, it’s a highly amusing ‘fish out of water’ tale, even if it does end up increasingly outlandish. There’s still time though, for one of President Bartlet’s most memorable speeches as a pipe bomb explodes, killing a group of college students.
12. “King Corn” (Season 6, Episode 13)
There was an abundance of change in Season 6. Donna left the White House to go on the campaign trail with Vice President ‘Bingo’ Bob Russell (played by Gary Cole). Shortly after that, Josh encourages his own candidate in the form of fringe congressman, Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits). “King Corn” splits the action between the two Democratic campaigns, along with the Republican frontrunner, Arnold Vinick (played perfectly by Alan Alda). We see a day in the life of the campaign from each perspective, highlighting just how exhausting it all is, as well as throwing in some time for a bittersweet moment between Josh and Donna. It’s a drastic change of pace compared to what we’re used to, but its insight is fascinating.
11. “Take This Sabbath Day” (Season 1, Episode 14)
Combining a humorous side plot with a weightier and more poignant main story was The West Wing’s bread and butter for much of its run. “Take This Sabbath Day” offers one part death penalty discussion, one part absurd hangover story. President Bartlet is conflicted when it comes to deciding whether to set aside the death penalty for a man convicted of drug-related murders, leading to a debate from various different religious sides. Alongside such moral discussion, this episode introduces Joey Lucas, a campaign manager who happens to be deaf, and shows off Bradley Whitford’s admirable comic timing when it comes to playing a severely hungover Josh.
10. “2162 Votes” (Season 6, Episode 22)
By the closing episode of Season 6, there’s no Presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention. “2162 Votes” shows how dirty some campaigns get in a bid to win. Even the typically, fairly clean, Josh, shows his dark side, so keen to win that he’s willing to leak news of a rival candidate’s wife’s mental health issues to undermine them. Matt Santos is told to step back in favor of the Vice President, but refuses to, giving a stirring speech (the kind that we’d all love to hear one of our actual leader give). In an election year, this episode is all the more worthwhile, highlighting just how vicious things can get.
9. “17 People” (Season 2, Episode 18)
Few people participate in heated debates with the President, but that changes in this ‘bottle’ episode. Toby discovers that President Bartlet has been hiding the fact that he has Multiple Sclerosis. It leads to an episode-long argument in the Oval Office as the pair debate over the decision Bartlet made, with seemingly no consideration for the repercussions it has for his staff. To lighten the mood, the others are left to punch up a speech for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Besides being a funny aside, it also offers up one of the more overtly romantic scenes between Josh and Donna (played by Janel Moloney)—further igniting the very slow burn of their almost, but-not-quite romance. There are no sweeping ‘walk and talks,’ but “17 People” doesn’t need it when the storytelling is this good.
8. “The Supremes” (Season 5, Episode 17)
Another memorable highlight of Season 5 laid out the process of putting someone on the Supreme Court. And yes, its parallels to Obama’s recent nomination are immediately clear. The West Wing’s Senior Staff has a choice between two extremes, eventually arranging a deal that has them both nominated as a form of compromise. Glenn Close puts in a prototypically great performance as the very liberal federal judge set to be the first female Chief Justice.
7. Celestial Navigation (Season 1, Episode 15)
Airing right after “Take This Sabbath Day,” “Celestial Navigation” continues to straddle drama with comedy. It’s the kind of episode you could watch without any prior knowledge of the show, and still enjoy what unfolds. While Sam and Toby head to Connecticut to bail out their Supreme Court nominee, Judge Mendoza, who’s been racially profiled and arrested on a false drunk driving charge, CJ suffers from some painful dental issues. Watching Allison Janney lament her ‘woot canaw’ is a joy to see. That delight is further enhanced as we watch Josh struggling to deal with giving a press conference, with some hilarious consequences.
6. “In Excelsis Deo” (Season 1, Episode 10)
Much of The West Wing’s strength stemmed from its ability to deal with the important issues of the day, while making them personable too. The show’s first season reached its stride in time for Christmas, giving us one of the finest Christmas episodes on TV. In “Excelsis Deo” tackled the problem of homeless war veterans. When Toby Ziegler, the relatively cold Communications Director, finds out about the death of a homeless war vet, he works diligently to give the man a military funeral. It showed us that Toby has more heart than previously shown, while highlighting an important issue in our society. The punches continue to hit hard as press secretary, CJ Cregg (played by Allison Janney), deals with the deadly assault of a homosexual teenager, and whether or not hate crime legislation should be pushed through. The episode won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, with Richard Schiff winning Outstanding Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Toby.
5. “Bartlet for America” (Season 3, Episode 9)
“Bartlet for America” followed a similar trend to the previous Christmas special, focusing on a single character. Leo testifies before a Congressional committee regarding President’s Bartlet’s MS, leading to much of his past being uncovered. We learn more about his alcoholism and how it affected the early days of the campaign, as well as his friendship with the President. Where John Spencer’s performance really shines through is when he describes the process of pouring a glass of scotch and dropping an ice cube in. It’s darkly poetic, and rightly earned him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
4. “Noel” (Season 2, Episode 10)
“Noel” is a rare West Wing episode that almost exclusively focuses on one character,
in an attempt to demonstrate how mental scars can be even worse than physical scars. Josh struggles with his return to work after the shooting, and a therapist is called in to investigate. What unfolds is a powerfull deconstruction of the horrors of PTSD. This is a Christmas special with few laughs, but it’s powerfully done and important in breaking down misconceptions about mental health conditions. Bradley Whitford puts in a performance of a lifetime, and went on to win the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor that year.
3. “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1)
The first 10 minutes of the Pilot episode are almost exhausting, relentlessly throwing quick dialogue at you. It was necessary, especially with a fairly large cast of relatively unknown actors (at the time) needing to be introduced. The focus initially seemed to be on Rob Lowe’s character, Sam Seaborn, but we soon learn that this is an ensemble piece. Bradley Whitford’s Josh Lyman’s cocky, yet insecure nature proved to be just as important in the “Pilot,” as Sam’s naïveté when it comes to encountering women at a bar. But it’s the closing minutes that truly lure you in. Martin Sheen’s President Josiah Bartlet makes a thunderous entrance stating the First Commandment in a bid to unsettle overly aggressive members of the Christian Right. It’s conducted with power and confidence, ensuring it’s engrained in your memory for a long time to come.
2. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” (Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2)
Season 2 started with a bang, literally. The first season ended on the cliffhanger of a shooting at an event, and no sign of who had been shot. We learn quickly that the President was shot but not seriously, while Josh is in a critical condition. This could have been 90 brutal minutes of watching people suffer in a hospital but instead, we’re taken back to the very beginning to see how the Senior Staff all got together. It’s an entertaining mixture of poignancy, tension, and humor—and a strong reminder that this group is essentially a family.
1. “Two Cathedrals” (Season 2, Episode 22)
Killing off a beloved recurring character is rarely a popular move with audiences, but that’s what Aaron Sorkin did in 18th and Potomac, killing off President Bartlet’s kindly secretary, Mrs Landingham. “Two Cathedrals” combines President Bartlet’s grief over her loss, with his impending decision on whether or not to run for a second term. With plenty of flashbacks to a young Bartlet and Mrs Landingham, there’s some much-needed insight into just how he came to be the man he is today. Using Dire Straits’s “Brothers in Arms” in conjunction with Bartlet’s arrival at the press conference determining his future is an inspired move, but it’s Martin Sheen’s performance when ranting at God in Latin that really makes this an essential episode to watch.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Yesterday, President Obama signed an order barring federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay rates with one another, the latest in a string of executive orders aimed at improving working conditions at companies that do business with the government. President Obama will also order federal contractors to report race- and gender-based compensation data, and has ordered the minimum wage for these contractors hiked to $10.10 an hour. Ad Policy
But these moves apply only to workers in the United States, suggesting the Obama administration seeks to take a narrow approach to a globalized problem.
The federal government, according to a recent investigation by The New York Times, spends over $1.5 billion a year on clothing from factories in countries like Bangladesh, where over 1,200 garment industry workers have died at their jobs over the past eighteen months.
In Vietnam, Haiti, Bangladesh, Mexico, Pakistan and Mexico garment workers sewing clothing for the American government earn salaries so low that even the pope described it as “slave labor.” Some of the factories that outfit federal workers were found to be employing children as young as 15. Managers at other American suppliers were coaching workers on how to dupe auditors. Workers were beaten with sticks. Some soiled themselves because they were forbidden from taking bathroom breaks.
Globalization has made it difficult to escape sweatshop labor. Consumers—be they Walmart shoppers buying a $20 pair of jeans or government agencies contracting for $50 million in uniforms—rarely know the exact location or working conditions of the factories that make their clothes. The garment industry is a layered web of contractors and subcontractors. Companies routinely decamp from one country to the next, prowling for cheaper labor. Federal agencies have a fiduciary obligation to taxpayers to get the best bargain. And yet, taxpayers also expect their money will not underwrite scofflaws who abuse workers.
A handful of cities and states have found a way around this problem. At least five states and more than twenty cities require companies, as a precondition to bidding on contracts, to reveal the addresses of the factory where these uniforms and other clothes will be made. This allows labor advocates and human rights groups to conduct independent investigations of conditions at these plants.
Some of these policies have had good effect. In 2007, for instance, the City of Los Angeles, which has such a requirement, asked the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) to audit a foreign factory that was making uniforms for city workers. The auditors found various labor violations at the factory, New Wide Garment, in Cambodia, which enabled the city to pressure the company to improve. Within months the factory managers stopped restricting workers’ access to toilets, and they began paying workers legally required sick leave. Factory managers also instituted a policy to stop verbal harassment and abuse by managers, and they wrote rules granting more protections for pregnant workers. The city also forced the factory to rehire a union organizer who had been forced to resign, restoring her to her previous position with back-pay and no loss of seniority.
“It may not sound like a lot to us but there it had a big impact on workers’ lives,” said Farshid Yazdi, a management analyst for the City of Los Angeles. “It’s good just to see what kind of impact the city can have.”
Maine leads the way among the states that have rules meant to ensure that the uniforms worn by public workers are not made in sweatshops. State officials require garment companies to reveal which factories make the uniforms and then post this information online. Maine also forces the clothing companies to pay fees to partially fund factory inspections.
Still, labor groups say that even in cities and states like Los Angeles and Maine, which have progressive policies, it’s difficult to ensure that public money is not going toward overseas sweatshops.
In 2012, for instance, the WRC investigated I.T.I.C. Apparel in the Dominican Republic’s San Pedro de Macorís free trade zone, which was a supplier of work shirts and work pants to the city of San |
Our vineyards make more profit," he said.
Twelve years ago, when Jiuzhaigou was first established, Wu Qiyun and his wife converted their modest 1 acre orchard into a vineyard. "We expected the vineyard to bring more income," he said as he headed towards his vines with a plastic container of pesticide strapped to his back. "But the prices for apples rose over the last decade, so growing grapes is actually not as good." Last year, the couple made 20,000 yuan from the vineyard. If they still had apple trees they could have earned twice that.
It has been a struggle for Wu to support his two children. Last year, in protest over the low price Jiuzhaigou offered for grapes, farmers began selling their harvest to a producer in a neighbouring county. Eventually authorities intervened, forcing Jiuzhaigou to raise the buying price to three yuan a 0.5kg.
It was a small victory, but Wu is under no illusion about who is profiting from the wine industry in Xiaojin. "Jiuzhaigou benefits most from our vineyards, followed by local officials who enjoy some takings from the trade as well as wine at their government banquets," he said. "Farmers like us never drink wine."
Additional reporting by Xia KeyuLONDON: Alongside 144 others, a memorial paving stone has been laid in honour of Khudadad Khan, the first South Asian and Muslim recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC) during the First World War.
An unveiling ceremony, as part of the UK Government’s First World War Centenary commemorations, was held in the National Memorial Arboretum in the UK on Thursday where government ministers, relatives and servicemen were present.
Khudadad Khan from Dab village of the Chakwal district of modern day Pakistan was awarded a Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military award, for his actions on 31 October 1914 at Hollebeke, Belgium. He and his detachment were subjected to heavy gun fire as they attempted to defend their position. All were killed except Khudadad Khan, who despite being badly wounded continued firing. He was left for dead by the enemy but despite his wounds, he managed to crawl back to his regiment during the night to continue fighting.
Paving stones commemorating Jemader Mir Dast and Naik Shahamad Khan, the other two recipients of the Victoria Cross during First World War from modern day Pakistan, were also unveiled as part of the ceremony. Acting British High Commissioner, Mr Patrick Moody said:
“The First World War was a truly global war, and one which pulled in people from every corner of the earth. People from every background united in their shared values.
“Khudadad Khan displayed immense fortitude by continuing to fight when all around him were lost and despite terrible injuries, dragging himself back to his comrades, his friends, to continue to give his all in the fight for liberty.
“As part of the First World War Centenary commemorations, last November we unveiled a plaque in Islamabad to honour three soldiers from modern day Pakistan who were awarded Victoria Crosses during the First World War. This plaque will soon be moved to a public space in Islamabad where members of the public will be able to visit and pay their respects.
“I hope that for many years to come the plaque will remind us all of the gallantry of the brave men who fought alongside British and other Commonwealth soldiers in the First World War. The stones that have been laid in the UK’s National Memorial Arboretum for Sepoy Khan and others are small token of our continued gratitude and recognition of our shared history.”The world came to see Neymar but found Iraq
In a night of high-drama in Brazil’s capital Brasília – the scenes of jubilation at the final whistle were felt in the early hours in households all over the embattled nation of Iraq, its people wide-awake (the game kicked off at 4.00am Baghdad time) to watch one of Iraq’s greatest and gallant footballing efforts against one of world’s top powers, Brazil. The nation of Pelé, Zico and Garrincha, whose name the stadium where it all played out bears. The Iraqi Olympic team fought like Lions and while just days earlier they faced the same 0-0 outcome, the players were somewhat downcast after the disappointing stalemate with the Danes which had a slight taste of a bitter defeat, this draw however tasted very much like a hard-earned victory.
The resolute and defiant Iraqi coach Abdul-Ghani Shahad returning from his one match touchline ban was the Emperor directing his army on by the sidelines against the youthful Brazilian team – a talented group of fledgling and some day world-class individuals – but, a splintered team at present– and what was plain and so easy to see for every one of the 65,829 spectators at the stadium, was a Brazilian team that was so clearly lacking a true leader.
Neymar Jr. – the superstar of the Camp Nou – has shouldered much of the burden of the nation’s footballing hopes – post-Mineiraço – the 7-1 World Cup semi-final defeat at the hands of the Germans in Belo Horizonte two summers ago – but the captain’s armband has weighed heavy on the forward. Iraq on the other hand, led by the often unsung hero Saad Abdul-Amir, bursting forward through the centre of the park, and the midfielder revelled in the buffeting and tussling that went on, throughout the game.
Iraq came as visitors to the Estádio Mané Garrincha and when the 65,829 strong Brazilian following – started to sing the Hino Nacional Brasileiro, it must have brought a shudder into the hearts of the Iraqi team, however luckily, they were only up against 11 Brazilian players and not the spirited and vocal crowd whose singing of the Brazilian national anthem made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
As he had done in the opening game against Denmark, Iraq’s Abdul-Ghani Shahad sprang a surprise by naming a back-four and sacrificing an extra attacker Ali Husni – absent for most parts of Iraq’s first match – for a holding midfielder in the shape of Saad Natiq – the role he had been accustomed to play during his early days at Al-Najaf.
Shahad also preferred the taller Mohanad Abdul-Rahim ahead of Hamadi Ahmed in attack and the striker almost scored with a header that hit the crossbar from a long throw from Dhargham Ismail, another one of Iraq’s stand-outs on Sunday night or Monday morning if you were watching the game in Iraq. Iraq’s youngest player Amjad Atwan went close with a long range shot and eptimised the work-ethic of Shahad’s team, battling throughout and never giving up.
And we cannot forget the reincarnated goalkeeper Mohammed Hamed – yes, he did roll around and feign injury in attempts to time waste, though the Romanian referee more than compensated the home team for time Iraq’s keeper had dragged out. However saying that, Iraq’s goalkeeper – perceived as the Under-23’s second choice in goal – looked composed and for a player who has played little football over the past twelve months, Mohammed is now earning rave-reviews for his performances at the Olympics.
Midfielder turned full back Humam Tariq selected in the first game, dropped to the bench and in his place came Alaa Mahawi, the player given the unnerving task to mark the talisman Neymar – however the full back whose defensive frailties had been questioned – even by his coach – prior to the Games, gave the Barça man little respect on the turf, constantly at his heels, the boy from Zawraa became the Brazilian captain’s nemesis – Alaa obviously a Madridi and not a Barça fan – irritated the Brazilian No.10 in his challenges at times, fouling him and catching him late in others.
Iraqi artist Ibrahim Salah Hindi mocked up a caricature of Alaa imprisoning Neymar – the right back – as all the world could see – had clearly frustrated the golden boy, maybe not had him completely in his back pocket, but thwarted him to unnerving depths and infuriated him to the level that it nullified his true effectiveness.
No one had given Iraq much hope before the game, just like the South Africans who gained a praiseworthy and commendable point against the hosts in their opening game. But Iraq’s dogged determination, the gheera factor that Iraqi fans speak so much about, was there in full view.
At the final whistle, the local brasileiro fans were chanting ‘Iraque, Iraque, Iraque’ and gave the opposing players a rousing round of applause, they knew and had seen how hard they had fought. The point from the game keeps Iraq’s hopes of reaching the knockout stages well and truly alive. And this is how the Iraqis do it, always against adversity and hardships, as in 2004 Olympics when Adnan Hamad’s team beat Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal, this time, Abdul-Ghani Shahad and his boys had humbled Neymar and Brazil.
Every one of Iraq’s team played their part from the kit-man to the goalkeeper, to the team physio, Iraq a team unable to play home matches, fighting terrorism for many years within their borders, daily car bombings, and kidnappings, were unfazed by pre-tournament worries over the ZIKA virus, Neymar or the daily crime and violence in Brazil. Unnerved Iraq have come to Rio to make a statement.
Brazil is a home away from home for the Iraqi players, born under Saddam’s dictatorial regime, living through the UN sanctions, War against the Coalition of the Willing and the post-2003 chaos of their nation in its aftermath, football comes easier than life. Brazil may have taught Iraqi footballers a lesson in their two previous meetings at U-20 and senior level, but this time, Iraq taught them something else. At the end, the Iraqi players reassuringly patted the disenchanted Neymar on his back, “don’t worry” they must have told him “You may have been frustrated for 90 +7 minutes, we have felt that our whole lives. Raise your head, you’re an Iraqi.”
Iraq the nation which barely gets any respect or mention on the world football map, who apparently are making their second appearance at a football tournament at the Olympics according to one football commentator (correction Iraq has actually qualified on five occasions), the “not-so-great footballing nation” says BBC Sport and Brazil’s Goal.com who claimed prior to the start of the competition that Iraq were the weakest team in Group A, have been made to eat their words. But the Iraqis don’t need to talk, they let the football do that for them. Obrigado Brasil but they, the Iraqis, move on and try to complete the mission by beating South Africa in their final group game. Aish Al-Irak. Eu ♥ IraqueGet 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
After 11 hours and 40 minutes of exercise consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile marathon run just about anyone would be on their kness.
But when Sam Davis from Barry, finished the Tenby Ironman on Sunday he knelt down due to more than exhaustion.
The knackered romantic popped the question to Georgie Anderson while crossing the finish line of the gruelling race.
The triathlete captured hearts across the country after a video of his proposal went viral - gaining more than 85,000 views on Facebook alone.
Sam, 25, who runs a poultry wholesalers in Barry, met intensive care nurse Georgie, when they were 17.
Describing her as being his rock throughout his gruelling Ironman training, Sam decided to buy a ring for Georgie after a training injury made him realise how supportive she had been.
Sam said: "I lost my granddad to cancer around a year and a half ago and decided I wanted to give something back to Velindre cancer centre.
"I came up with the idea with my best mate that I would compete in the Ironman Wales, having never taken part in a triathlon of any sort before.
"So I bought a training book online and stuck to it like the bible.
Watch the Ironman Wales start:
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"I started the gruelling training program which along side working a physical full time job almost killed me!
"I'm telling you getting up at 4am for one day is bad enough... try it for eight months!
"All the way through I had this amazing support from Georgie.
"She went away with the girls to Vegas at week 19 of 30 week training program. This is when the drama struck!
"I came off my bike at 30mph head first into a stone wall. If I didn't have my helmet on I'd be dead!
"I couldn't walk for three days. On the one side it slowed my training down but on the plus it made me realise how much I need Georgie and how selfish I had been all year.
"So I limped into Cardiff with the help of mum and bought her a diamond ring!
"Even up to the last loop of the marathon I didn't know where the sign was. It just happened mum managed to get it to me and here I am.
"It seemed like the perfect time - the end of one truly epic journey and the start of another.
"A 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile marathon, £2000 raised for Velindre and a beautiful fiancée - all in 11 hours and 40 mins.
"Some would say I am an Ironman with a soft heart."The Box Office:
Batman and Harley Quinn arrives on Digital HD today courtesy of Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc., with a DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K Blu-Ray arriving on Aug. 29, 2017. Like the last handful of high-profile DCAU animated features, this one got a one-night-only theatrical screening courtesy of Fathom Entertainment. I don’t have the numbers for last night’s screening, and Fathom usually doesn’t release them unless they are exceptional (The Killing Joke made $3.7 million via its two nights of theatrical screenings last summer), but I can say that last night’s 7:30 pm showing at the AMC in Thousand Oaks was surprisingly crowded.
The Review:
At its core, director Sam Liu and writers Bruce Timm and Jim Kreig’s Batman and Harley Quinn is a reworked/stretched out remake of the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Harlequinade.” That 1994 episode concerned Batman freeing Harley from Arkham to help him track down The Joker who had stolen a nuclear bomb with the intent of blowing up Gotham. This time around, Ms. Quinzel is on the straight-and-narrow, but Batman (and Nightwing) still needs her help to track down Poison Ivy after she teams up with the Floronic Man (Kevin Michael Richardson) with a scheme to turn every human into a plant.
Oddly enough, the 68-minute feature (minus credits) is a very talky little caper, with time enough for two full-length musical numbers in a dive bar but little time for actual character development or introspection. The picture takes a bit to find its groove, as this is essentially the first Batman: The Animated Series movie/episode since Mystery of the Batwoman back in 2003. Even Kevin Conroy, who never stopped voicing this character, seems initially ill-at-ease playing this Batman in this world.
At its core, this is a two-part episode of The New Batman Adventures slowed down to 0.75 speed so as to make it past the magical 65-minute mark to qualify as a feature. The film is choppy, disjointed and alternating between talky and oddly silent (there are expository dialogue exchanges where you’d swear folks forgot their lines and had to wing it to safety). Part of the issue is that, quite frankly, Batman and Nightwing (Loren Lester) are assholes this time around.
Batman especially is abrasive, cold and rather unsympathetic to a former enemy gone straight, while Nightwing can’t decide whether to belittle or screw her. The film tries to offer a story about Harley being undervalued and sexualized by the men around her, even as the movie goes all-in on the male gaze right from the start.
While those two Caped Crusader actors return to voice their defining roles, Melissa Rauch (Big Bang Theory) voices Harley Quinn while Paget Brewster (Criminal Minds) voices Poison Ivy. They are both excellent actors, but considering the nostalgia-driven nature of this project I can only wonder why Arleen Sorkin and Diane Pershing weren’t brought back. If Julie Newmar can voice Catwoman in Return of the Caped Crusaders…
And the picture does toe the line between being its own thing and being a kind of love letter to the Harley Quinn character and the legacy of Batman: The Animated Series. There is a wonderful second act bit where our heroes waltz into a dive bar for villains, and every single extra is a minor villain or henchman/henchwoman from a Batman: The Animated Series episode. Now, several of these characters (like Two Face’s freckled henchmen or Captain Clown) died in their respective episode, but just go with it. And I liked a phone call with Booster Gold as well.
While the picture earns its PG-13 via adult language and lots of first-act sexual content (including a few “no big deal” gay insinuations), it is rather light on action and violence. The film wants to be more of a detective story than an action spectacular, even if the “mystery” component essentially boils down to asking a source for an address, but there is too much expositional dialogue and awkward comedic beats in place of adventure.
The picture doesn’t offer Batman or Nightwing at their best, and it’s a little odd that Poison Ivy would feel conflicted about the violence she is unleashing and threatening to unleash, but Rauch tries her best to save the film through sheer force of will. This Harley is totally disconnected from the Joker (he is barely referenced at all) and walking a tightrope between a more adult interpretation and the TV-Y7 figure of evil fun that we first met back in September of 1992. More screen time between her and Brewster's Poison Ivy would have helped immensely.
Batman and Harley Quinn is a slight entry into the DCAU library, but that is its intent. I wish the pacing was tighter, and I wish there was more of an emotional ending, rather than what amounts to an abrupt punchline. I again wonder how much of Batman: The Animated Series’ inherent goodness (especially in terms of not making Batman into a jerk) was due to Bruce Timm and friends not being able to go as “hardcore” as they might have liked due to Fox’s BS&P at the time. But that’s a conversation for another day. I can’t help noticing that “Harlequinade” did it better, 23 years ago, in just 20 minutes.The suicide bombing at the Volgograd main railway station on December 29 in whichraises yet again the questions whether and how self-styled Caucasus Emirate leader Doku Umarov could prevent the staging of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February.[An explosion that destroyed a trolleybus in Volgograd less than 24 hours later, at rush hour on December 30,.]In ato his supporters six months ago, Umarov declared that “they are planning to hold the games on the bones of many, many Muslims buried on our land by the Black Sea. It is incumbent on us as Muslims not to permit that, resorting to any methods Allah allows us."The answer to that question hinges on two interrelated imponderables. First, does Umarov have the manpower and tactical skills to stage one or more military operations of such magnitude and complexity that they could disrupt the games? And second, assuming the answer to the first question is “no,” what level of security threat to participants and spectators is the Russian leadership prepared to accept?The first question is all the more difficult to answer because there is no way of knowing whether Umarov intends to present Moscow with a credible ultimatum after seizing hostages -- "Call off the Games or hundreds of people die" -- or mount a series of terrorist attacks so shocking that the Russian authorities have no choice but to abandon an undertaking into which they have reportedly channeled 1.3 trillion rubles ($40 billion).There are precedents for both approaches. Between 1995 and 2004, the Chechen resistance staged four major operations with the aim of wringing political concessions from Moscow: the Budyonnovsk hostage taking in June 1995 masterminded by radical field commander Shamil Basayev; a similar hostage taking in Kizlyar in December 1996 commanded by Salman Raduyev; the Moscow theater hostage taking in October 2002; and the Beslan-school hostage taking in September 2004. None achieved the desired results, although Basayev succeeded in securing from then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin free passage for himself and his men back to Chechnya.Both Basayev and Raduyev are now dead. Umarov himself has never been identified as having masterminded a major operation, and it is questionable whether any of his senior commanders has the necessary tactical vision to plan and carry out a major military offensive, as opposed to providing logistical and psychological training to potential suicide bombers, as Umarov deputy Aslan Byutukayev (aka Amir Khamzat) has reportedly done on more than one occasion.Aslanbek Vadalov, arguably the most effective military planner among the surviving Chechen field commanders, successfully planned two major attacks in Chechnya in August and October 2010, but they involved only a dozen and three fighters respectively. And Vadalov has not featured prominently in any of Umarov’s video clips since re-pledging his loyalty to him in the summer of 2011.Thwarting a possible large-scale hostage taking in a hospital was nonetheless one of thecarried out in November by 7,000 combined military, Interior Ministry, and Federal Security Service (FSB) troops in preparation for the Sochi Olympics.In addition to the question of who might coordinate and command such an attack, it is not clear how many fighters Umarov has at his disposal in light of the new rift between him and Tarkhan Gaziyev, who hasUmarov’s argument that his rejection in 2007 of the cause of Chechen independent statehood was justified under Islamic law.recently compiled by the Center for PolitInformation headed by Aleksei Mukhin noted the (admittedly remote) possibility that Umarov’s men could be reinforced by more experienced fighters from Afghanistan or (less unlikely) from Syria.The North Caucasus insurgency has also mounted two successful operations targeting major sporting events despite tight security. In the first, in May 2004, then-Chechen President Akhmad-hadji Kadyrov was killed, together with five other people, by a remote-controlled bomb apparently cemented under his seat at a Grozny sports stadium. No less an expert than former FSB Directorthat the bomb was planted by, or with the connivance of, Kadyrov’s immediate entourage.In the second, six years later, the Kabardino-Balkaria insurgency wing planted an explosive device at the Nalchik race course with the aim of killing former Kabardino-Balkaria Republic Interior Minister Khachim Shogenov. Shogenov was one of 30 prominent officials injured in, which killed only an elderly World War II veteran.The risk that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) could be implanted in the fabric of facilities constructed specially for the Olympic Games was highlighted in theThe alternative tactic would be for the insurgency to mount in the run-up to the Olympics a series of suicide bombings such as those perpetrated in Moscow in 2010 and 2011, and/or car bombings such as the one that targeted the main police station in Nazran in the summer of 2010 in which 25 people were killed and up to 250 injured.The chances of a successful attack of whatever kind must, however, be assessed in the light of the unprecedented security arrangements already in place.All the construction workers brought from outside the region to work on infrastructure projects in preparation for the Olympics areby the end of December. Access to Sochi by motor vehicles has beenfor the duration of the Games.The security measures for the Sochi Olympics drafted in 2009by 42,000 police officers and 10,000 Interior Ministry troops, while 23,000 Ministry for Emergency Situations personnelin the mountains and along the coast.Any insurgent group intending to launch an attack will thus not only be heavily outnumbered. They will probably also be operating on terrain that is unfamiliar (unless Umarov began deploying his men to Krasnodar Krai months ago) and hampered by logistical problems in the absence of the extensive network of support personnel that any insurgency needs to function with maximum effectiveness.That said, a large-scale hostage-taking far enough away from Sochi not to fall foul of the intensified security measures might stand a greater chance of success.Andrei Soldatov, chief editor of the website agentra.ru, takes seriously the possibility of terrorist action to sabotage the Winter Olympics., as does RFE/RL North Caucasus Service Director Aslan Doukaev, that “in order to thwart the Olympics there is no need to stage large-scale terrorist attacks in which a large number of people would participate. By and large, bombings could literally be organized by terrorist cells or even a single cell, that would be sufficient.”Consequently, Soldatov argues, it will not be easy for Russian security services to guarantee the Olympics pass without incident. In that context, Soldatov also expresses bewilderment that the FSB officer put in overall charge of coordinating the security arrangements, Oleg Syromolotov, is a counterintelligence, rather than a counterinsurgency or counterterrorism, expert.It should be noted that Umarov is not the only actor to have threatened to sabotage the Sochi Olympics. On December 27, hackers operating under the collective title Anonymous Caucasus uploaded ato the Russian government declaring “large-scale cyber-warfare” under the slogan “Pay-back for Sochi.” The speaker accuses the Russian authorities of inhumanity in staging the Olympics on the ancestral homeland of the Circassian people, hundreds of thousands of whom perished fighting tsarist Russia’s expansion into the Caucasus in the 19th century. He affirms that “we support all the peoples of the Caucasus against the enemy of our people and the enemies of Islam -- Russia. Stop your activities on the territory of Sochi, and we will stop ours.... We shall try to destroy you, we shall try to achieve our aim, and you will not be able to stop us.”Anonymous Caucasusin temporarily disabling the websites of Sberbank and the Bank of Russia.Meanwhile, just 50 percent of Chechens believe that Umarov’s statement was indeed motivated by resentment at Moscow’s choice as the venue for the 2014 Olympics of the ancestral homeland of the Circassians. Inlaunched in mid-December by RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service, 10.5 percent of respondents attributed Umarov’s statement to the need to remind people he still exists, 7.9 percent to the belief that if he issues such threats, people will believe he is still a force to be reckoned with, and just 5.9 percent to the belief that he could force Russia to backtrack over the venue.Tonight, Elon Musk unveils the Model 3, Tesla Motors' long-awaited, affordable sedan.
Musk has already shared the car's key attributes: A 200-mile range and a $35,000 price that will drop to $27,500 or less after tax credits kick in. Tesla has long promised to change the world, and this is the car designed to bring electric vehicles to the masses and save humanity from climate catastrophe.
So the enormous hype surrounding this car is little surprise. Telsa inspires tremendous passion, so much so that people have been lining up outside Tesla stores to get their names as high as possible on the preorder list.
If you're planning to join them on that list, though, be ready to pay more than $30,000.
There are several reasons that price is almost certainly a fantasy. First, that $35,000 base model probably won't have the fun options people want. Based upon how Tesla has priced its Model S sedans and Model X SUVs, crowd-pleasing features like all-wheel drive, a larger battery for more range, and that really cool "autopilot" feature will add thousands to the sticker price. The base price of a Model S is 70 grand. Tesla won't reveal the average sale price, but Morgan Stanley pegged it at $105,000 in 2014.
But even if you're happy with the base model, there's a bigger problem. The sub-$30,000 price point is based on a $7,500 federal tax credit (some states offer additional incentives, but nothing nearly so generous). That discount is designed to foster adoption by subsidizing the cost of what remains a fairly expensive technology without dinging automakers. Everyone from General Motors to Nissan relies upon tax credits to help move cars by keeping the cost of cars like the Model 3, the Chevrolet Bolt, and the Nissan Leaf below $30,000, a number consumers find palatable.
One could argue they sort of wasted their credits on the very wealthy, people who didn't need it. Kelley Blue Book Senior Analyst Rebecca Lindland
That federal tax credit won't be around forever. It was designed to get automakers started, and applies to the first 200,000 electric vehicles a manufacturer sells in the US. Once an automaker hits that benchmark, the credit phases out incrementally over the following 12 months.
It's not known just how many cars Tesla has sold in the US since the Roadster debuted in 2008. The automaker didn't start breaking down sales by region—US, Europe, etc.—until 2014, and declined my request for that data for previous years. Still, some back-of-the-envelope math offers a glimpse.
Tesla has said it sold nearly 42,000 vehicles in the US in 2014 and 2015. Add in smaller volumes for 2012 and 2013, plus most of the 2,400 or Roadsters the company sold worldwide, and 50,000 vehicles in the US is a safe bet. That's a quarter of the cars eligible for the credit.
Looking ahead, Tesla plans to sell about 90,000 Model S and Model X cars this year. We already know that about half of all Model S sedans sold in the past two years went to American buyers, and there's no reason to believe that would change this year. With that in mind, Tesla is halfway to the 200,000 mark by the end of December.
"Ah," you say, "that leaves another 100,000 cars. No problem." Not quite. The Model 3 won't enter production until the end of 2017—and that's if Tesla meets its own deadline, something it has a habit of rarely doing. Meanwhile, it keeps selling the Model S and Model X. Even if the Model 3 rolls off the line and into driveways as scheduled, most of Tesla's federal tax breaks will be gone by then. Once they're all used up, the tax credit drops to half its value ($3,750) for six months, then a quarter ($1,875) for another six months. Then it's gone.
That could be a problem for Tesla, especially if the automaker is serious about reaching the mainstream. That $7,500 tax credit is "incredibly important," especially at the Model 3 price point, says Rebecca Lindland, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book. "One could argue they sort of wasted their credits on the very wealthy, people who didn't need it," she says.
For its part, Tesla doesn't seem too worried. "We build our vehicles, including Model 3, to offer compelling value without any incentives," a spokesperson said.
The fate of the federal tax credit isn't sealed, however. Lindland says Tesla could push for an extension, or other kinds of government support for buyers interested in its vehicles. "You can't let these kinds of incentives expire," she says.
Ideally, someday automakers won't need extra help to make electric cars cost competitive with their gas-powered counterparts. Lithium-ion batteries, which can make up a third of the cost of the entire car, are getting cheaper, dropping 65 percent in the past five years. Based on that trend, research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by 2022, "the unsubsidized total cost of ownership of [battery electric vehicles] will fall below that of an internal combustion engine vehicle.”
Until then, though, be ready to pay extra for electric.This is The Beatles’ second LP on the UK Parlophone label. It was released in Britain on an auspicious date – Friday, 22 November, 1963, the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
That event had an effect on the future of The Beatles in the USA. At the time they were virtual unknowns in America, but a TV news feature detailing their huge success elsewhere in the world was due to be aired nationally that very same night.
Of course the story on the beat group from Liverpool was dropped and wall-to-wall coverage of the tragic events in Dallas dominated. Understandably all anyone wanted to see and hear that day was the biggest story in the world – the shocking death of JFK.
That Beatle news program feature was shelved. In fact it wasn’t seen on US television screens until some weeks later, by which time The Beatles had already made their big breakthrough in the States via other means, namely their appearance on the hugely popular variety program, The Ed Sullivan Show. In a strange way had the Beatles been featured earlier on those news shows in the US they may not have enjoyed the same absolutely huge response that they later received. The Sullivan program turned out to be a far more influential vehicle.
Back in the UK, With the Beatles went to Number One on the charts and stayed there until April, 1964. It signalled the start of what became known as Beatlemania in Britain, a new type of mania that was about to infect the whole world. At the time the respected music magazine New Musical Express wrote: “If there are any Beatle-haters left in Britain, I doubt they'll remain unmoved after hearing With The Beatles. I'll even go this far: if it doesn't stay at the top of the NME LP Chart for at least eight weeks, I'll walk up and down Liverpool's Lime Street carrying an "I Hate The Beatles" sandwich-board”. He didn’t have to do it.
The album begins, just as their previous LP Please Please Me did, with an up-tempo number that immediately grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. In this case it’s “It Won’t Be Long”, a Lennon/McCartney original that again features the now trademark Beatle “Yeah, yeah, yeahs”, but this time in a catchy, infectious call-and-response form. There’s an excitement to this recording which simply jumps out of the speaker. If there’s one thing that producer George Martin managed successfully with The Beatles it was to capture in the studio their powerful “live” sound. It comes out even now in the record grooves. More than fifty years on this song still resonates.
Next up is “All I’ve Got To Do”, another original composition, but much slower in tempo this time, and again with a John Lennon vocal. This is Lennon paying tribute to an idol – one Smokey Robinson.
The third song on With The Beatles is a Paul McCartney number, the hugely confident “All My Loving”. The song embodies the excitement of Beatlemania, and yet it’s a song that simply came to Paul one day while he was shaving, and he wrote it down as a poem. Incidentally, this was the first song that the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 before an audience estimated to be 73 million viewers.
George Harrison gets a song of his own for the first time on this LP. “Don’t Bother Me” is a real foot-tapper and as good as anything Lennon and McCartney had written. George composed the song while on tour in 1963, at the Palace Court Hotel in the city of Bournemouth. Harrison was later very dismissive of the song, writing in his 'biography' I Me Mine “It might not have been a song at all, but it showed me that all I needed to do was keep writing and then eventually I would write something good”.
“Little Child” was initially written for Ringo Starr to perform, but the song ended up having a John Lennon vocal (Ringo instead got the better-suited “I Wanna Be Your Man” on this album). It has to be said that this is not one of the greatest Beatle tunes. It's regarded by many critics as an album filler track.
Next comes a sequence of three covers. These had been performed by The Beatles for years as part of their stage show, and as a result they are each well rehearsed and familiar to the band. Each is striking in contrast to the next.
First up is Meredith Wilson’s Broadway song “Till There Was You” (from the 1957 musical comedy The Music Man) with Paul on vocals; then comes a Motown song made popular by the girl group The Marvellettes, “Please Mister Postman” (which is infectiously sung by John). It’s followed by the 1956 Chuck Berry rocker, “Roll Over Beethoven” (with a great lead vocal from George Harrison). Each song, in its way, is The Beatles paying tribute to some of their very early influences. In the process they demonstrate the breadth of styles that the band could tackle with ease.
“Hold Me Tight” is another Paul McCartney composition. It’s a bit of a throw-away song to be honest, but still has a strong beat-group feel to it, typical of the era. While the song is nothing special it's not embarrassingly bad either.
“You Really Got a Hold on Me” is another Beatle cover. It’s a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles song, with John Lennon on vocals. This Beatle version is very close to the original, but distinctive enough to make it one of the great covers. As already mentioned, Smokey Robinson was definitely one of Lennon’s main idols at the time.
The next song, “I Wanna Be Your Man” was initially given to the Rolling Stones before The Beatles later decided to record the version we have here with Ringo as lead vocalist. The Stones rendition, |
Eyes. London, 1984.
. London, 1984. "Crusades." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2011. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/144695/Crusades>.
James A. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary Survey. Marquette University Press, 1962.
. Marquette University Press, 1962. Kenneth Setton, ed. A History of the Crusades, vol. I. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958 (available online).
. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958 (available online). Peter W. Edbury, The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation. Ashgate, 1996.
. Ashgate, 1996. P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517. Longman, 1986.
. Longman, 1986. R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193. Cambridge University Press, 1956.
. Cambridge University Press, 1956. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. II: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187. Cambridge University Press, 1952.
Coordinates:"It's official – again. Business purely for profit is not part of the new global business culture," writes Andrea Newell on Vault's CSR Blog: In Good Company.
Newell is referring to the 11th annual trust barometer survey results collected by PR firm Edelman, which were released last week.
Respondents included 5,075 college-educated, upper middle class, media-savvy and politically informed individuals from 23 countries, ages 25-64.
The sectors that were the subject of a trust rating: Business, government, media and non-government organizations (NGOs).
In a different year, the winner would have been an easy guess. But for 2010,beset by economic and environmental crises, the results took an unusual turn--especially when we turn to the top trustworthy industries.
So, what sector won our trust?
NGOs kept the top spot as the institutions most trusted to do what’s right, followed closely by business, government and the media, in that order. Overall, despite the turmoil and financial woes of global companies in recent years, trust in all institutions increased.
In fact, Edelman reported that in past years, "trust in business and government has normally trended in opposite directions where gains for one resulted in loss for the other."
The question then, as Newell--a former consultant and writer for green business news website Triple Pundit --puts it, is one of cross-sector partnerships. She writes:
"With gains for both, does this suggest the beginning of a tentative, but crucial, interdependent relationship where the two institutions work more closely together in the future?"
Top Trustworthy Economies
The U.S. lost ground as the most trustworthy economy, ceding the top spots to emerging economies Brazil, India and China. In fact, the U.S. slipped from No. 4 in the 2010 Trust Barometer to No. 10 this year, narrowly winning over the U.K. and Russia.
Top Trustworthy Industries
But that's just the overall economic picture.
For those of us who care about details, the barometer digs deeper to come up with the most trustworthy industries, as well as four overall trends that depict a troubling, and changed, future for business globally.
[Technology, automotive, media and banks all make an appearance, and one industry in particular, took a whopping 46 points plunge!]
Take note: Whether you are a student, a job seeker, a career changer or a senior executive, these results show a changing dynamic in the marketplace that isn't just dictated by a shifting sense of social responsibility. The results also show how education and social media can change economic and professional tides drastically, and quickly.
The Trust Barometer doesn't just speak to CSR advocates and tree-huggers.
It speaks to every one of us who has been following the crises in Tunisia and Egypt this past week, as global citizens operating in a global economy, where the difference between our political, personal and professional lives is infinitesimal. And that's where this barometer is most provocative.
Because regardless of our stand on climate change or CSR, we can all relate to trust.
Visit Vault's CSR Blog: In Good Company to see which industries were winners in the trust barometer as well as the new dictators of corporate reputation for 2011.An LG Smart TV owner in the United Kingdom has shockingly discovered that his device is sending unencrypted data over Wi-Fi containing TV watching habits, as well as file names from external storage units hooked up to the TV to an LG website, even though the TV’s privacy settings should have prevented such behavior. The Smart TV model in question is the LG 42LN572V that was manufactured in May 2013.
The Smart TV has an option of collecting watching information from users, although TV owners are able to turn it off from the Option menu. Even so, the unnamed TV owner – identified as DoctorBeet on his blog– found that the TV was sending the information to an LG web address (GB.smartshare.lgtvsdp.com), which is currently offline, returning 404 errors when accessed. Even though it looks like LG is not collecting the data at this time, such a “feature” could always be enabled, at which point the company would receive information every time the channel is changed and even get access to file names on USB dongles or external hard drives, although file names have not been always sent to that specific URL in DoctorBeet’s tests.
Such data could then be used for advertising purposes. DoctorBeet found a corporate video that explains LG’s Smart Ad feature that’s included in various LG products. “LG Smart Ad analyses users favorite programs, online behavior, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences,” the video says, further describing the kind of relevant, personalized ads that LG could deliver to TV owners.
However, in addition to using the data for advertising purposes, LG could also get a glimpse to what users are doing with their Smart TVs, especially when it comes to the kind of files they play on their devices from other storage units. Furthermore, since the data is not transmitted over an encrypted connection, it would be vulnerable to prying eyes.
It is not clear at this time whether this is a widespread issue for LG Smart TVs, or whether this was an isolated incident, but LG’s Smart Ad video promotion lists many other LG devices as capable of delivering such ads, including Smart TVs, Blu-ray players and even smart refrigerators. When contacted, LG UK basically told DoctorBeet that he has “unfortunately accepted the Terms and Conditions” on his TVs, and that nothing can be really be done. In response, DoctorBeet blocked access on his home Wi-Fi router to the web sites his Internet-connected TV could send information to, although that’s not something all Smart TV owners would know how to do.The men were jailed after a failed bid to seek asylum in the US Two men have lost their appeals against the UK's first conviction for inciting racial hatred via a foreign website. Simon Sheppard, 51, was sentenced to four years and 10 months, and Stephen Whittle, 42, to two years and four months at Leeds Crown Court in July. However, the Court of Appeal has reduced Sheppard's sentence by one year and Whittle's jail term by six months. Sheppard, from Selby, North Yorks, and Whittle, of Preston, Lancs, controlled US websites featuring racist material. During their first trial in 2008, they skipped bail and fled to California, where they sought asylum claiming they were being persecuted for their right-wing views, but were deported. The police investigation began after a complaint about a leaflet called "Tales of the Holohoax", which was pushed through the door of a Blackpool synagogue and traced back to a post office box in Hull registered to Sheppard. 'Abusive and insulting' Published material found later included images of murdered Jews alongside cartoons and articles ridiculing ethnic groups. The pair were charged under the Public Order Act with publishing racially inflammatory material, distributing racially inflammatory material and possessing racially inflammatory material with a view to distribution. Sheppard, of Brook Street, Selby, was found guilty of 16 offences and Whittle, of Avenham Lane, Preston, was found guilty of five. Sentencing them, Judge Rodney Grant said he had rarely seen material which was so abusive and insulting. Sheppard's counsel Adrian Davies told the Appeal Court the sites were "entirely lawful" in the US. He said that there was no evidence that anyone in England and Wales - except for the police officer in the case - had ever seen any of them. Excessive sentences Giving the Court of Appeal ruling, Lord Justice Scott Baker said the material had been available to the public despite the fact that the evidence went no further than establishing that one police officer downloaded it. He said the trial judge had been right to hold that he had jurisdiction to try the pair because much of the activities constituting the crime took place in England. However, although the Appeal Court judges agreed that "this was truly pernicious material", the sentences handed down had been excessive.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionNot that your pooch will be reciting William Blake poems anytime soon, but teaching him how to speak is one of the easiest tasks you can handle. Teaching your dog how to speak isn’t is a cute trick.
Accomplishing this task can have significant benefits for you in that it allows you to manage your dog’s behavior effectively. In addition to speaking, you will also want to train your dog to be quiet so that you can keep the barking under control.
Once your dog has learned to speak, you can move on to teaching more sophisticated tricks like complex speech behaviors as well as announcing visitors at the door.
In this guide, we will look at four aspects of teaching a dog to speak i.e. barking on command, training to be quiet, how to announce visitors and barking to be let out.
Teaching your dog to respond to commands
While many pet owners find trying to get their dogs to settle down and be quiet hard, getting them to respond to command can be just as equally frustrating. Teaching him to bark as a way of acknowledging a command can make it easier for you to teach him how to obey the quiet command. Whatever your reason for wanting them to speak, these tricks will certainly come in handy.
An enticing reward can work wonders
Go for something that the dog loves. In fact, the better the reward, the easier it will be to train the dog. Try using his favorite toy to get him to bark when you play with him. Treats are also a useful tool for teaching your dog to bark when responding to commands. The best treat will be one that is easy to break into pieces, healthy, easy to carry and more importantly, your dog loves. Using a variety of gifts will ensure that your dog will not get bored.
Clicker training
This is where you use a sound as a signal that your dog has done something right. Click and offer a treat to your dog, then repeat the process after a few minutes. Keep doing this until the dog gets used to the sound and rushes towards you every time he hears the sound. You can use the words ‘yes’ or ‘good’ if you do not have a clicker.
Get him excited
Dogs are more likely to bark when they are excited. To achieve this, consider playing a fun game like tug or fetch with him.
Take back the reward
With your pooch primed for barking, it is now time to grab the award you gave him and hide it behind your back.
Reward barking
With the prize hid behind your back and your dog excited, there is a good chance that he will bark. If he does not, hold out the treat but don’t give it to him. This will confuse him and may lead to barking. Give him at least five minutes to see his response. If he does, use your clicker. If he does not, try your own barking to encourage him.
Name the behavior
This will get your dog to associate certain words like ‘talk’ or ‘speak’ or hand signals with treats. It’s important to note that like most pets, dogs learn visual cues faster than spoken ones. Be sure to use the same tone when giving a command to improve your dog’s learning capabilities.
Once your dog has learned to associate certain words with barking, you can say ‘talk’ or ‘speak’ and wait for them bark. Only use spoken cues and reward him when he barks. Practice this daily for ten minutes until he masters the basic commands.
How to get a dog to stop barking
Below are a few techniques that can be used to train your dog to stop barking when need be. While they have proven useful severally, they don’t work overnight. Keep in mind that it will take longer for your dog to change his ways if he has been practicing barking for a long time. In addition, some of these may require you to know why your dog barks.In what can only be called ironic justice, Ku Klux Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller, the same man who killed three people at a Jewish community center a few weeks ago, was busted while having sex with a black male prostitute in the back seat of a car. Miller, who told an investigator he had lured the prostitute for the purpose of beating him up, was caught with his pants down engaging in acts that were too graphic to be described by authorities.
Miller is reported to have a lengthy and complex history with the law dating back to the 1980s. His involvement with the “white nationalist party” and the Ku Klux Klan has landed him in plenty of trouble with the FBI, who eventually cut a deal with Miller in exchange for his ratting out his fellow party members. He then entered a witness protection program after participating with law enforcement to catch other white nationalists. His deal included a greatly reduced prison sentence of just five years, and the protection of a brand new identity, which was furnished to him by the FBI.
Miller’s behavior and criminal activities have surprised law enforcement officials, but it was the incident in the back of a car that shocked investigators the most. An official commenting on the case declined to give exact details of what police found “Grand Dragon” Ku Klux Klan leader Miller doing when he got busted having sex with a black male prostitute, but described the activities as “salacious” and “shocking” given the fact that Miller had long been involved with the KKK.
Earlier this month, Miller was arrested for killing three people outside a Jewish community center while shouting racist slurs, including “Heil Hitler.” He is currently being held without bail while awaiting trial. The Daily Beast recently published an article which insinuates that Miller could also possibly have been involved with the murder of three black men at a gay book store in 1987. After those murders, Miller fingered two of his associates in the white nationalist party as the perpetrators, but both men he accused had alibis that checked out after a police investigation, and the murders were never solved.
In the same piece, Daily Beast writer Charlotte Lytton hints that Miller’s frolic with the black male prostitute might be due to his need for power and control over those he hates, and points to cases in which white slave owners often became involved with those they held captive.
That may be the case, or perhaps Miller is a repressed gay man himself. Studies have shown that the more homophobic a man is, the more stimulated he gets when watching sexual situations between men. This has led to a belief among psychiatrists and other medical professionals that homophobia often can indicate a person’s own homosexuality.
Miller, the Ku Klux Klan leader and admitted anti-Semite, was once busted having sex with a black male prostitute in the backseat of a car, shocking law enforcement officials and revealing a very sad irony. He is currently awaiting trial for the Jewish community center murders and won’t be making any more deals with the feds anytime soon.
By: Rebecca Savastio
Sources:
New York Magazine
ABC
New York Daily News
The Daily BeastAs the Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale film begins its worldwide screenings, our collaborator megax decided to translate some interviews with the key creators on the series. This one relates to the production of the first season and features its Chief Animation Director duo giving plenty of insight into the project, as well as their feelings towards the title.
Chief Animation Director interview
Shingo Adachi & Tetsuya Kawakami
Sword Art Online fascinated Adachi-san and Kawakami-san
– How did you two come to participate in Sword Art Online?
Kawakami: I received the first novel from Aniplex’s producer (Shinichiro) Kashiwada-san who said “We’re going to do this,” and so I read it. Since it was entertaining, I requested “please give me the second volume.” (laughs) I had turned into an ordinary reader.
Adachi: I was busy working on Wagnaria!! / Working!! when I was asked “who do you think would be good to serve as character designer on SAO?” However, after a while, the animation producer (Jin) Katou-san came to me and said “since your name has come up as a candidate, I’d like you to read the novel.” I believe it was on a Sunday night and I was eating at a family restaurant when I started to read it and thought it was good. I continued reading it until morning. My work on Wagnaria!! had completely come to a halt. (laughs) So when I left the restaurant, I called Katou-san and said “It’s good, so please let me work on it.” (laughs)
– What were your impressions of the illustrations drawn by abec?
Adachi: I’d thought that abec-san was an amazingly talented person even before that.
Kawakami: They drew some detailed images, didn’t they? I wondered how we could portray that delicacy in an anime.
– What were some troubles that you encountered while designing the characters for the anime?
Adachi: Probably that the designs themselves had changed.
Kawakami: The illustrations from when the first novel was published and the current novels have evolved a lot when it comes to the designs.
Adachi: I thought a lot about which time period to base the designs on, but abec-san created a set of designs to use for the anime. At first, I thought it would just be designs for clothing that wasn’t used in the illustrations, but he continued to give us designs for things like expressions and such. Since these would be considered the base work, I stayed faithful to the anime groundwork that abec-san drew for the character designs in the Aincrad arc.
– abec-san certainly drew an immense amount of designs for the anime.
Kawakami: It’s unusual for the source material side to send over this many detailed documents. We’re incredibly grateful for their considerable collaboration efforts.
Adachi: There’s a lot of illustrations that don’t show the full body in the novels, so there were a lot of points where I didn’t know the structure of their shoes or skirts. That’s why abec-san’s clothing designs were especially important for SAO. One characteristic of SAO’s clothing are the lines with 2 solid edges and color inserted in-between them. Portraying those in the anime was very difficult. For example, if you pull the camera back and the character becomes very small, those two lines start to come together and you can’t insert any color between them. In the end, we had to go with one line that was colored, but scenes where the camera moved away for a while and the characters move around were hard to depict.
– By the way, which of the requests for your positions (chief animation director or minor character designer) came first Kawakami-san?
Kawakami: Minor character designer. I believe Adachi-san had already joined us by the time we had our training camp.
Adachi: I had joined.
– Training camp?
Kawakami: We had a training camp at the beginning of 2012, the year the first season was scheduled for broadcast. The main staff members were taken to something like the shore of a lone island. (laughs)
Adachi: I drew character designs. Director Ito drew storyboards. Producers Katou-san and Kashiwada-san did something on their laptops. (laughs)
Kawakami: We were really pressed for time, weren’t we? (laughs) It was a 3 day 2 night camp where we wondered if we should sleep or keep working. We stuffed all the character designing process in that camp.
Adachi: We also decided what to do with the anime key visual too. As starters, I drew an image that presented the tragedy and suspense that’s stuffed in the Aincrad arc. It was pulled back more than it is now so you saw everyone’s bodies inserted. But I was told “We want you to draw the characters bigger,” and “We don’t want something sad; we want something with the feeling of ‘We’re going to battle.’” I grumbled “Don’t we have differences in what we imagine the content of SAO being?” (laughs)
Kawakami: We all viewed it differently. (laughs)
Adachi: Eventually, Kawakami-kun proposed an idea “wouldn’t it be nice if we have them coming together feeling like they’re watching his back?”. Everyone discussed it and decided on that. Despite still being busy on Wagnaria!! I couldn’t help myself from drawing it…..
Kawakami: I was disconnected while we were working on episode 1 too. My previous job kept pulling me along. (laughs)
Adachi: It’s really tough to suddenly switch like that. We’re not copy machines. We have to battle with our mental images to make the drawings look good. Of course, thinking about “what does the committee expect of me here” is also important, though I don’t think that’s a completely separate issue.
Kawakami: Everyone tasked with animation can relate.
– By the way, was this the first job that you two worked together on?
Adachi: Wasn’t the training camp the first time we met? I seem to remember you saying something like “Adachi? What kind of small fry is this underling?” when you saw me. (laughs)
Kawakami: Why would I say that?! (laughs)
Adachi: There was no need for you to have been here at all, even in the meetings we had. (laughs)
Kawakami: No, no, what are you saying?! (laughs) Speaking seriously, I drew based off of the copies I saw of Adachi-san’s corrections. He was the chief AD for episodes 1-2, so I used those as a base for my corrections. Since then, I’ve seen him gain popularity and display his strengths. Working with him on SAO was my big chance. While I’m working on Nanana’s Buried Treasure now, I’m still using what was cultivated in me during SAO.
Superior animation directors supported the work for SAO
– What impressions do you recall from the work environment?
Kawakami: It was difficult, but the workload was easily divided amongst many people working around on this show. If you have a bad workflow, there’s constant wasted effort in situations like someone correcting an animator’s drawing, passing it onto the next station, and then them having to re-do everything due to fundamental problems. But for SAO, the Animation Directors, Action ADs, and Chief ADs all performed very well. Since our main animator (Atsushi) Saito-san was given an immense amount of cuts and there were a lot of solid ADs around, the production within the company went smoothly.
– Are there any impressions that you recall where you said “the key animation for this scene is really good”?
Kawakami: (Naoto) Nakamura-san was in charge of the gutsy episodes.
Adachi: He also handled episode 10. I wanted to handle the scene where Kirito and Asuna kiss. (laughs) Also (Masaru) Yonezawa-kun, who handled episode 22, is fast and talented.
Kawakami: He also drew tons of key animation too, nearly 100 cuts.
Adachi: There was an episode of Big Windup where he handled all the key animation.
Kawakami: Also the action ADs, (Takahiro) Shikama-kun and (Ryuuta) Yanagi-kun also gave us good work.
– Each of the action ADs have their own field of work, don’t they?
Adachi: I thought about it a lot, but I think Yanagi-kun suited the effects of magic and light in the ALO arc. He presented immensely elaborate details in the scene in episode 23 where Kirito plunges his sword through.
Kawakami: The pressure that Shikama-kun put on us chief ADs on whether or not to correct drawings was pretty bad. (laughs)
Adachi: They were good. I felt that if we put a strange correction in a scene, it would kill the energy it already had. That’s why I thought that if a sequence deviated from the designs, it would be fine if the face was altered just a little bit. The expressions drawn on the scenes handed to us were so good that I wondered “isn’t this way better?”. I think the moment in episode 2 where Illfang is killed and the battle with Eugene in episode 20 show Shikama-kun’s real abilities. So cool. So amazing.
Kawakami: His explosions were amazing too.
Adachi: Just like a flower. He also handled the scene in episode 22 where Kirito gets skewered, but he made it move so much more dynamically than the storyboards. There’s not many people who could create an atmosphere like he can.
Kawakami: Speaking of talented, that could also apply to episode 8’s AD, (Mai) Yoneyama-san.
– By the way, there’s two chief ADs and two action ADs. Did you foresee how many people you would need?
Adachi: This is a production with action at its core. If we were to do 2 consecutive cour with just one AD, they would get frazzled out, so we switched to 2 ADs for each. We could’ve done this with just one, but we’ll blame the decision on wanting to be healthy and live longer. (laughs)
– As chief ADs, what were some points where you went beyond mere corrections into focusing on bringing out the expressions of the characters?
Kawakami: Kirito’s designs for the ALO arc were completely different. He grew up a bit and became somewhat more mature.
Adachi: Asuna also changed. The Titania Asuna I drew was very good in my opinion. She is pretty popular it seems like, but I don’t know if I can personally say that’s the best I drew of her. (laughs) That doesn’t mean that there weren’t big characteristics in her design though.
– So who is the cutest character in your opinions?
Adachi: If you pressure me to say someone, it’s Suguha.
Kawakami: Same for me.
– Why is she the cutest?
Adachi: Her images are cute, so therefore. (laughs)
Kawakami: She’s somewhat the cutest. It may be simply because I like the short-cut hairstyle on girls.
Adachi: Maybe because she has this cool atmosphere around her. I really like the clothes she wears, but maybe it’s because I don’t have a little sister. (laughs) In the end, I think a character’s appeal is about how kind they are as a person. In SAO, Suguha is the kindest character. She falls for her older brother and realizes that’s a bad idea, so she goes into the game world and finds this person who will make her forget about her older brother, and then he turns out to actually be her older brother. It’s easy to understand how her emotions change. At that point, you realize how superhuman Kirito and Asuna are and how difficult it is for an ordinary person to chase after them.
– Kirito and Asuna appear to be popular among middle and high school students.
Adachi: Because they’re strong. It’s easy to picture them saying “Kirito’s so cool!”
While aware of each other’s episodes, they enjoyed them like a viewer
– Looking back during the production, are there any scenes that still leave an impression on you?
Adachi: I personally can’t look at an episode I handled objectively. (laughs) While it may be “the key animation is really good here,” I’m still thinking “couldn’t we have gone even further?”
Kawakami: I’m comparatively calmer.
Adachi: You’re the kind of person who thinks “Ah, we could do this next time.”
Kawakami: If I didn’t think about that, then wouldn’t this job get boring?
Adachi: On the other hand, I’d say that you handled about half of SAO. I was plainly aware of the episodes that you were in charge of. (laughs)
Kawakami: I was intrigued by the episodes that were in your hands. (laughs)
– What about each other’s episodes did you notice?
Kawakami: Since I couldn’t see the episodes I didn’t handle until they were finished, there wasn’t any difference in me seeing them the first time and the audience seeing them.
Adachi: It was kinda fun in that manner.
Kawakami: Simply, I was mainly interested in the drawings of his episodes. Things like “this Asuna is so cute.”
– You two also drew a lot of promotional illustrations too.
Adachi: I love promotional illustrations.
Kawakami: Before SAO aired, Adachi-san began drawing on a tablet. Because of that, I kept asking him “how do you do this?” when I would go to his desk. (laughs)
Adachi: I said “Eventually, everyone is going to move digitally, so if I have to go sooner or later, I think sooner would be the better choice.” (laughs)
Kawakami: Due to his influence, I also drew the promotional illustrations and designs on a tablet. I was recommended a newer model that had just gone on sale.
Adachi: That version was a new version of the model that I had just bought 3 months earlier, so I was annoyed. I wanted to divert my attention away from it. (laughs) I was a perfect shill for the company that manufactured it. (laughs)
Kawakami: But it was fun trying to draw promotional illustrations with it and learning via trial and error.
Adachi: It is fun. I’ve been working in this industry for over 10 years now, so drawing with pencil on paper doesn’t feel fresh anymore. (laughs) When you switch to a digital environment, you have to learn new ways to draw, so it’s a bit more entertaining that way. There are things that you can’t do, but there are new things you discover as well. It’s fun to add to your list of things you can do and spontaneously draw something. I already don’t want to return to drawing with pencils. Of course, if we were still working on film, I’d draw with a pencil. It’s amazingly inconvenient not to have an undo button. Erasers are annoying. (laughs)
– What is your favorite promotional illustration?
Adachi: I think Kawakami-kun’s first promotional illustration was too cool. I remember saying “Would it be alright if I quit since he can draw better than I can? (laughs)” It was an image of Kirito in the front, Kayaba behind him, and some other characters there too. I really love it.
Kawakami: But when I look at it now myself… (laughs)
Adachi: Well, that’s what anyone who draws thinks when they look back at their old work. (laughs) But when I look at your illustration now, I still think it’s cool.
What is the charm of SAO, which keeps leading to hits?
– SAO has not only become a hit with its novels; it’s also become a hit anime series and has popular games. What do you think its charm is?
Adachi: By the way, Kawakami also drew the illustration on the cover for the Hollow Fragment PS Vita game. It was really cool.
Kawakami: Thank you very much. I appreciate that more than the game being popular. There have been many games like SAO sold to consumers before, so it has to be the charm of the characters. We start with Kirito and Asuna at the beginning, but gradually new characters appear with their own appeal as well.
Adachi: I’m part of the generation that loved Record of Lodoss War, and had experienced fantasy novels prospering. I was somewhat sick of it by then. So when I saw the cover for SAO, I thought “Really? A fantasy novel…” but it was the story of an online game. When I realized that, I thought this could be good.
– So it wasn’t that you expected it to be in the fantasy genre?
Adachi: We think stories in a completely fictional world are a bit hard-to-believe. If you say directly “there exists a fantasy world like this,” you’re also thinking “well, not really.” However, if you say “there is one called ‘Aincrad’ within a videogame called ‘Sword Art Online’”, then that’s something that could really happen if a lot of us played an online game like SAO. Other people are feeling that way as well. You could say that fantasy games are in a resurgence now, but I think they’re a bit different from fantasy games of the past.
Kawakami: If it’s within a game, you have a chance for anyone to relate more, so it’s easy for readers to get hooked into SAO.
Adachi: Bringing the reader into this land was big.
Kawakami: Presenting those game elements in the anime like menus was pretty difficult.
Adachi: SAO’s user interface was the result of trial-and-error. Eventually, we gathered the game consoles our friends had, and imagined what the future of gaming would be 10-20 years. We extracted many things from that discussion like how the menu would be converted into icons so that you wouldn’t need to think about translating it into languages, so for SAO the menu’s first layer is all visual. Since our concept of SAO was not to visualize it into a simple fantasy world from the very start of production, we weren’t picky about having the art boards be in medieval Europe either. Our main point was to make a game world that you could see in the near future. I’m glad that we combined the imagination of game designers and specialists in the visuals we created.
Interview originally published in 『ソードアート・オンライン』ノ全テ, which you can still purchase on Amazon JP and similar stores.
Support us on Patreon for more analysis, translations, staff insight and industry news, and so that we can keep affording the increasing costs of this adventure. Thanks to everyone who’s allowed us to keep on expanding the site’s scope!Setting the record straight
Vegetables have plenty of protein, and they're complete proteins as well
by Michael Bluejay Last update: July 2017
Protein content of various foods 6.7% Fruit 11% Nuts & Seeds 13% Grains 22% Vegetables 28% Beans 2.5% 11% Need (Low end) Need (High end) Protein given as a percentage of calories. Food figures are averages for several foods in each category4.1 and were taken from the bible of nutrient data, the USDA Food and Nutrient Database. Human need is from peer-reviewed research2, US govt. recommendations3, and WHO4 Chart from MichaelBluejay.com, ©2009-12
Common vegetables have much more protein than you need, and contrary to popular myth, they're complete proteins as well.
We need only 2.5 to 11% of our calories as protein, according to peer-reviewed research and the official recommendations.2,3,4 That amount is easily supplied by common vegetables.4.1 Vegetables average around 22% protein by calorie, beans 28%, and grains 13%.4.1 Have a look at the chart at right.
The U.S. government's recommendation is 5-11%, based on various factors.3 The World Health Organization recommends a similar amount.4 And these recommendations are padded with generous safety margins, to cover people who need more protein than average. WHO makes it clear that around 97% of people need less than their recommendations.4
In any event, whether you think our needs are closer to 2.5% or 11%, you can see from the chart that it's nearly impossible to fail to get enough protein, provided that you make sure to eat food. Every single whole plant food has more than 2.5% protein, and every group averages at least 11% except for fruit. Protein is one of the easiest nutrients to get.
The figures for food are from the bible of nutrition data, the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. (I averaged the numbers for several foods in each category.4.1 To find the percentage of protein for a sample, multiply the protein grams by 4 and divide by the number of calories.4.2)
So plant foods easily supply our protein needs. The truth is that if you're eating food, you're eating proteinand almost certainly more than enough.
It's meaningless to talk about a "source of protein", since all foods have plentiful protein. In other words, every whole food is a "source of protein". You don't have to eat certain, special foods to get protein. You just have to eat any whole food. That's it.
Any well-educated health professional will tell you the same thing. Take Marion Nestle, Ph.D, chair of the Department of Nutrition at New York University:
"We never talk about protein anymore, because it's absolutely not an issue, even among children. If anything, we talk about the dangers of high-protein diets. Getting enough is simply a matter of getting enough calories." 4.3
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DataAnnotations provides an easy way to declaratively add validation rules to Model and ViewModel classes within an application, and have automatic binding and UI helper validation support within ASP.NET MVC.
To see this feature in action, we can create a new “Customer” ViewModel class like below that has five properties on it (implemented using the C# automatic property feature).
We can then decorate the properties with appropriate validation rules using the DataAnnotation attributes implemented within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. The code below uses 4 different built-in validation rules – [Required], [StringLength], [Range], and [RegularExpression]. The namespace also includes a base class (ValidationAttribute) that you can subclass to create your own custom validation attributes.
We can then create a CustomersController class that has two Create action methods on it. The first Create action method handles HTTP GET requests to the “/Customers/Create” URL, and renders a view template based on an empty Customer object. The second Create action method handles HTTP POST requests to the same URL (and takes a Customer object as a method parameter). It checks if there are any model binding errors to the input submitted, and if there are errors it redisplays the view template using the already entered data. If there are no errors it displays a success view to the user:
Finally, we can right-click within either of the Create action methods above, choose the “Add View” context menu command, and automatically “scaffold” a “create” view template that is based on the Customer object. When we do this the generated scaffolded view template will contain the below HTML <form> for our Customer:
And now when we request the “/Customers/Create” URL in our browser we’ll get an initial empty form like below:
If we enter invalid input and perform a post to the server, the ASP.NET MVC 2 model binder will detect that there are DataAnnotations attributes on our Customer class, and automatically validate the posted form input using them. If there are errors our controller action method redisplays the form – which will cause the appropriate validation error messages to be rendered to the user like below. Note how the validation property error message strings we specified using the DataAnnotation attributes are displayed to the user by the Html.Validation helper methods. No extra code is required to enable this.
The above form will redisplay with error messages each time the user enters invalid input and attempts to perform a form post.
In a future ASP.NET MVC 2 preview we are planning to ship the jQuery Validation plugin as part of the default project template, and add support for the automatic client-side JavaScript enforcement of DataAnnotation validation rules as well. This will enable developers to easily add validation rules in one place on either a Model or ViewModel object, and have them be enforced both client and server-side everywhere it is used within the application.
If you do not wish to annotate your model or viewmodel classes directly, you can alternatively create a “buddy class” that accompanies your model class and encapsulates the DataAnnotaton rules separately. This capability is also useful for scenarios where VS is code-generating/updating the properties on a class directly and you cannot easily add attributes to the generated code (for example: classes generated by the LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities designers).
In addition to providing built-in support for DataAnnotations, the DefaultModelBinder class in ASP.NET MVC V2 now has new virtual methods that can be overridden to easily integrate other validation frameworks as well (for example: Castle Validator, EntLib Validation, etc). The validation UI helper methods in ASP.NET MVC are designed to support any type of validation framework (they have no direct knowledge of DataAnnotations).
Strongly Typed UI Helpers
ASP.NET MVC V2 includes new HTML UI helpers that enable you to use strong-typed lambda expressions when referencing the view template’s model object. This enables better compile-time checking of views (so that bugs can be found at build-time as opposed to runtime), and also enables better code intellisense support within view templates.
You can see an example of the better intellisense in action below – notice how I am getting a full listing of the customer model object’s properties when using the new Html.EditorFor() helper method:
Preview 1 has built-in support for new Html.EditorFor(), Html.LabelFor(), and Html.DisplayFor() helpers. An updated MVC futures assembly that we are shipping this week adds additional Html.TextBoxFor(), Html.TextAreaFor(), Html.DropDownListFor(), Html.HiddenFor(), and Html.ValidationMessageFor() helper methods as well (overtime these will move into the core ASP.NET MVC 2 assembly too).
Below you can see an updated version of the “create” view template for our customer creation scenario. Notice how instead of using string expressions to reference the customer object we are instead using strongly-typed lambda expressions with the UI helpers. We can get full intellisense and compile-time checking with all of them:
The Html.LabelFor() helper method above generates <label for="Name">Name:</label> HTML markup.
The Html.EditorFor() helper method can be used for any datatype value. By default it is smart and will output an appropriate HTML <input/> element based on the type to be edited. For example, it will generate <input type=”text”/> elements for the first four properties above (which are strings and integers). It will generate a <input type=”checkbox”/> element for the final “IsActive” property – which is of type boolean.
In addition to supporting simple data-types, the Html.EditorFor() helper method also allows you to pass more complex objects with multiple properties to it. By default it will loop over the public properties of the object and generate a <label>, <input/> element, and any appropriate validation message for each property it finds. For example, we could re-write the above view to have just a single Html.EditorFor() call for the Customer object to conceptually output the same markup as above:
The strongly typed helpers allow you to optionally decorate the properties of the Customer ViewModel class with [DisplayName] attributes to control the label string that is output for each property used (for example: instead of having a label text of “IsActive” we could apply a [DisplayName(“Is Active Customer:”)] attribute).
You can also add [ScaffoldColumn(false)] attributes to indicate that a particular property shouldn’t be rendered at all in scenarios like above where complex objects are passed to Html.EditorFor().
UI Helper Templating Support
The Html.EditorFor() and Html.DisplayFor() helper methods have built-in support for rendering both standard data-types as well as complex objects with multiple properties. As noted above, they also support basic customization of rendering by applying attributes like [DisplayName] and [ScaffoldColumn] to the ViewModel.
Often developers want to be able to customize the output from UI helpers even further, though, and have total control over what is generated. The Html.EditorFor() and Html.DisplayFor() helper methods support this via a templating mechanism that allows you to define external templates that can override and completely control the output rendered. Better yet, you can customize the content rendered on a per-datatype/class basis.
With Preview 1 you can now optionally add an “EditorTemplates” and/or “DisplayTemplates” folder underneath either a \Views\[controllername] directory (if you want to customize the rendering for views used by a specific controller) or underneath the \Views\Shared folder (if you want to customize the rendering for all views and controllers in an application).
You can then add partial template files to these folders to customize the output rendering performed on an individual datatype and/or class basis. For example, below I have added an EditorTemplates folder underneath the \Views\Shared folder – and added three custom template files to it:
The “Customer.ascx” template above indicates that I want to customize the output anytime Html.EditorFor() is passed a Customer object (for example: I could customize the exact ordering/layout of the Customer properties). The “DateTime.ascx” template above indicates that I want to customize the output anytime Html.EditorFor() is passed a DateTime property (for example: I might want to use a JavaScript datepicker instead of a plain textbox). I could optionally add an “Object.ascx” template to the folder if I wanted to override the default rendering of all objects.
In addition to customizing rendering on a per-type basis, you can also add “named templates” to the folder. A common scenario might be a “CountryDropDown” template that handles a string datatype – but instead of providing a standard textbox instead renders a <select> dropdownlist of country values that a user can pick from. Below is what this editor template might look like:
We can explicitly indicate that we want to use the above template by passing its name as an argument when we invoke the Html.EditorFor() helper method. For example, below in addition to specifying a lambda expression for our Country property, we are also specifying the name of the editor template to use when rendering it:
Alternatively, you can specify “UIHint” attributes on your ViewModel properties and types. This allows you to indicate the default editor or display template to use in a single place, and have it be used in all views across your application (without having to explicitly pass it as an argument to Html.EditorFor).
Below is an example of how to indicate using a UIHint attribute that the Customer.Country property (which is of type string) should by default use the CountryDropDown template when being rendered:
Once we set the above attribute on our ViewModel we no longer need to specify a template name explicitly when we use that property with Html.EditorFor(). And now when we hit refresh on our /Customers/Create URL our Country property will be rendered as a dropdown instead of a standard textbox:
Other Cool Features
ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 includes a number of other small, but really nice, feature additions. A few of my favorites include:
New [HttpPost] Attribute
It is pretty common with ASP.NET MVC to split up the handling of a URL across two action methods – one that handles GET requests and one that handles POST requests.
With ASP.NET MVC 1 you used an [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] attribute to indicate the “Post” version of an action method:
This still works with ASP.NET MVC 2. Alternatively, though, you can also now take advantage of a terser [HttpPost] attribute that does the same thing:
Default Parameter Values
Handling optional parameters is a pretty common web scenario. With ASP.NET MVC 1 you could handle optional parameters either by registering a custom routing rule and specifying a default value with it, or by marking an action method parameter as nullable and then adding code within your action method to handle whether it was null (and if so provide a default value).
ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 now supports decorating action method parameters with the DefaultValueAttribute from the System.ComponentModel namespace. This allows you to specify a parameter value that ASP.NET MVC should pass in if it is not present as part of the request. For example, below is an example of how we could handle both the /Products/Browse/Beverages and /Products/Browse/Beverages?page=2 URLs – and have the “page” parameter value be “1” if it isn’t provided as part of the querystring:
VB today allows you to specify default parameter values directly within the VB language (avoiding the need to explicitly specify the DefaultValue attribute like above). C# in VS2010 will also support default values with optional parameters – which will enable you to rewrite the above code simply as:
This should make handling default/optional scenarios really easy and clean.
Binding Binary Data
ASP.NET MVC Preview 1 adds support for binding base64-encoded string values to properties of type byte[] and System.Data.Linq.Binary. There are now two overloaded versions of Html.Hidden() that can take these data-types. These can be useful for scenarios where you want to enable concurrency control within your application and want to roundtrip timestamp values of database rows within your forms.
Summary
Click here to download a.zip file that contains a ASP.NET MVC 2 project that implements the sample code I demonstrated in the above walkthrough.
Today’s build of ASP.NET MVC 2 is just a first preview. More features will be coming in future previews, and the team expects to get a lot of feedback on ways to improve and enhance the release.
The goal with doing these regular previews is to help make sure that this feedback process is open and that anyone who wants to participate can easily get involved. Please post any feedback, suggestions or problems you have to the ASP.NET MVC Forum on www.asp.net. You can also learn more about the release from Phil Haack’s MVC2 post, and from the Channel9 video Phil did with Scott Hanselman about the Preview 1 release.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. I have been using Twitter more recently to-do quick posts and share links. You can follow me on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name)The video will start in 8 Cancel
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Liverpool are closing in on the £25million capture of Burnley defender Michael Keane.
Anfield boss Jurgen Koop has made England international Keane his top defensive signing this summer and is confident of closing the deal.
Personal terms have been agreed in principle between Liverpool and Keane, with Burnley aware they are fighting a losing battle to keep their star defender this summer.
Keane is said to be waiting to see whether Liverpool, currently third, can secure Champions League qualification for next season before committing himself to the deal on offer, understood to be four years.
(Image: PA Wire)
(Image: REUTERS)
Manchester United have been linked with a bid to bring Keane back to Old Trafford, but Jose Mourinho has not yet indicated a willingness to move for the 24-year-old.
Everton and Tottenham have also expressed interest in signing Keane, but Liverpool have moved ahead of their rivals and are in pole position to land the in-demand centre-back.
Transfers
Keane, who made his England debut in March, was short-listed for the PFA Young Player of the Year award this season and has emerged as one of the most coveted young central defenders in the Premier League.
After coming through the youth ranks at United, Keane joined Burnley in January 2015, signing a three-and-half year deal, having been offloaded by former Reds boss Louis van Gaal.From Nature magazine
Fair-skinned, red-haired folks know — sometimes through painful experience — that they are more susceptible to the damaging effects of the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays, including sunburn, skin ageing and a higher risk of skin cancers. But a study published today in Nature suggests that in mice, the pigment responsible for this colouring has a role in the development of melanoma.
“There is something about the redhead genetic background that is behaving in a carcinogenic fashion, independent of UV,” says David Fisher, a cancer biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who led the study. “It means that shielding from UV would not be enough.”
Compared to people with darker skin, those with fair, freckly skin and red hair produce a different form of the pigment melanin. This red–yellow form, called pheomelanin, is less effective at protecting the skin from UV damage than the darker form, eumelanin. The difference is caused by a mutation in the gene MC1R.
But for a number of years there have been hints that UV exposure alone might not account entirely for the risk of melanoma in redheads. Fisher and his team wanted to investigate the molecular backdrop for this increased risk.
The researchers looked at how melanomas develop in mouse models of olive-skinned, ginger and albino colouring. The last group had the same genetic background as the dark-skinned mice but lacked the enzyme needed to synthesize melanin. The researchers also tweaked each group’s genes to be more susceptible to developing benign moles, which Fisher says is a probable first step in the development of melanoma.
No sunlight needed
The researchers planned to expose the mice to UV light and monitor differences in melanoma development. But before they got to that part of the experiment, about half the ginger mice had developed melanomas. Fisher says that he and his team were shocked. “The first thing we needed to do was bring a UV meter into the animal room to be sure there wasn’t some inadvertent UV being radiated out of the light bulbs or something,” he says. “And it turned out there was not.”
The result suggested that the pigment itself was a cause of melanoma. The researchers suggest that the increased melanoma risk could have something to do with the pigment-production process, or a by-product of it, in melanin-containing cells called melanocytes.
Eugene Healy, a clinical dermatologist at the University of Southampton, UK, says that although the mechanism is interesting, it is probably a less common trigger of melanoma than UV radiation. Indeed, in the UK, 8 out of 10 cases of melanoma are due to UV exposure. In humans, most melanomas develop on skin that sees the sun. “You almost never see melanoma, for example, on the buttocks,” says Healy.
To complicate the picture, one of Healy’s own studies, published in 2010, suggested that pheomelanin was protective against the effects of UV radiation in another type of skin cell, the keratinocyte.
The sun-safety message does not change because of the latest results. “UV is very tightly and convincingly linked to the formation of most non-melanoma types of skin cancer,” Fisher says. “One of the most important messages from this is to avoid an assumption that this takes UV off the hook.” It is possible that UV exposure worsens the carcinogenic mechanism of the red pigment, he adds.
Healy is keen to avoid alarming people with fair complexions. “Whatever risk was there, was always there. But we don’t see lots of spontaneous melanomas in redheads. We shouldn’t be sending out a worrying message for them.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on November 2, 2012.Wow, look wh0 turns 60 on Sunday. Yup, April 15 marks the 60th anniversary of the first flight of the nation's ubiquitous B-52 Stratofortress bomber.
On April 15, 1952 legendary Boeing test pilot Alvin "Tex" Johnson brought the XB-52 (shown above) prototype aloft for the first time, six years after the company was awarded the contract to develop the plane by the ARMY Air Force and two years before it entered service with the newly independent Air Force. Think about this, 60 years before the B-52's first flight, airplanes didn't exist. Remember, the Air Force's newest B-52 just turned 50.
(The Air Force fact sheet on the aircraft incorrectly lists its initial operational capability date as 1952. The B-52 entered limited service in 1954.)
Read up on the history of the B-52's development. It took nearly ten years of fits, starts and redesigns to get the revolutionary and long-lasting jet bomber into service. It may give you some perspective whenever you get frustrated with how long it's taking to field the current crop of next-generation weapons like the new long-range bomber.
Here's what Air Force Global Strike Command, the 21st Century successor to the legendary Strategic Air Command, has to say about the incredible milestone that its BUFFs have reached.On Thursday night’s “Media Mash” with Sean Hannity on Fox News, MRC president and "Collusion" author Brent Bozell unloaded on MSNBC star Chris Matthews for repeatedly citing conservative senators who are digging in against Obamacare as “terrorists.” Sean Hannity asked if MSNBC is so desperate for ratings that they’ll say anything now.
Brent said Chris Matthews isn’t a liberal any more. He’s a radical with no decency (video and transcript below):
BOZELL: I said today to Cruz, Lee, and Rubio, this morning as a matter of fact, I told them that when you are attacked this viciously and this personally, it means you're doing something right. Because, and this is not liberalism anymore, Sean. This is radicalism. I'm not going to call them liberals any more. Because there's a certain decency in liberalism that doesn't exist with these radicals.
And to hear Chris Matthews six times call United States Senators “haters”! And this is the man who then turns around and says that he wished he could put a CO 2 pellet in Rush Limbaugh's head and watch it explode! He comes from a network where people have wished for the death of Dick Cheney! And he's going to call conservatives haters?
After playing a long clip of Matthews uncorking the usual rainbows-and-unicorns oozing over how wonderful Obama is, Hannity cracked to Mr. Hardball, “Why don't you just go to the White House and kiss him on the lips, and just hug the man, you're so in love with him? It's gross.”
Sean and Brent began with video from the Stephanie Miller show (soon to expire as Current TV switches to Al-Jazeera America) where CNN-contributor "comedian" Dean Obeidallah smeared Fox News: "I'm not kidding, if Fox News were around years ago when anti-Semitism was part of the mainstream, I have no doubt they would be anti-Semitic to get viewers. I have no doubt they would be pro-segregation to get viewers in the times of the civil rights movement....They just feed to the worst element of our society and thankfully their viewers are dying off."
Bozell said of Obeidallah: "Of course he knows it isn't the truth. They not only distort, they not only employ character assassination. They lie with complete abandon."Image caption Charlton also admitted pretending to have terminal cancer
A woman who tried to swindle more than £150,000 out of her grandmother and fiance has been ordered to repay £1.
Emma Charlton, 25, used their chequebooks to try to buy goods, but not all the cheques were cashed and she only got away with £26,704.
Charlton, of Walkerville, Newcastle, admitted 23 fraud and theft charges in March and was jailed for three years.
But at a proceeds of crime hearing in Newcastle she was only ordered to repay £1 because she is "penniless".
The hearing heard how she used her grandmother's stolen chequebook to pay for more than £125,000 worth of holidays, food and jewellery.
She also posed as the editor of Vogue magazine to give the impression she was wealthy and to con her fiance Neil Lupton out of almost £30,000.
'No assets'
Charlton, of Meadowfield Gardens, was caught after she used stolen cheques to pay for a charity fashion show at the Hilton Hotel in Gateshead, which never took place.
She was brought from her cell to attend the hearing on Thursday.
Mitigating, Michael Hodson said Charlton was not motivated by self interest but had been trying to create a fantasy world to feel better about herself.
Judge Brian Forster said: "In view of the fact that the defendant has no available assets I make a nominal finding in the sum of £1."
At a hearing earlier this year, Charlton, formerly known as Emma Golightly, also pleaded guilty to falsely claiming she had terminal cancer in a bid to obtain the services of a carer.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Watch Mark Urban's Newsnight film in full
Ukraine is in political crisis again.
Since its "Orange Revolution" nine years ago, pro-Western and pro-Russian groups have contended for political power. The current president, Viktor Yanukovych, stands accused by protesters of turning his back on Europe, after refusing to sign a partnership agreement with the EU.
They also accuse him of conducting a vendetta against former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned more than two years ago for abuse of power.
Outside General Clinic No 5, in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the incongruity of it all was striking.
The hospital, in which opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko is held, is something out of Soviet times - an ugly, concrete monstrosity where security men in plain clothes patrol the grounds, keeping prying eyes away from a woman regarded by millions of supporters as a political prisoner.
Yanukovych spent millions on these audit companies and they all stated they couldn't find one penny of her corruption or abuse of power Eugenia Tymoshenko
Sitting in the hospital car park was a black Range Rover surrounded by bodyguards, and inside it we interviewed Mrs Tymoshenko's daughter Eugenia.
She was clad in designer black, she speaks English fluently after schooling and university education in the UK, and looks more like Natalie Portman about to step out on to a Hollywood red carpet than the average person's idea of a political dissident.
That is the Tymoshenko contradiction. Yulia Tymoshenko's imprisonment by the government of Mr Yanukovych causes European human rights groups to denounce him for persecuting a political opponent and turns her into an opposition idol.
Yet others claim the abuse of office conviction is just the tip of the iceberg and they allege that she lined her pockets while betraying the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
When I asked her whether her mother was an honest woman, Eugenia argued: "Yanukovych spent millions on these audit companies and they all stated they couldn't find one penny of her corruption or abuse of power."
Image copyright AP Image caption Eugenia Tymoshenko has kept her mother's plight in the spotlight
Back in the mid-1990s, when former state industries were being privatised in post-Soviet republics and there were fortunes to be made, Yulia Tymoshenko went into the gas business. The family says that's the origin of her wealth.
However Sergei Leshchenko, the deputy editor of Ukrainian Pravda, alleges that she entered parliament in 1996 to gain immunity from prosecution after allegations of financial irregularities.
As to the scale of the possible problems, he points to claims that Yulia Tymoshenko sent $100m (£60m) to former Ukrainian prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko, which emerged in a US court that convicted him of corruption charges in 2006.
When I asked her about the Lazarenko case, Eugenia Tymoshenko insisted that the American court had not indicted her mother or found her guilty of any offence.
"It's just something that pro-Yanukovych people use against her," she said, although Mr Leshchenko, who has written a book about the Lazarenko affair, is certainly no friend of the president.
Yulia Tymoshenko was convicted in a Ukrainian court, but in a process widely condemned by opposition groups as politically motivated.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Police and protesters have clashed in snowy central Kiev
What's striking though is that her supporters do not care about the mud-slinging and accusations. Eugenia's expensive clothes, bodyguards, and upmarket vehicles don't seem to bother them either. These are the everyday features of those who wield power and money in a post-Soviet republic.
When I asked Mr Leshchenko, who's extensively investigated official corruption in Ukraine, whether anyone has come through the country's recent upheavals with clean hands, he suggested it was possible since "not everyone wanted to be a billionaire".
Could Yulia Tymoshenko still become president one day? Mr Leshchenko thinks it's feasible given her "charisma", although he thinks it likely that a younger, less compromised figure will eventually come through. Eugenia said "I hope so" when I asked the same question.
The interview with her concluded, Eugenia and her bodyguards sped off into the swirling snow and I was left to contemplate the Tymoshenko phenomenon.
It's a measure of how broken and cynical politics in Ukraine has become that corruption allegations and a criminal conviction do not apparently put paid to someone's political career.
Many Ukrainians suggested to me that President Yanukovych's misdemeanours in office have been far worse than Yulia Tymoshenko's and indeed it is his behaviour, in imprisoning the former prime minister, that has revived her political fortunes.
You can watch Mark's report for Newsnight on the BBC iPlayer or via the Newsnight website.Results In a linear mixed model adjusted for age, sex, education, participation in cognitive activities, physical activities, smoking, and seafood and alcohol consumption, consumption of green leafy vegetables was associated with slower cognitive decline; the decline rate for those in the highest quintile of intake (median 1.3 servings/d) was slower by β = 0.05 standardized units (p = 0.0001) or the equivalent of being 11 years younger in age. Higher intakes of each of the nutrients and bioactives except β-carotene were individually associated with slower cognitive decline. In the adjusted models, the rates for the highest vs the lowest quintiles of intake were β = 0.02, p = 0.002 for phylloquinone; β = 0.04, p = 0.002 for lutein; β = 0.05, p < 0.001 for folate; β = 0.03, p = 0.02 for α-tocopherol; β = 0.04, p = 0.002 for nitrate; β = 0.04, p = 0.003 for kaempferol; and β = 0.02, p = 0.08 for β-carotene.Debatte Kaczynski-Tod
Einig im Schmerz
Gab Präsident Kaczynski den Befehl zur Landung seines Flugzeugs? Die Frage nach seinem Anteil am Unglück empfinden viele Polen als Angriff.
Man könnte glatt zur Verschwörungstheoretikerin werden. Nicht etwa, weil man glauben müsste, dass die Russen beim Absturz der polnischen Tupolew 154 ihre Hände im Spiel gehabt haben könnten. Auch nicht, weil sich hinter der Auslöschung polnischer Amts- und Würdenträger, die in unglaublicher Zahl an Bord waren, nur ein gezielter deutsch-russischer Anschlag vermuten ließe. Nein, um solche pathologischen Erklärungen für das Unglück geht es nicht.
Aber man könnte fast einer rationalen Verschwörungstheorie anhängen, so laut ist das Schweigen, wenn es um die unmittelbare Unglücksursache geht. Wieso wird über die Auswertung der Flugschreiber noch immer so wenig bekannt? Immerhin konnten diese schon am Samstag in brauchbarem Zustand geborgen werden. Wieso gab es in Polen tagelang keine offiziellen Stellungnahmen dazu, keine öffentliche Debatte in den Medien?
Ein zentrales Moment des Unglücks wird damit auf die Ebene der Gerüchte verwiesen. Wir haben es also mit einem Fall zu tun, wo das wirklich Obsessive, das Irrationale nicht in den Gerüchten, sondern in der Zurückweisung der Gerüchte liegt.
Denn bereits die Diskussion um die Frage nach Ursache und Schuld erleben viele Polen als Angriff. Doch wenn der Pilot trotz eindringlicher Warnung der Bodenstation vor massiv eingeschränkter Sicht vier Mal zu landen versucht, dann steht die Frage im Raum, was ihn zu dieser Wahnsinnstat verleitet haben mag. Die Vermutung liegt nahe, dass es dabei einen Zusammenhang mit seinem Vorgesetzten und dem Präsidenten gab, ob es sich nun um deren bloße Anwesenheit oder expliziten Druck handelte.
Woher rührt die massive Abwehr dieser bloßen Vermutung? Warum darf Lech Kaczynski keine Mitschuld an seinem schrecklichen Unfalltod (und an dem der anderen Passagiere) tragen.
Eine Antwort darauf liefert der sofort einsetzende Kult um den zu Lebzeiten durchaus umstrittenen Präsidenten. Alle huldigen heute geschlossen dem einstigen Polarisierer. Selbst Adam Michnik entschuldigt sich in der Gazeta Wyborcza für seine früheren "Fehleinschätzungen" des Präsidenten, den er nun als großen Patrioten würdigt. Das lässt sich nicht allein mit der Pietätsforderung, über Tote nur Gutes zu sagen, erklären. Lech Kaczynski repräsentiert heute das zentrale Moment des polnischen Selbstverständnisses: Er ist ein tragischer Held. Tragisch ist sein verfrühtes Ende, klar. Aber wieso ist er ein Held?
Nun, dies war keine Privatreise. Kaczynski sowie alle anderen Funktionsträger an Bord fuhren als Amtsträger zum Opfergedenken nach Katyn. Mittlerweile weiß wohl jeder, was es mit diesem Ort auf sich hat. Kaczynski und die Vertreter des offiziellen Polens fuhren quasi als "Rächer" der tausenden ermordeten polnischen Offiziere nach Russland, und Kaczynski hatte bekanntlich eine russenkritische Rede im Gepäck. Darum ist er für viele Polen ein Held, denn er verstarb im Dienste der Nation, bei der Verteidigung des Vaterlandes. Dies galt seit je als höchste Form des Patriotismus.
Opfermythos und Verklärung
Kaczynski habe sich für Polen geopfert, so lautet das Narrativ. Dies ist die Erzählung, die viele Polen im Innersten ergreift. Deshalb darf er auch keine Mitschuld - etwa durch einen unverantwortlichen Landebefehl - an seinem Ende tragen. Und deshalb auch der Beisetzungsort auf der Burg Wawel, der Königen und Nationalhelden vorbehalten ist. Wobei die nationale Erzählung "Opfer bringen" und "Opfer sein" umstandslos gleichsetzt.
Der tote Lech Kaczynski verkörpert dieses Opfer, diese Katastrophe. Das wird besonders deutlich am - auch für Außenstehende - beklemmenden Bild des Bruders, der am Sarg seines Zwillings kniet. Gerade weil dieser (nahezu) genauso aussieht wie der Verstorbene - der ja erst durch seinen Tod diese allpolnische Dimension erlangt hat -, wird er zu einem gespenstischen Wiedergänger. Man versteht, warum ihm bei den kommenden Präsidentschaftswahlen keine Chancen zugesprochen werden, denn er sieht genauso aus - und lebt! (Wobei die Zwillingsähnlichkeit diesem polnischen "Nepotismus" immer schon eine eigene Note, um nicht zu sagen ein eigenes Gesicht, gegeben hat.)
Eine Nation erst in der Tragödie
Nun ist dieses ganze Amalgam eine Form des Nationalismus, den wir hierzulande nicht (mehr) kennen: ein stark religiös konnotierter Patriotismus, eine immense Bindung an eine mit mystischem Charakter ausgestattete Gemeinschaft. Die polnische Besonderheit liegt nicht nur in dessen ungebrochener Lebendigkeit, sondern auch in der unglaublichen Betonung des Opfertums. Polen als Vaterland, das Ganze des polnischen Volkes als Imagination entsteht gerade durchs Opfer. Das sogenannte Polentum "lebt" durch den heldenhaften Untergang. Es "lebt" in der Katastrophe.
Dem fernen Betrachter erscheint das paradox. Ebenso unverständlich ist ihm der emotionale Ausnahmezustand, in dem sich das ganze Land seit Tagen befindet. Natürlich trauert ein Land, wenn ein erheblicher Teil seiner politischen Elite verunglückt. Natürlich geht das Mitgefühl über politische Differenzen hinweg. Unverständlich wird es nur, wenn die nationale Trauer zu einer tiefen persönlichen Betroffenheit eines ganzen Volkes wird; wo die Anteilnahme der Staatsbürger zum privaten Mitleiden wird. Man sehe sich nur die Gesichter der trauernden Polen an.
Viele Polen sähen dieses Unglück als symbolisches Zeichen, schrieb der polnischstämmige Autor Artur Becker - ein Zeichen, das sich rationalen Erklärungen seiner Ursache eben entzieht. Die Polen erleben diese Katastrophe als eine zutiefst metaphysische Erfahrung. Aber auch nüchternere Stimmen - etwa der Publizist Adam Krzeminski - sprechen von einer nationalen Totenmesse.
Ob es sich dabei wirklich um eine Läuterung handelt, wie Krzeminski im Radio meinte (mit dem bezeichnenden Versprecher, eine "Läuterung über alle politischen Gräber hinweg")? Oder handelt es sich nicht eher um eine Bekräftigung des Kollektivs? Die Katastrophe vereint die Polen im Schmerz. Aber kann daraus eine "geläuterte" Gesellschaft entstehen?Getting started with F# and.NET Core
TLDR: F# and.NET Core are really cool, you should give them a try.
I recently got interested in the.NET world thanks to my colleagues who are doing C# at $WORK. My last experience with Microsoft technologies was during my school years doing ASP Classic and it was not a great one but.NET Core is now a multi-platform, open-source.NET and it has a functional language: F#.
F# was designed by Don Syme. It’s open-source and maintained by the F# Software Foundation and individual contributors with some working at Microsoft.
I’m really fond of functional languages like Haskell or OCaml so I took F# for a test-drive to see what I could benefit from it.
Core vs Mono vs Standard
A bit of terminology first.
.NET Framework is Windows-only and is what you usually think about what.NET is.
Mono is a cross-platform implementation of.NET Framework from Xamarin (which Microsoft bought).
Microsoft chose to rewrite.NET to be truly cross-platform and stripped some APIs that were not considered core. The new product is.NET Core. So.NET Core is a |
by the business. It will (most likely…) still be there long after you’ve left. You need to be able to let it go… (I should totally have linked that to the Frozen song >.>)
Responsibility also means being able to let go while you’re still there. Letting someone else take the reins so you can move on to bigger and better things. So you can improve your current skill set further. So you can try your hand at something new and learn a new skill. Being a responsible admin, letting others help and helping others, makes you a better admin. It doesn’t mean your job is more precarious because you won’t be needed (and if it does, that means your organisation isn’t one you want to work for anyway…). But it doesn’t mean that you’re “less” because someone else knows what you know. There is no joy in hoarding information to make yourself seem better; but there is joy in providing information to others, to bring them up, train them up, help them get better. You are not made worse by someone getting better – that’s now how it works.
Those servers? Those services? Those jobs? You don’t own them. Your business/company/organisation/team does. You’re just responsible for them, for the time being – so do the right thing and be responsible.It's just rare that all these things come together in a real-life event, as they have with the St. Jude Medical pacemaker-hacking debacle. And it's even more awful when someone dies in the background as companies fight over press coverage, hacks and cash -- which is exactly the twist that happened this week.
If you're not familiar with the story, here's the light version.
Last August, short-selling firm Muddy Waters and its business partner, security company MedSec Holdings, released a set of scathing and hotly contested findings. The report said St. Jude Medical's pacemakers and implantable heart devices have critical security flaws.
Rather than the standard disclosure process, in which researchers go to the manufacturer first so they have an opportunity to fix and patch the flaws, both MedSec and Muddy Waters went public. As in, to the press. Where MedSec admitted that its payment for the damning security findings on St. Jude Medical was tied to Muddy's profits.
Muddy Waters founder Carson Block gave investors -- and press -- a report warning "that tens of thousands of Americans are living with ticking time bombs: St. Jude pacemakers and defibrillators that are easily compromised, causing potentially fatal disruptions."
Even though that is still in the realm of Hollywood and CSI: Cyber fantasy, Block went on Bloomberg TV spreading some serious fear. "The nightmare scenario is somebody is able to launch a mass attack and cause these devices that are implanted to malfunction." He added that St. Jude Medical "should stop selling these devices until it has developed a new secure communication protocol."
While there have been documented cases of police investigations supported by pacemaker surveillance, there have been no documented cases of mass pacemaker hacking.
The report hit the news, and shares of St. Jude immediately fell 5 percent. St. Jude Medical called the Muddy Waters report "false and misleading," saying most of the findings applied to older and unpatched versions of its devices.
In a blog post, MedSec CEO Justine Bone gave a parenthetical on why it didn't disclose to the manufacturer first, saying the company believed St Jude Medical "has known about security problems in their products since at least 2013." But MedSec said that because the devices had such bad security, it believed going to the press and Muddy Waters was "the only way to spur St Jude Medical into action."
"For the past 18 months, our team has been quietly evaluating the security of various medical devices," wrote Ms. Bone. She continued: "One company, St Jude Medical, has stood out as lagging far behind. For years this company has continued to put patients at risk by profiting from the sale of devices and a device ecosystem which has little to no built-in security."
Some in infosec said the researchers were endangering patients and behaving unethically by not telling St. Jude Medical about the problems first. Debates raged about responsibility, disclosure and the role of the press. Some wondered if the findings were reproducible, and called for independent audits to objectively determine what was really going on -- some researchers even had conflicting findings.
Ultimately, St. Jude Medical's stock plunged as much as 10 percent in the aftermath. The company launched a lawsuit against MedSec and Muddy Waters, and the three firms skirmished in the press again when MedSec's findings were allegedly reproduced by security firm Bishop Fox. What's more, the second set of researchers claimed they could take over the pacemakers at a distance of around 10 feet.
At the time of the Muddy Waters press drama, the Food and Drug Administration declined to comment on St. Jude's devices.
Now the FDA has something to say, and it looks like MedSec was right. According to a scathing letter from the FDA, St. Jude Medical knew about grave security issues in its implantable medical devices as early as 2014 "but failed to address them with software updates or by replacing those devices."
The government concluded that St. Jude Medical, "time and again, failed to adhere to internal security and product-quality guidelines, a lapse that resulted in at least one patient death."
Despite learning about vulns in its April 2014 security tests from a hired third party, St. Jude Medical "failed to accurately incorporate the findings of that assessment" in subsequent risk evaluations for its devices. The FDA said one of the serious flaws is a "hardcoded universal unlock code" for the company's High Voltage heart implants.
St. Jude Medical parent company Abbott responded with a statement saying that "patient safety comes first" and it "takes these matters seriously, continues to make progress on our corrective actions, will closely review FDA's warning letter, and are committed to fully addressing FDA's concerns."
"It is refreshing to see the disclosure," Bone told press. "St. Jude Medical, for the first time, publicly acknowledge that they knew about [the security risks], but continued to sell these products and have them implanted in patients," she said.
I'll be honest: I didn't want to revisit the Muddy Waters, MedSec and St. Jude story. Going to the press before actually working for a fix isn't really a clever stick, and it's certainly not an effective one when there's no carrot. And then to see that bad behavior rewarded by a too-little-too-late FDA spanking...
It's a good reminder of why infosec's limelight addiction makes me sick. Making hack-scare headlines for profit about a situation in which someone actually died is repulsive.
And I don't know about you, but I scream into the wind every week right here on these pages wishing it wasn't happening. Not like this. I write hoping no one dies in the middle of a story where hackers say they want fixes, but maybe they're in it more for the cash-headlines-fame, and we can no longer determine what it looks like when they really do care.Brad Duguid, Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Growth, announces $100-million grant for new $2.2-billion NOVA polyethylene plant Dec. 8, 2017 (BlackburnNews.com photo)
Sarnia-Lambton Lands $2-Billion NOVA Plant (VIDEO & GALLERY)
After years of preliminary work, NOVA Chemicals has announced it will build its new $2.2-billion polyethylene plant in St. Clair Township.
It’s the first world scale plant construction in Chemical Valley since Petrosar, now NOVA Corunna, in the 1970’s.
The plant will be built on land next to the Calgary-based company’s Corunna facility at Rokeby Line and Hwy. 40 and will be NOVA’s second Advanced SCLAIRTECH technology facility.
“We’re proud of this technology,” said Naushad Jamani, NOVA’s Senior VP of Olefins and Feedstocks. “I might say that the technology was essentially developed right here in Sarnia. We have a plant running in Joffre today that has been sold out for many years. Our consumers are actually demanding more of those products, so this is a great, great, fit for NOVA as well as the marketplace.”
He says preliminary work is already underway with start-up of the plant targeted for late 2021.
“It’s going to be a very busy four years for this area, this community. It’s going to create a lot of construction jobs and lots of opportunities for our youth as they look for job opportunities in Ontario.”
It’s expected up to 1,400 construction workers will be on site at any given time, and 150 full time workers will be hired once the project is complete.
Minister of Economic Development and Growth Brad Duguid announced that the province is investing $100-million in NOVA.
“That is, as far as I can tell, the largest grant that we’ve put forward for an investment in Ontario history, which we are very, very proud and pleased to do,” said Duguid. “That is the second biggest manufacturing investment in Ontario, in a century.”
He says it’s a game-changer for Sarnia-Lambton.
“It’s keeping this region on the map. It’s bringing a globally competitive strength back to the chemistry sector, here in Sarnia that has always been a real strength of Canada’s economy and Ontario’s manufacturing sector. Because of the impact this has on the entire manufacturing sector, there are probably tens of thousands of more jobs that are supported by the investment we are seeing here today.”
Construction of the new facility will be tied to an expansion of the Corunna site that produces ethylene which is used in the production of polyethylene.
NOVA says it will expand the Corunna cracker by about 50 percent to provide ethylene feedstock to the new polyethylene facility — which will increase NOVA’s polyethylene production capacity by approximately 950 million pounds (450 kilotons) per year.
LIVE NOVA ANNOUNCEMENT https://t.co/V9CK7wrhmI — Melanie Irwin (@MIrwinCHOKNews) December 8, 2017It’s no secret that goalscoring is a bit of a problem for the Canadian men’s national team.
While Les Rouges have never been offensive juggernauts, the team reached historic depths – even by their own standards – in 2013, scoring just once in 13 games. So are there any players willing to step up and lay claim to being part of the solution in the years ahead?
Well, there’s definitely at least one.
“I hope to become what Canada needs up front,” striker Jordan Hamilton told MLSsoccer.com by phone over the weekend from CanMNT camp in Florida. “I’m a different player than the strikers [the national team has] now, or have had in the past. I’ve so far proven on every level that I can score goals.”
Indeed, Hamilton led the way for Canada at last year’s FIFA U-17 World Cup (two goals in three games) and in the qualifying tournament (three goals in five games). The 17-year-old also scored nine goals in 10 appearances for Toronto FC’s Senior Academy Team in 2013, impressing the club enough that he signed a contract with the first team earlier this month.
“I can’t wait to start training alongside [Jermain] Defoe and [Dwayne] De Rosario, to imagine how much better I could become,” said Hamilton.
Hamilton is especially excited to play alongside De Rosario, who grew up in the same part of Toronto as he did. And as De Rosario told MLSsoccer.com last week, the feeling is mutual.
“Dwayne even mentioning me is a big thing,” said Hamilton. “He’s done so much in his career that I can only dream of doing right now. He’s such a role model.”
Given Hamilton’s desire to score for Canada, De Rosario – the team’s all-time leader in international goals – is a fitting role model. And Hamilton, like De Rosario, is confident and unafraid of a little self-promotion, regularly interacting with fans via Twitter (@jayhams) and other platforms.
But Hamilton knows he’s a long way away from being any sort of savior for club or country. For now, he has other targets he’s working toward in 2014.
“Score some goals for TFC and the national team, and just be myself at all times … and just learn as much as possible from DeRo, Defoe and [Brazilian striker] Gilberto.”
He also knows that when it comes to bringing Canada back to respectability, he’ll need to have a solid team alongside him. After his first week in national team training camp, he’s confident in that regard, too.
“Preparing for the Olympics [in 2016] and also the U-20s coming up [in 2015], everyone’s hungry,” he said. “I feel like, especially the Olympic team, it’s going to be a real special thing. Everyone’s very hungry to put Canada on the world stage.”AKRON, Ohio - Nearly 3,000 students will receive degrees at the University of Akron's commencement ceremonies this weekend. Two students from the university will receive doctoral degrees in integrated bioscience with Ph.D. training in biomimicry - the first in the world to do so.
The university's Integrated Bioscience program is the only one in the world offering doctoral training in biomimicry, a field that studies nature and applies findings to human challenges in medicine, engineering and more. Two students completed the five-year program, which requires candidates to gain work experience through corporate, industry or educational sponsors arranged by program partner Great Lakes Biomimicry:
Bor-Kai (Bill) Hsiung, sponsored by the Sherwin-Williams Company. Hsiung has led game-changing research inspired by blue tarantulas that could revolutionize how colors are manufactured, according to a news release.
Bor-Kai (Bill) Hsiung, sponsored by the Sherwin-Williams Company. Hsiung has led game-changing research inspired by blue tarantulas that could revolutionize how colors are manufactured, according to a news release. Emily Kennedy, sponsored by GOJO Industries. Kennedy has invented a hedgehog-inspired product that can be used as a liner in football helmets for concussion prevention, as well as a variety of shipping and packaging applications, according to a news release.
University of Akron President Matthew J. Wilson will deliver the address at six commencement ceremonies scheduled to take place at the E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall this weekend. In all, the university will award 2,994 degrees to students from 29 states and 39 countries, including 66 doctorate degrees, 91 Juris Doctor degrees, 649 master's degrees, 1,886 bachelor's degrees and 302 associate degrees.
Commencement ceremonies include:
Friday, May 12, 7 p.m.
College of Business Administration
The LeBron James Family Foundation College of Education
Wayne College
Saturday, May 13, 10 a.m.
Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences (graduate degrees)
College of Engineering
College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering
U.S. Army ROTC Cadet Commissioning
Saturday, May 13, 2 p.m.
Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences (undergraduate degrees)
Saturday, May 13, 5:30 p.m.
Summer degree candidates - all colleges
Sunday, May 14, 10 a.m.
College of Health Professions (undergraduate degrees)
Sunday, May 14, 2 p.m.
College of Applied Science and Technology
College of Health Professions (graduate degrees)
Save
SaveOn 16 November 2016 the web site Winning Democrats published an article implying that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was seeking a personal presidential pardon from Donald Trump as recompense for “[s]abotaging Clinton]”:
Julian Assange Finally Asks Trump for Payment for Sabotaging Clinton — A Full Pardon With the 2016 elections over and Trump as the President-elect, Julian Assange is finally asking for payment for his part in assisting the Trump campaign. Since 2011, Assange has been avoiding prosecution in the United States for leaking documents through his organization, Wikileaks, relating to foreign affairs with information that had been given “secret” classification by the U.S. government … In light of his anti-Clinton sentiment and despite the fact that he once likened Trump to cholera, Assange is now appealing to Trump to pardon him — the fact that he is currently under investigation and hasn’t actually been convicted of anything notwithstanding. With a history of anti-semitism and misogyny behind him, Julian Assange would fit in well with the company Trump currently surrounds himself, including alt-right advocate Steve Bannon and of course, Trump himself.
As Breitbart correctly noted, WikiLeaks has already been negotiating with American authorities for several years with respect to the organization’s operations. On 19 August 2012, Assange issued a formal statement from the Ecuadorean Embassy in which he implored President Obama that:
As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of our societies. We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the United States of America. Will it return to and reaffirm the values it was founded on? Or will it lurch off the precipice dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark? I say that it must turn back. I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks. The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation. The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters. The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful. There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organization, be it WikiLeaks or the New York Times. The US administration’s war on whistle-blowers must end. Thomas Drake, William Binney, John Kirakou and the other heroic US whistle-blowers must – they must – be pardoned and compensated for the hardships they have endured as servants of the public record. And the Army Private who remains in a military prison in Fort Leavenworth Kansas, who was found by the UN to have endured months of torturous detention in Quantico Virginia and who has yet — after two years in prison — to see a trial, must be released.
(Assange currently resides at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after seeking asylum from that country and is wanted by Swedish authorities over allegations of sexual assault, so he would not necessarily escape legal troubles personally if he were pardoned by the U.S. president.)
In November 2010, the Program in Law and Journalism at New York Law School blog Legal As She Is Spoke argued WikiLeaks (and by extension, Assange) had “committed no crime” for publishing leaked documents pertaining to the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The piece stood in stark relief to items published in 2016 decrying WikiLeaks for its activity:
Since August, when Wikileaks first published 91,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, and in October, when they published approximately 400,000 more relating to the War in Iraq, many conservative commentators have been clamoring for the Justice Department to prosecute Wikileaks for publishing classified information. But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act). Perhaps lamenting that the U.S. does not have an Official Secrets Act like the United Kingdom, right wing columnists have consistently misinterpreted these Acts, or have cited other provisions of our espionage laws which almost surely do not apply to Wikileaks. The most commonly cited statute by those who advocate prosecuting Wikileaks is Section 793(e) of the Espionage Act. In August, former Bush speechwriter Marc Theissen linked to this section in an article for the Washington Post when he wrote that Wikileaks is “a criminal enterprise” whose founder, Julian Assange, should be arrested by U.S. forces on foreign soil, international law be damned. But this provision does not apply to those who publish information. Section 793(e)reads “Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document…relating to the national defense…willfully communicates… the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it…[s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” As made clear in the Pentagon Papers case, the word “communicates” was never meant “to encompass publication” or to affect the press. Congress included the word “publish” in three other sections of the Act but intentionally left it out of 793. As the legislative history of this provision states, “Nothing in this Act shall … in any way to limit or infringe upon freedom of the press or of speech as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”
Slate published an editorial titled “Why I Love WikiLeaks” on 30 November 2010 that lauded the site for “shock[ing] us out of [] complacency,” again with a tenor absent from coverage of the platform during the 2016 election:
As Assange navigates from military and diplomatic exposés to financial ones this year, his Wall Street targets won’t be able to shield their incompetence and misconduct with lip music about how he has damaged national security and violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and deserves capital punishment. But I’m sure they’ll invoke trade secrets, copyright, privacy, or whatever other legal window dressing they find convenient. Rather than defending their behavior, they’ll imitate Clinton and assail Assange’s methods and practices. As the Economist put it, “secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy.” But it “is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents.” Assange and WikiLeaks, while not perfect, have punctured the prerogative of secrecy with their recent revelations. The untold story is that while doing the United States’ allies, adversaries, and enemies a favor with his leaks, he’s doing the United States the biggest favor by holding it accountable. As I.F. Stone put it, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
We contacted WikiLeaks’ Task Force, a subset of the organization dedicated to ensuring accuracy in reporting about the platform’s activities. A volunteer with whom we spoke confirmed that WikiLeaks had beseeched the Obama administration for many years to cease investigating their activities and to pardon whistleblowers, adding that the organization “publishes without [favor]” and would never release or withhold information based upon the possibility of favorable treatment from any state or entity.Soldiers 'looted Polish crash dead' BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Four Russian soldiers have been charged with stealing bank cards from the wreckage of the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_world/soldiers-looted-polish-crash-dead-28540292.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25697152.ece/b17a9/AUTOCROP/h342/World%20News%208-1.jpg
Email
Four Russian soldiers have been charged with stealing bank cards from the wreckage of the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others.
They used at least one of the cards to withdraw 60,345 roubles (about £1,500).
"The four suspects have admitted their guilt and are actively co-operating with investigators," an investigative committee said.
Poles have reacted with shock and outrage that people would try to profit from a crash that has deeply shaken the nation, and is widely considered the country's worst tragedy since the Second World War. The Super Express tabloid condemned the thieves as "hyenas."
The theft also raises doubts in Poland about whether all procedures were followed in securing the crash site - and it risks straining the good working relationship formed between Russians and Poles in the aftermath of the crash.
The soldiers were attached to the airport in the western Russian city of Smolensk, where the plane carrying Mr Kaczynski crashed on April 10. The president was leading a high-ranking delegation to a memorial ceremony for Polish prisoners of war massacred by Soviet secret police at the start of the Second World War.
Polish officials said that the money was withdrawn using a card that belonged to Andrzej Przewoznik, a prominent official who oversaw Poland's wartime memorials. They said the thieves failed to obtain cash from another card that belonged Mr Przewoznik.
Press AssociationTodd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack.
Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point.
Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though we pine for relief, nothing kills desire like abundance. (Spoiler alert: should there be an equitable redistribution of wealth, we would still suffer a hunger for the lost object which, according to McGowan, not employing Kleinian thinking, was never attainable in the first place.) If we did not experience ourselves as missing something we might never get out of bed–and, as clinicians know, why it can be purely ruinous to gratify a depressive patient.
You buy those boots, the ones you had to have, and within moments of wearing them, your heart sinks. That car you finally got your hands on? Driving it out of the lot you wonder, “should I have just leased it?” Desire is an engine best run on less than half a tank.
The paradox of capitalism, the way it lets us down, gets a full treatment here. Capitalism reclines on McGowan’s couch and he offers it a few interpretations that shake loose its obsessional and hysterical tendencies. He works with capitalism effectively, not arousing its defenses, because he understands it as caught in a trap of its own making. Embracing Beyond The Pleasure Principle and Lacanian thinking, he asks capitalism how come the ends are more important than the means, and doesn’t it miss the sublime? He also treats the reader, reminding us that we need to not have what we want in order to get what we need.
The interview sails along, if I say so myself, and, given the political surround, offers a good conversation to get into. The author would love to hear from us and has asked that I post his email right here, [email protected].May 6, 2013 David Murray
Previous posts in this series: Top 200 Online Preaching Resources, Top 200 Online Leadership Resources, and Top 300 Online Counseling Resources. Now, here’s the Top 60 Online Resources for battling Porn.
Usual disclaimer: Link does not imply full agreement or endorsement.
Raising a Pure Son In a Sex-Crazed World — We are THAT Family
The Bible and the Brain: Scripture strengthens neurological pathways
F.L.E.E.—A Strategy for Pursuing Sexual Purity – The Gospel Coalition Blog
A Warped Worldview: Another Moral Effect of Pornography | Al Mohler
Raising Kids in a Pornified Culture | Take Your Vitamin Z
How do you counsel a husband who has revealed a struggle with pornography to his wife? | Practical Shepherding
How do you counsel a wife who has been harmed by her husband’s struggle with pornography? | Practical Shepherding
The Science of Porn Addiction | Take your Vitamin Z
“What Do I Do If My Child Is Looking at Pornography?” | Biblical Counseling Coalition Blogs
Porn and the contemplative life | Joel Miller
Book Reviews: Sexual Sanity For Men | The Gospel Coalition
Why is Porn Addictive? | Covenant Eyes
I Get By With A Little Help From My Readers…-Housewife Theologian
Porn-Free Church: Sex, God, and the Gospel – The Gospel Coalition Blog
How to Confess the Sin of Pornography to Your Wife (And How Not To), Part 1 | Biblical Counseling Coalition Blogs
The Urban Gospel Mission – THE PORN GATEWAYS
Sex in the Media – The Price Our Kids Pay | Covenant Eyes
Pornopoly – The Gospel Coalition Blog
Counseling Single Men (and Men in General) Toward Lasting Freedom from Pornography | Covenant Eyes
Is bad sex killing the great commission? Between The Times
The Seduction of Pornography and the Integrity of Christian Marriage, Part One | Al Mohler
Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games – Desiring God
D.A. Carson on Overcoming Porn Temptation | Take your Vitamin Z
Overcoming Sexual Sin (Video 1 of 9) | Brad Hambrick
Porn-Free Church | Free E-book for Pastors | Covenant Eyes
Raquel Welch Says Pornography “Annihilates” Men | Denny Burk
Take Your Vitamin Z: Teens and Porn: 10 Stats You Need To Know
Free E-book: Your Brain On Porn | Covenant Eyes | Covenant Eyes
Escaping pornography | The Briefing
Closing the Window | Challies Dot Com
Confessing Lust to Your Wife: How Detailed Should You Be? | Covenant Eyes
ANTHEM: Strategies for Fighting Lust – Desiring God
Piper, Keller & Carson on How the Gospel Helps Us Overcome Pornography – From Age to Age
Spiritual Healing in the Midst of a Husband’s Addiction to Pornography | Challies Dot Com
For Pastors Who Struggle with Pornography | Covenant Eyes
This Is Your Brain on Porn – Justin Taylor
Pornography and Gypsy Moths – Pure Church by Thabiti Anyabwile
The Weight of smut | First Things
Counting the costs | Warren Cole Smith
Girls Snared by Porn and Cybersex
Breaking Pornography Addiction – Part 1 | CCEFIt’s Not Just a ‘Guy Problem’
Break Pornography Addiction – Part Two | CCEF
The Brain on Lust
Forgiving Your Spouse After Adultery
Sexual Sin in the Ministry
Counseling Stories
Confessing Lust to Your Wife: How Detailed Should You Be?
Hijacking the Brain — How Pornography Works
Breaking Pornography Addiction – Part 1
Discussing and Dealing with Pornography
Sexual Integrity Resources for Teens
Sex Before Marriage: How Far Is Too Far?– CTV announced today itsTV Everywhere service now works with Google Chromecast. The newly updatedprovides an improved user experience and is the first TVE product from a Canadian broadcaster to support Chromecast functionality, further expanding the viewing experience forusers. Increasing the value of subscriptions to participating TV service providers, CTV has enabled the newly updatedto take the next step in providing viewers the flexibility to start, stop, and continue their favourite CTV programs seamlessly, in and out of the home. With the Chromecast device, Canadians have another option to enjoy their favourite CTV GO offerings on a big screen. Current users can stream from their web-connected computers or the CTV GO app for their iOS and Android mobile devices. Chromecast is a thumb-sized media streaming device that plugs into the HDMI port on TVs. Viewers can simply use an Android phone, tablet, iPhone®, iPad®, Mac or Windows laptop, or Chromebook to cast theapp and CTV programming onto a television. In addition to, the availability of more Bell Media digital brands for Chromecast will be announced soon., now supporting Google Chromecast“As viewing habits continue to evolve, Bell Media is committed to continuing our momentum of providing the latest TV technology to our viewers,” said Domenic Vivolo, Executive Vice-President, Content Sales, and Distribution Marketing, Bell Media. “As the first Canadian broadcaster to support Google Chromecast we are offering viewers an unparalleled TVE experience – giving them great programming wherever and whenever they want to see it.” “We’re excited to have CTV as the first Canadian broadcaster available on Chromecast,” said Suveer Kothari, Director of Chromecast Partnerships, Google. “With the CTV GO app and Chromecast, Canadians will now be able to use the devices they already own, like phones, tablets, and laptops to find and cast their favourite CTV programs to their TV screen with a simple tap." The newapp features a redesigned, current, and cleaner look, and full support for Google Chromecast. With core improvements that have made the app faster, the user experience is improved with easily accessible content including full-length episodes and extras.is a free app allowing Canadians to access CTV’s #1 television lineup on-demand for seven days following a television broadcast. Additional content is available exclusively to Canadians who subscribe to participating TV service providers, allowing them extended catch-up viewing windows, as well as live streams of CTV and CTV Two broadcasts. Currently, participating service providers include Bell Fibe, Bell TV, Bell Aliant FibreOP TV, Northerntel FibreOP, Shaw Cable, Shaw Direct, Telus Optik TV, Northwestel, Eastlink, and Access Communications, with additionalpartners to be announced soon.features 12 of the Top 20 most-watched programs in Canada* including THE BIG BANG THEORY, GOTHAM, MARVELS AGENT CARTER, PERSON OF INTEREST, and more, in addition to ongoing unprecedented access to live special event programming. For more information aboutChromecast is a trademark of Google Inc. Source: Numeris (BBM Canada), Total Canada, Dec 15, 2014 – Jan 25, 2015, A18-49
- CTV -In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out a Blueprint for an America Built to Last, encouraging companies to create manufacturing jobs in the United States while removing deductions for shipping jobs overseas and encouraging insourcing. During the past two years, we have begun to see positive signs in American manufacturing – with the manufacturing sector adding more than 300,000 jobs since December 2009, with companies engaging in the emerging trend of “insourcing” by bringing jobs back and making additional investments in the United States. Manufacturing jobs are growing for the first time since the late 1990s.
The proposals the President is describing today are designed to build on this progress. They include six proposals that Congress should act on immediately to encourage job growth in the United States and that are fully paid for by closing tax loopholes that encourage the shifting of jobs and shielding of profits overseas. The President is also calling for Congress to extend current temporary tax incentives this year to bring more certainty to the near-term economy and for fundamental tax reform that would encourage more investment in America with a new international minimum tax, a lower rate for American manufacturing, and a simpler, broader tax code.
The President is proposing the following revenue-neutral reform package to support manufacturing, discourage outsourcing, and encourage insourcing that Congress should act on immediately :
1. Removing tax deductions for shipping jobs overseas and providing new incentives for bringing them back home (revenue neutral): The tax code currently allows companies moving operations overseas to deduct their moving expenses – and reduce their taxes in the United States as a result. The President is proposing to change that. These deductions will be denied, and companies will no longer be provided deductions for moving their operations abroad. At the same time, the President is proposing to give a 20 percent income tax credit for the expenses of moving operations back into the United States to help companies bring jobs home.
For example : If a company was closing a plant to move that plant overseas and incurred $1 million in expenses – ranging from the cost of scrapping equipment to shipping physical capital to clean up costs – it could right now deduct those expenses, and get a tax reduction of $350,000 (assuming the firm faces the 35 percent statutory tax rate). The President proposes to eliminate this tax deduction. And, if a corporation moving jobs to the U.S. incurred similar expenses, the President proposes to provide that company with a tax credit of $200,000 to help offset these costs and encourage investment here at home.
2. Targeting the domestic production incentive on manufacturers who create jobs here at home and doubling the deduction for advanced manufacturing (revenue neutral): In conjunction with the President’s broader commitment to corporate tax reform, the Administration is proposing measures to provide incentives for manufacturing in the United States. The Administration is proposing to reform the current deduction for domestic production by more narrowly focusing it on manufacturing activities—for example, it would no longer cover oil production. These savings would be invested in expanding the deduction for manufacturers and doubling for advanced manufacturing technologies from its current level of 9 percent to 18 percent.
3. Introducing a new Manufacturing Communities Tax Credit to encourage investments in communities affected by job loss ($6 billion in credits): The President is proposing a new credit for qualified investments that help finance projects in communities that have suffered a major job loss event. This credit will provide $2 billion per year in incentives for three years. For this purpose, a major job loss event occurs when a military base closes or a major employer closes or substantially reduces a facility or operating unit, resulting in permanent mass layoffs. The tax credit would support qualified investments in this affected community – made in conjunction with State Economic Development Agencies and other local entities – that improve local economic growth.
4. Providing temporary tax credits to drive nearly $20 billion in domestic clean energy manufacturing ($5 billion in credits): The President is proposing to extend tax credits to drive nearly $20 billion of investment in domestic clean energy manufacturing, ensuring new windmills and solar panels will incorporate parts that are produced and assembled by American workers. This Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit – which was oversubscribed more than three times over – goes to investments in clean energy manufacturing in the United States. The additional $5 billion in tax credits the President is proposing will leverage nearly $20 billion in total investment in the United States.
5. Reauthorizing 100% expensing of investment in plants and equipment ($4 billion): The President is proposing to extend for all of 2012 a provision that allows businesses to expense the full cost of their investments in equipment, spurring investment in the United States. Over the next two years, this would provide businesses large and small with $50 billion in tax relief, with much of that recovered by the Treasury in subsequent years.
6. Closing a loophole that allows companies to shift profits overseas (raises $23 billion): Corporations right now can abuse the tax system by inappropriately shifting profits overseas from intangible property created in the United States. The President is proposing to close this loophole.
At the same time as the President is calling |
council for a decade and it hasn't improved their record one bit. Regimes seeks membership on U.N. human rights bodies for three reasons only: to ensure they'll never be condemned for their abuses; to obtain a false badge of international legitimacy; and to demoralize human rights activists at home." Watch tonight's interview with the executive director of UN Watch: Posted by UN Watch on Tuesday, April 25, 2017
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It was a secret ballot, but the math tells us that at least 15 of the following democratic member states of the U.N. Economic and Social Council voted to elect Saudi Arabia to the U.N.’s women’s rights commission:
Andorra
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Chile
Colombia
Czech Republic
Estonia
France
Germany
India
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Norway
Republic of Korea
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
UK
USAEarlier today, the Planned Parenthood blog “Reproductive Health Reality Check” posted an editorial stating that the organization has been subject to several suspicious visits at clinics across the country.
“In recent weeks people who oppose Planned Parenthood, and our mission to provide high-quality reproductive health care, have been conducting a secret, nationwide hoax campaign in an attempt to undermine women’s access to services,” wrote Leslie Kantor and Dr. Carolyn Westhoff.
Planned Parenthood spokesperson Chloe Cooney told Raw Story, “We don’t know how many groups are involved in this propaganda campaign, but we know from experience that their ultimate goal is to undermine women’s access to reproductive health care services. We expect that this campaign will only further escalate the political battles over access to health care, rather than focus on helping women and their families get the care they need.”
In the past, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose has filmed undercover operations at Planned Parenthood clinics, posing variously as a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old purportedly impregnated by much older men. Her organization, Live Action, has also released video of individuals posing as pimps and underage prostitutes soliciting abortion services. Given the organization’s past activities targeting Planned Parenthood, Raw Story reached out to Live Action for a statement.
Live Action’s spokesperson Kate Bryan declined to offer details of its current project or whether it involves Planned Parenthood. Bryan would not specifically confirm whether it is the organization named in the RH Reality Check post, saying, “Live Action’s policy is not to comment on or confirm ongoing investigative research until its conclusion and public release.”
According to RH Reality Check, “For years opponents of reproductive health and rights have used secret videotaping tactics with fictitious patient scenarios and selective editing to promote falsehoods about Planned Parenthood’s mission, services, and policies. Recently, one group has escalated these hoax visits in many states, apparently using secret recorders while inquiring about sex selection abortions.”
The post states that the reproductive rights organization is anticipating a campaign based on these “hoax visits.” The group states for the record that Planned Parenthood is against the concept of sex selective abortion and that the organization does not offer sex determination services.
(Image via Flickr Commons user flatiron32)Super Bowl XLV was an American football game between the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Pittsburgh Steelers and the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Green Bay Packers to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 2010 season. The Packers defeated the Steelers by the score of 31–25. The game was played on February 6, 2011 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the first time the Super Bowl was played in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
Unlike most other Super Bowls, this game featured two title-abundant franchises: coming into the game, the Packers held the most NFL championships with 12 (9 league championships prior to the Super Bowl era and 3 Super Bowl championships), while the Steelers held the most Super Bowl championships with 6. The Packers entered their fifth Super Bowl in team history, and became the first number 6-seeded team in the NFC to compete in the Super Bowl, after posting a 10–6 regular season record. The Steelers finished the regular season with a 12–4 record, and advanced to a league-tying 8th Super Bowl appearance.
Green Bay dominated most of the first half of Super Bowl XLV, jumping to a 21–3 lead before Pittsburgh cut it down to 21–10 just before halftime. Then after the teams exchanged touchdowns, the Steelers pulled within 28–25 midway through the fourth quarter with wide receiver Mike Wallace's 25-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and a two-point conversion. But the Packers answered with Mason Crosby's 23-yard field goal with 2:07 remaining, and then prevented the Steelers from scoring on their final drive of the game. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was named Super Bowl MVP, completing 24 of 39 passes for 304 yards and three touchdowns.
The broadcast of Super Bowl XLV on Fox averaged about 111 million viewers, breaking the record for the most-watched program in American television history.[4] The game's attendance was 103,219, just short of the Super Bowl record 103,985 set in Super Bowl XIV at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The halftime show featured the American hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas, with additional performances by Usher and Slash.
Background [ edit ]
Host selection process [ edit ]
Three NFL cities presented bids for the game:
NFL owners voted to select the North Texas site on May 22, 2007.[11]
Teams [ edit ]
Pittsburgh Steelers [ edit ]
The Pittsburgh Steelers finished the 2010 season with a 12–4 record. They earned the AFC North division title, and the second seed in the AFC and advanced to their 8th Super Bowl, tying the Dallas Cowboys' record of most Super Bowl appearances.
After missing the first four games of the year on suspension for violating the NFL's personal conduct policy (during which the Steelers went 3–1), quarterback Ben Roethlisberger returned for his seventh season as the Steelers starting quarterback, finishing the season with 3,200 yards and 17 touchdowns, with just five interceptions, for a 97 passer rating. He also rushed for 176 yards and two touchdowns. The team's top receiver was Mike Wallace who caught 60 passes for 1,257 yards and 10 touchdowns, giving him a 21 yards per catch average. Other reliable options included 13-year veteran Hines Ward (59 receptions for 755 yards and 5 touchdowns), the Steelers all-time leading receiver, and tight end Heath Miller who caught 42 passes for 512 yards. Halfback Rashard Mendenhall was the team's leading rusher, gaining 1,273 yards and 13 touchdowns while also catching 23 passes. The line was led by rookie center Maurkice Pouncey, the Steelers only pro bowl selection on offense. However, Pouncey was injured in the AFC championship game and would be inactive for Super Bowl XLV.[12]
The Steelers had one of the league's top defenses, leading the NFL in sacks (48), and fewest points (14.5) and rushing yards (62.8) allowed per game, while ranking second in fewest total yards (276.8). The line was anchored by pro bowl end Brett Keisel. The Steelers also had four excellent linebackers: LaMarr Woodley, James Harrison, James Farrior, and Lawrence Timmons. For the third consecutive year, Woodley and Harrison each recorded at least 10 sacks. Woodley also forced three fumbles and Harrison forced six. Farrior had 109 total tackles and six sacks. Timmons led the team with 135 total tackles, while also recording three sacks and two interceptions. The secondary was led by pro bowl safety Troy Polamalu, who won the NFL Defensive Player of the Year Award, tying his career-best seven interceptions and returning them for 101 yards and a touchdown.
Coach Mike Tomlin, already the youngest coach to ever win a Super Bowl, became the youngest coach ever to make it to the Super Bowl twice at age 38. The Pittsburgh Steelers had also accomplished going to the Super Bowl in five different decades; and, in every decade since the post AFL-NFL merger. 1970s: 1975, 1976, and 1979. 1980s: 1980. 1990s: 1996. 2000s: 2006 and 2009. 2010s: 2011.
Green Bay Packers [ edit ]
The Green Bay Packers finished the season with a 10–6 record and became the first number 6-seeded team in the NFC to compete in the Super Bowl. They are only the second number 6 seeded team to reach the Super Bowl, with the only other number 6 seed to accomplish this feat being the Pittsburgh Steelers, who won Super Bowl XL following the 2005 season. Green Bay also joined the 2005 Steelers as the only teams ever to defeat the top three seeded teams on the road in the playoffs. In order to secure their fifth Super Bowl bid they defeated their longtime rivals, the Chicago Bears, in the NFC Championship Game at Soldier Field.
The offense was led by quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was in his third year as a starter after taking over for the team's all-time leading passer Brett Favre. Rodgers finished the season completing 65.7% of his passes for 3,922 yards and 28 touchdowns, with only eleven interceptions, giving him his second consecutive season with a triple digit passer rating (101.2). He was also a good rusher, adding 356 yards and 4 touchdowns on the ground. His top target was pro bowl receiver Greg Jennings, who caught 76 passes for 1,265 yards and 12 touchdowns, giving him a 16.6 yards per catch average while also ranking him fourth in the NFL in yards and second in touchdown catches. Other reliable targets included receivers James Jones (50 receptions, 676 yards, 5 touchdowns), Donald Driver (51 receptions, 565 yards, 4 touchdowns), and Jordy Nelson (45 receptions, 582 yards, 496 kick return yards). The Packers lost star tight end Jermichael Finley (21 receptions 301 yards, 1 touchdown) to injury in week five who was their leading receiver at the time. The Packers ground game was crippled by injuries, especially the Week 1 loss of Ryan Grant, who had rushed for over 1,200 yards in each of the last two seasons. In his absence, the team relied prominently on Brandon Jackson, who rushed for 703 yards and caught 43 passes for 342, and fullback John Kuhn, who added 281 yards on the ground. The team's offensive line was anchored by pro bowl tackle Chad Clifton, an 11-year veteran.
The Packers defense ranked second in the league in fewest points allowed per game (15). The line was led by Cullen Jenkins, who recorded seven sacks in just eleven games, and 338-pound defensive tackle B. J. Raji, who had 6.5. The linebackers were led by pro bowler Clay Matthews and A. J. Hawk. Matthews ranked fourth in the NFL with 13.5 sacks, while Hawk led the team in combined tackles (111) and intercepted three passes. Three of the Packers starters in the secondary had made the pro bowl. Tramon Williams led the team with a career-high 6 interceptions, while adding 326 punt return yards. Other pro bowl selections included safety Nick Collins (4 interceptions and 70 combined tackles) and hard hitting 13-year veteran cornerback Charles Woodson, who recorded 92 total tackles and forced five fumbles, while also intercepting two passes.
The Packers entered the Super Bowl never having trailed by more than 7 points at any point during the season—a feat that had never been accomplished during a complete season in the Super Bowl era. The last team to complete a season with this distinction was the Detroit Lions in 1962.[13] In the Super Bowl game itself, the Packers never trailed.
Of note, this was Green Bay's first Super Bowl against an AFC team that was not one of the "Original 8" American Football League franchises. The Packers had played Kansas City, Oakland, New England, and Denver in their four previous Super Bowl match-ups, winning against all but Denver. The Steelers, like the Packers, predated the AFL's launch, having begun play in 1933 (12 years after the Packers joined the NFL after two years as an independent team), and moved to the AFC in 1970 as a result of the AFL–NFL merger to even out the two conferences.
Playoffs [ edit ]
Pittsburgh advanced to the Super Bowl with two close wins in the playoffs. After a first-round bye, the Steelers defeated their division rival, the number 5 seeded Baltimore Ravens 31–24, with Ben Roethlisberger's 58-yard completion to Antonio Brown on third down and 19 setting up Rashard Mendenhall's game winning 2-yard touchdown run with 1:33 left in the game. Roethlisberger finished with 226 passing yards and two touchdowns, while the defense forced three turnovers and sacked Baltimore QB Joe Flacco five times, three by James Harrison.
Then the Steelers defeated the number 6 seeded New York Jets 24–19 in the AFC Championship Game. Pittsburgh seemed to be in complete control at first, taking a 24–0 lead in the first half. Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez rallied his team back, cutting the score to 24–10 going into the fourth quarter. The Jets then drove to the Steelers 2-yard line on a 17-play drive, but the Pittsburgh defense made a key stand, keeping them out of the end zone on four consecutive plays near the goal-line to force a turnover. New York subsequently forced a safety and scored a touchdown with just over three minutes left, but Roethlisberger's 14-yard completions to Brown and Heath Miller allowed Pittsburgh to hang onto the ball until time expired. Mendenhall finished with 121 rushing yards and a touchdown, along with 2 catches for 32 yards.
Green Bay started off their postseason with a 21–16 win over the number 3 seeded Philadelphia Eagles after Tramon Williams intercepted a pass from Michael Vick in the end zone with less than a minute left to play. Aaron Rodgers threw for 180 yards and three touchdowns while James Starks, who only rushed for 101 yards during the season, rushed for 123 yards in the game.
The Packers then went to Georgia, where the top-seeded 13–3 Atlanta Falcons were waiting. Although the Falcons took advantage of an early turnover and a kick return touchdown to build a 14–7 lead, Green Bay quickly buried the Falcons with 35 straight points. By the end of the first half, the Packers held a 28–14 lead, and went on to win comfortably, 48–21. Rodgers was nearly perfect, completing 31 of 36 passes for 366 yards and three touchdowns, while adding another score on the ground. Jordy Nelson and James Jones both had touchdown catches, while John Kuhn added scores by air and ground and Tramon Williams returned one of his two interceptions 70 yards for a touchdown. Green Bay's special teams unit never had to punt the ball, while Mason Crosby contributed two field goals.
Green Bay next faced the number 2 Chicago Bears in the NFC Championship Game, defeating them 21–14. This time Rodgers had a rougher day than his previous two games, throwing no touchdown passes and being intercepted twice. But he still threw for 244 yards and scored a 1-yard touchdown run, while Starks added 74 rushing yards, including a touchdown run in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Green Bay's defense knocked Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler out of the game and intercepted three passes, one of which was returned 18 yards for a touchdown by B. J. Raji. The other two were made by rookie Sam Shields, who recorded his second interception near his own end zone with 37 seconds left to put the game away.
Super Bowl pregame notes [ edit ]
Both teams are known to have sizable fanbases that often travel to away games, largely due to the home games themselves having decades-long waiting lists.[14] In August 2008, ESPN.com ranked the two teams tied as having the best fans in the NFL.[15] ESPN's own John Clayton, a Pittsburgh native, broke the tie in favor of the Steelers.
As the Packers were the designated home team in the annual rotation between AFC and NFC teams, the team elected to wear their green jerseys.[16] Although both teams are known to wear their colored jerseys at home and have rarely worn white at home (the Packers wore white at home for two games in 1989), the Packers decision contrasted with the Steelers decision as the home team in Super Bowl XL to wear white jerseys. Both the 2005 Steelers and 2010 Packers were number 6 seeded teams when they reached the Super Bowl, forcing them to play all of their postseason games on the road and wearing their respective white jerseys in those games.[17]
The retractable roof at Cowboys Stadium was closed for the game.[18]
A severe winter storm blanketed the Dallas-Fort Worth area in hard ice and snow the week before the game, threatening to disrupt game preparations. Snow fell from the roof of Cowboys Stadium's East end on February 4, injuring six people.[19] Over 3,000 tickets were sold to watch the game in the stadium's East Plaza, which experienced the falling ice tragedy earlier in the week. However, the snow had melted by game time and fans who paid $200 per ticket were allowed to watch the game outside Cowboys Stadium, in the open air, as the weather turned from sleet to sun.
Since the Steelers and Packers were two of the six teams that did not have cheerleaders during the 2010 NFL season (the others being the Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Cleveland Browns, and New York Giants), this marked the first Super Bowl without cheerleaders.[20]
Packers lineman, Bryan Bulaga, became the youngest player to start in a Super Bowl, at the age of 21 years and 322 days old. Steelers center Maurkice Pouncey would have been the youngest player (21 years, 197 days), but he could not play because of a high ankle sprain.
Possible Presidential appearance [ edit ]
During a press conference on January 19, 2011, President Obama (a longtime Chicago Bears fan) said he would attend Super Bowl XLV if Chicago defeated Green Bay, saying "If Chicago wins, I’m going no doubt".[21] Chicago ended up losing the NFC Championship game a few days later on January 23 to Green Bay 21–14. In a post-game locker-room speech by Green Bay Packers corner Charles Woodson he poked fun at the President's comment saying "The President don't want to come watch us at the Super Bowl, guess what? We'll go see him" (implying that Green Bay would win the Super Bowl and visit the White House as the winning team does each year; a statement that would come true). Woodson then broke the Packers meeting with a team cheer of "White House!".[22] On January 26 President Obama visited Green Bay and was greeted by Mayor Jim Schmitt and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who presented the President with two Green Bay Packers Jerseys. The first had Obama's name on the back with the number 1 and the second was an autographed Charles Woodson jersey with the message "See you at the White House. Go Packers!" written on the back by Woodson.[23]
On August 12, 2011, Woodson's promise came true and Packers visited the White House and met with President Obama. Their visit was delayed because of the NFL lockout and took place a day before the Packers first preseason game against the Cleveland Browns.[24] President Obama was presented with a Packers jersey with the number 1 and the words Commander-In-Chief on the back. He was also presented with a stock share of the Packers organization, thus making him a part owner of the Packers. When Obama jokingly asked if this meant he could trade Aaron Rodgers to the Bears, Woodson responded that Obama was just "a minority owner."
Obama, who is also a Steelers fan and considers the team to be his second-favorite after the Bears, openly supported the Steelers two years earlier in Super Bowl XLIII after the Rooney family helped with his campaigning work and later appointed Steelers chairman Dan Rooney, an ethnic Irish Catholic, the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland.[25] He did not attend the game; instead, he hosted a 100-person Super Bowl party at the White House. Attendees included his family, elected leaders from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, DNC member Andres Lopez of Puerto Rico, Buffalo, New York mayor Byron Brown, Buffalo deputy mayor Steve Casey, Newark, New Jersey mayor Cory Booker, Jennifer Lopez and her husband Marc Anthony, both actors/singers, ESPN columnist Michael Wilbon, and Tony Kornheiser.[26][27]
Although the sitting president did not attend the game, former president and former Texas governor George W. Bush was present, along with his wife Laura and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.[28]
Local commemoration [ edit ]
From June 15, 2010, through February 6, 2011, the 30-mile section of Interstate 30 between Dallas and Fort Worth along which Cowboys Stadium is situated had been temporarily designated as the "Tom Landry Super Bowl Highway" in commemoration of Super Bowl XLV.[29] The former Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike is normally known as the "Tom Landry Highway" in honor of former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry.[29]
Logo [ edit ]
While past Super Bowl games used their own unique logo designs that changed yearly and featured imagery which reflected the host city, Super Bowl XLV introduced a new, generic design for the game's logo. It incorporates an image of the Vince Lombardi Trophy sitting atop the traditional Roman numerals used to denote each edition, with a stylized image of the host stadium shown in the background. It was introduced as part of a new, standardized branding scheme for the NFL's postseason games, which also saw the redesign of the conference championship trophies.[30][31]
The only changes made to the logo for future Super Bowls have been to change the number and the stadium depicted.[31] Super Bowl 50 deviated slightly from the standard design to emphasize the game's "golden anniversary", featuring the number "50" in large gold numbering on each side of the trophy rather than below it in Roman numerals; this modified layout, but with Roman numerals, has since been used for subsequent Super Bowl games.[32][33][34]
Broadcasting [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
United States [ edit ]
Fox Sports televised the game in the United States, with Joe Buck as the play-by-play announcer and Troy Aikman, himself a three-time Super Bowl winner as a Dallas Cowboys quarterback, as the color analyst. Mike Pereira joined Buck and Aikman in the broadcast booth to comment on instant replay reviews,[35] while Pam Oliver and Chris Myers served as sideline reporters. The pre-game show featured the Fox NFL Sunday crew of host Curt Menefee and a group of analysts with extensive Super Bowl experiences of their own: Terry Bradshaw (4 time Super Bowl winning QB with the Pittsburgh Steelers), Howie Long (one-time Super Bowl winning defensive end with the then-Los Angeles Raiders), Michael Strahan (one-time Super Bowl winning defensive end with the NY Giants) and Jimmy Johnson (two-time Super Bowl winning head coach with the Cowboys). They were joined by a variety of other commentators.[36]
Five days prior to the game, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, seized and shut down several websites that had provided access to pirated Internet television feeds of NFL games.[37]
With an average US audience of 111 million viewers, this was the most-watched Super Bowl as well as the most-watched program of any kind in American television history, beating the previous record of 106.5 million viewers for Super Bowl XLIV.[38] An estimated 162.9 million total viewers watched all or part of the game.[4] The game drew a national household Nielsen rating of 46.0 and a 69 share. It drew a 59.7 local rating in both Milwaukee (WITI) and Pittsburgh (WPGH), the second-highest local rating for a Super Bowl after the 63.0 that Super Bowl XX drew in Chicago. In the host market of Dallas-Fort Worth (KDFW), the game drew a 53.7 rating.[39]
The Steelers also became the second team to appear on Super Bowls on all four major networks, after the Denver Broncos. The Steelers appeared previously on four NBC-aired Super Bowls (IX, XIII, XXX, XLIII), two CBS-aired Super Bowls (X, XIV), and one ABC-aired Super Bowl (XL).
Fox's lead-out program was an episode of Glee titled "The Sue Sylvester Shuffle".[40]
Commercials [ edit ]
By September 15, 2010, Fox had sold 90% of all available slots; all slots were completely sold out by October. The price of an advertisement began at US$3,000,000.[5] Pepsi-Cola returned after a one-year retreat with three ads for their Pepsi Max drink, which has been named as the official soft drink of the NFL. Pepsi's Frito-Lay brand also advertised Doritos. Both brands had their advertisements created by web users as part of the annual USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter contest, which offers a prize of US $5 million.[41] In addition, regular purchasers Anheuser-Busch InBev, GoDaddy.com, Coca-Cola, CareerBuilder.com, and E*TRADE purchased advertisements; InBev advertised Stella Artois imported beer for the first time in the Super Bowl in addition to its usual Budweiser and Bud Light advertisements. Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Audi also advertised,[5] as did General Motors, who returned for the first time since their bankruptcy with advertisements for the Chevrolet Cruze, Camaro, Silverado and Volt. Chrysler purchased a 2-minute-long advertisement for its Chrysler 200 featuring Eminem.
Advertisements for 15 films were shown during the Pre-Game, Game, and Post-Game.[42]
International telecasts [ edit ]
NFL International provided television coverage for viewers outside of North America, with Bob Papa and Joe Theismann calling the English language feed. The game was shown live on the following channels:
Radio [ edit ]
Westwood One broadcast Super Bowl XLV across the United States and Canada, with play-by-play announcer Kevin Harlan (calling his first Super Bowl for the network) and color analyst Boomer Esiason. Univision Radio carried a Spanish language feed for its stations throughout the US. The flagship stations for each team also carried the game with their respective local announcers:
In the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 5 Live carried radio coverage with Darren Fletcher and Greg Brady announcing.[43]
Sirius XM Satellite Radio carried 14 feeds in ten languages to Sirius subscribers, as well as to XM subscribers with the "Best of Sirius" package.[44] In addition to the Westwood One and local team broadcasts, Sirius carried the following international feeds:
FieldPass, the subscription Internet radio service provided by the league at NFL.com, also carried most of these feeds. Due to contractual restrictions, only Sirius XM and FieldPass were permitted to carry the local team broadcasts along with WTAQ, WIXX, WTMJ, WDVE and WBGG, with the teams' other network radio affiliates instead airing the Westwood One feed.
Attendance [ edit ]
Cowboys Stadium installed 15,000 temporary seats and utilized its standing room to increase its capacity to over 105,000 fans. If the stadium had been filled to capacity (its record for an NFL game is 105,121 spectators), it would have set a record for Super Bowl attendance, breaking the previous record of 103,985 fans for Super Bowl XIV in the Rose Bowl; however the actual attendance of 103,219[45] fell 766 fans short. League officials had indicated that they would also count spectators watching the game on large television screens from outside the stadium in the tally, which generally is not allowed in official attendance counts.[46] However, Super Bowl XLV was the first Super Bowl game to break the 100,000 threshold in attendance since Super Bowl XXI in 1987.
Due to numerous delays, 1,250 temporary seats weren't ready in time for the game. According to a police officer standing near the affected area, the seats hadn't been installed in time for the fire marshal to inspect them.[47] The NFL scrambled almost until kickoff to find replacement seats. Eventually, 850 fans in four sections were relocated, while 400 fans in two sections were given a refund equivalent to three times the face value of their ticket.[48][49] The latter set of fans were later offered the chance to watch the game on monitors in the North Field Club behind the Steelers bench, but would still get the triple refund. Some of these fans were still upset, since they had spent thousands on airfare and hotels. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said that when the league decided to relocate the 850 fans, it lost any shot of setting the attendance record.[50]
The NFL subsequently offered affected fans a ticket to the next Super Bowl in addition to the refund. It also offered fans the option of a ticket to any future Super Bowl, along with round-trip airfare and hotel accommodations. However, this wasn't enough to mollify several fans, who on February 9 filed a $5 million class-action lawsuit against the NFL, the Cowboys and Jones. In addition to Steelers and Packers fans left without seats, the suit includes Cowboys fans who paid $100,000 for personal seat licenses, only to have to watch the Super Bowl in metal folding chairs without a view of the stadium's giant video replay board.[51] The NFL at first offered $2,400 to fans who did not receive a replacement seat, but later offered tickets to a future Super Bowl with airfare and hotels included.[52]
Not all of the fans accepted the NFL's settlement offer, so the case went to trial. The final outcome of the lawsuit was a finding for the plaintiffs against the NFL in the matter of breach of contract, and not liable for fraudulent inducement. The Cowboys and Jerry Jones were dismissed as parties to the lawsuit since the plaintiffs' contracts were solely with the NFL. The plaintiffs were awarded between $5,600 and $22,000 depending on the value of their tickets.[53]
Entertainment and other ceremonies [ edit ]
Pregame [ edit ]
Keith Urban and Maroon 5 performed during the pregame.[54] The Texas Christian University Horned Frog Marching Band also performed during the pregame show.[55] 22-year-old Candice Villesca of Lewisville, Texas performed the national anthem and "America the Beautiful" in American Sign Language.[56] Lea Michele performed "America the Beautiful"[57] supported by the Air Force Tops in Blue.[58] Pop singer Christina Aguilera sang the national anthem, but performed the wrong lyrics for the fourth line of the song,[59] later issuing an apology.[60]
The coin toss ceremony was the first to commemorate two anniversaries—the 25th anniversary of Super Bowl XX and 15th of Super Bowl XXX, which marked the Dallas Cowboys' most recent Super Bowl championship. In honor of those occasions, Super Bowl XX MVP Richard Dent and former Dallas Cowboys defensive back Deion Sanders, both of whom were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2011, joined the ceremonies. They were joined by fellow Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees and past Super Bowl participants Marshall Faulk, Chris Hanburger and Shannon Sharpe.[61]
Halftime [ edit ]
Super Bowl XLV halftime show
The Black Eyed Peas performed a medley of their greatest hits: "I Gotta Feeling", "Boom Boom Pow", "Pump It", "The Time (Dirty Bit)", "Let's Get It Started", and "Where Is the Love?" Slash made a guest appearance, performing "Sweet Child o' Mine" with Fergie, while Usher made an appearance to perform his song "OMG" with will.i.am.[54] The show also displayed a long list of other performers, including Prairie View A&M University's "Marching Storm" Band.[62] Country music was originally in the planning until the Black Eyed Peas agreed to perform.[63]
Game summary [ edit ]
First half [ edit ]
After the first three drives of the game ended with punts, Green Bay opened up the scoring with Aaron Rodgers's 29-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Jordy Nelson, who managed to pull slightly ahead of cornerback William Gay enough to make a leaping catch and fall into the end zone. Then on the first play after the ensuing kickoff, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was hit by Howard Green as he threw a pass, causing the ball to go well short of his intended target near the left sideline where it was intercepted by Nick Collins and returned 37 yards for a touchdown, giving Green Bay a 14–0 lead. This score continued the unbeaten streak of Super Bowl victories recorded by teams scoring on an interception runback, improving to 11–0 in such games. It was also the third consecutive Super Bowl with an interception return for a touchdown, as well as the eighth such score in the last ten Super Bowls.[64] The Packers also tied the Miami Dolphins' record which still stands for the largest Super Bowl lead (14 points) at the end of the first quarter, set in Super Bowl VIII against the Minnesota Vikings and later tied by the Oakland Raiders against the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XV.
This time Pittsburgh managed to respond, driving 49 yards in 13 plays including Roethlisberger's 18-yard run on 3rd down and 9. Shaun Suisham finished the drive with a 33-yard field goal to cut the score to 14–3. Then after forcing a punt, the Steelers drove to midfield, but turned the ball over again when Roethlisberger's pass was intercepted by defensive back Jarrett Bush at the 47. After the interception, Rodgers led the Packers to another score, completing two passes for 20 yards before James Starks's 12-yard run moved the ball to the 21-yard line. On the next play, Green Bay increased their lead to 21–3 with Rodgers' 21-yard touchdown pass to Greg Jennings. Taking the ball back with 2:24 left in the second quarter, Roethlisberger made a 37-yard completion to Antwaan Randle El on their first play. After that, receiver Hines Ward caught three passes for 39 yards on the drive, the last one an 8-yard touchdown catch with 37 seconds left in the half, making the score 21–10 at halftime. This was the fourth time in their four 2011 postseason games that the Packers finished the first half with a lead of at least 11 points. The first half had taken a heavy toll on both teams. The Steelers lost wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders to injury, while the Packers lost receiver Donald Driver along with defensive backs Charles Woodson and Sam Shields. Shields would be the only player among them who would return. The Black Eyed Peas played at halftime.
Second half [ edit ]
Steelers Field Goal Kick
Pittsburgh's defense forced Green Bay to punt on the first drive of the second half, and got the ball at midfield after a facemask call on Tom Crabtree while tackling Antonio Brown on the punt return. The offense then scored in five plays (all runs). First, Rashard Mendenhall broke free along with right sideline for a 17-yard run, then Isaac Redman rushed for 3 yards, and Roethlisberger ran for 6, bringing up third down and 1. On the next play, Redman tried to run up the middle, but was held up at the line, so he backed away and ran to the outside for a 16-yard gain to the 8-yard line. Then Mendenhall scored an 8-yard touchdown run on the next play, making the score 21–17. After forcing a punt, Pittsburgh mounted a drive to the Packers 29-yard line, but Green Bay's defense made a stand. First Roethlisberger's pass was batted down behind the line by linebacker Clay Matthews, then Roethlisberger tried a screen pass to tight end Heath Miller, but Desmond Bishop tackled him for a 3-yard loss. Then on third down Frank Zombo sacked Roethlisberger on the 34, and Suisham's ensuing 52-yard field goal attempt sailed wide left.[65]
On the first play of the fourth quarter, the Steelers lost their third turnover of the game when Mendenhall fumbled the ball while being tackled behind the line by Matthews and Ryan Pickett. Bishop recovered the ball and returned it 7 yards to the Packers 45. Five plays later on third down and 10, Rodgers completed a 38-yard pass to Nelson at the Steelers 2-yard line. Pittsburgh linebacker LaMarr Woodley sacked Rodgers for a 6-yard loss on the next play, but Rodgers threw an 8-yard touchdown pass to Jennings after that, increasing the Packers lead to 28–17. Roethlisberger led the Steelers right back with 6 of 7 completions. After a 9-yard pass to tight end Matt Spaeth, he threw three completions to receiver Mike Wallace for 27 yards to the Green Bay 40-yard line. Then after a 15-yard completion to Ward, he finished the drive with a 25-yard touchdown pass to Wallace. On the two-point conversion play, Roethlisberger faked a handoff to Mendenhall and ran up to the line before pitching the ball to Randle El, who scored on an outside sweep, cutting the Steelers deficit to 3 points at 28–25.
Green Bay took the ball back with just over 7 minutes left, and found themselves facing third down and 10 after two plays, but Rodgers kept the drive going with a 31-yard completion to Jennings over the middle. Starks then ran 14 yards to the Steelers 30. Two plays later, James Jones caught a 21-yard pass at the 8. The Steelers defense kept Green Bay out of the end zone, forcing the Packers to settle for a 23-yard field goal by Mason Crosby that gave Green Bay a 31–25 lead with 2:07 left in regulation.[66]
Pittsburgh got the ball back on their own 13-yard line following a penalty on the kickoff. On their first play, Roethlisberger completed a 15-yard pass to Miller. But after a 5-yard reception by Ward, his next three passes were incomplete, turning the ball over and allowing the Packers to run out the rest of the clock.[66]
Box score [ edit ]
Statistical overview [ edit ]
Nelson was the top receiver of the game with 9 receptions for 140 yards (both career highs) and a touchdown,[68] while also gaining 19 more yards on a kick return, all despite |
, for good beans you need the right soil...one step at a time). We know purists don’t believe in adding sugar, but we thought we’d sweeten the pot with a couple of new reward levels that package our machine with a shiny new Baratza Vario grinder!
That’s right, 9 pounds (4.1 kilograms) of high torque DC motor-driven ceramic burrs, digital controls, and user-programmable grind settings to start your prosumer career off right. It can do anything from a fine espresso grind to a coarse grind for a french press (though we know you won’t be using anything other than your ZPM machine ever again). The Vario retails at around $469, but we’re packaging it with one of our machines for $675, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
If you’re already a backer, but this fancy new level is just too tempting to pass up, never fear! Just click the “Manage Your Pledge” button to adjust your pledge amount and select the new reward level. Please note, though, that this reward level is for US backers only (international backers: we know, we’re working on it - we have to figure out shipping costs and some other issues, but we haven’t forgotten you).
Swag Prices!
In our last update we asked you to consider throwing in for some extra swag to help us reach our new funding goalposts, but we realized we didn’t give you prices! Here they are:
Shot glasses ($10/pair)
T-shirt ($15)
Tamper ($25)
Bag ‘o B&B Dancing Goats Beans ($15)
You can add any amount to your pledge on the “Manage my Pledge” page, and specify your desired items in the final survey. (Also, if anyone cares to try their hand at designing a nifty-looking ZPM t-shirt, we’re all eyes. Your compensation: our love.)
Clarifications!
There was some confusion, so we also want to point out that any international backer is welcome to choose to delay receipt of their machine until we make 240V machines (it’s not restricted to the $300 and $350 backers - if you’re ordering a machine at any reward level, this is an option for you). We also want to clarify, though, that we won’t be making 240V machines until all 120V Kickstarter machines go out, so it will realistically be a wait of around 18 months. You’ll have a chance to specify your preference on our final survey.elevators in the lower level of a Twos in the lower level of a London Underground station. The arrows show each elevator's position and direction of travel. The elevator on the right is preparing to ascend, and the left elevator is descending from the top floor.
An elevator or lift is a vertical transport vehicle that efficiently moves people or goods between floors of a building. They are generally powered by electric motors that either drive traction cables and counterweight systems, or pump hydraulic fluid to raise a cylindrical piston. Languages other than English may have loanwords based on either elevator (e.g., Japanese) or lift (e.g., Cantonese). Because of wheelchair access laws, elevators are often a legal requirement in new multi-story buildings, especially where wheelchair ramps would be impractical.
Some argue that lifts began as simple rope or chain hoists. A lift is essentially a platform that is either pulled or pushed up by a mechanical means. A modern day lift consists of a cab (also called a "cage" or "car") mounted on a platform within an enclosed space called a shaft or sometimes a "hoistway". In the past, lift drive mechanisms were powered by steam and water hydraulic pistons. In a "traction" lift, cars are pulled up by means of rolling steel ropes over a deeply grooved pulley, commonly called a sheave in the industry. The weight of the car is balanced with a counterweight. Sometimes two lifts always move synchronously in opposite directions, and they are each other's counterweight
The friction between the ropes and the pulley furnishes the traction which gives this type of lift its name.
Hydraulic lifts use the principles of hydraulics (in the sense of hydraulic power) to pressurize an above ground or in-ground piston to raise and lower the car. Roped hydraulics use a combination of both ropes and hydraulic power to raise and lower cars. Recent innovations include permanent earth magnet motors, machine room-less rail mounted gearless machines, and microprocessor controls.
The technology used in new installations depends on a variety of factors. Hydraulic lifts are cheaper, but installing cylinders greater than a certain length becomes impractical for very high lift hoistways. For buildings of much over seven stories, traction lifts must be employed instead. Hydraulic lifts are usually slower than traction lifts.
Lifts are a candidate for mass customization. There are economies to be made from mass production of the components, but each building comes with its own requirements like different number of floors, dimensions of the well and usage patterns.
Elevator doors [ change | change source ]
Elevator doors protect riders from being crushed in between the cab and the floor. The most common configuration is to have two panels that meet in the middle, and slide open laterally. In a cascading configuration (potentially allowing wider entryways within limited space), the doors run on independent tracks so that while open, they are tucked behind one another, and while closed, they form cascading layers on one side. This can configured so that two sets of such cascading doors operate like the center opening doors described above, allowing for a very wide elevator cab. In less expensive installations the elevator can also use one large "slab" door: a single panel door the width of the doorway that opens to the left or right laterally.
General
All elevators, whether traction or hydraulic, require a machine room to store large electric motors (or hydraulic pumps) and a controller cabinet. This room is located above or below the hoistway (or only below, for hydraulic elevators) and may contain machinery for a single or a group of elevators. Modern day traction motors boasting gearless and permanent magnet drive can be more compact and efficient; electronic microprocessors have replaced the mechanical relays. As a result, traction elevators can be built without a dedicated room above the shaft, saving valuable space in building planning.
The new lift design presents a departure from the traditional, looped over-the-top traction rope routing of traction elevators. The ends of the cables are fixed to the supporting structure, and the length of the cable are connected to the car and counterweight by means of a force-multiplying, energy saving compound pulley system. Machine room-less elevators have become a welcome alternative to the older hydraulic elevator for low to medium rise buildings.
Kone, a Finnish elevator company, first developed the machine room-less elevator in 1996.
Benefits from a Green Perspective
creates more usable space
uses less energy (70-80% less than hydraulic elevators)
uses no oil
all components are above ground
---this takes away the environmental concern that was created by the hydraulic cylinder being stored underground
Other Benefits
much lower cost than other elevators
ride quality is better due to gearless traction
operates at faster speeds than hydraulics
Facts
Noise level is at 50-55 dBA (A-weighted decibels), which is much lower than other types of elevators
Usually used for low-rise to mid-rise buildings
The motor mechanism is placed in the hoistway itself
The US was slow to accept the MRL Elevator because of codes
---national and local building codes did not address elevators without machine rooms
The first reference to an elevator is in the works of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who reported that Archimedes built his first elevator, probably in 236 B.C. In some literary sources of later historical periods, elevators were mentioned as cabs on a hemp rope and powered by hand or by animals. It is supposed that elevators of this type were installed in the Sinai monastery of Egypt. In the 17th century the prototypes of elevators were located in the palace buildings of England and France.
In 1852, Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator, which prevented the fall of the cab if the cable broke. The design of the Otis safety elevator is somewhat similar to one type still used today. A governor device engages knurled roller(s), locking the elevator to its guides should the elevator move at an excessive speed. He demonstrated it at the New York exposition in the Crystal Palace in 1854.
In 1874, J.W. Meaker patented a method which permitted elevator doors to open and close safely.
The first electric elevator was constructed by the German engineer Werner von Siemens in 1880.
In 1882, when hydraulic power was a well established technology, a company later named the London Hydraulic Power Company was formed. It constructed a network of high pressure mains on both sides of the Thames which, ultimately, extended to 184 miles and powered some 8,000 machines, predominantly lifts (elevators) and cranes.[1]
In 1929, Clarence Conrad Crispen, with Inclinator Company of America, created the first residential elevator. Crispen also invented the first inclined stairlift.http://inclinator.com/about-inclinator.asp
Elevator safety [ change | change source ]
Pneumatic Vacuum Elevators [ change | change source ]
Pneumatic or "Vacuum" elevators operate without cables and can be installed more easily and quickly than their alternatives since their housing comprises prefabricated sections which are considerably narrower than conventional lift shafts. These sections are often transparent and afford the passenger a near 360° view.
Statistically speaking, elevators are extremely safe. Their safety record is unsurpassed by any other vehicle system. In 1998, it was estimated that approximately eight 100-millionths of one percent (1 in 12 million) of elevator rides resulted in an anomaly, and the vast majority of these were minor things such as the doors failing to open. For all practical purposes, there are no cases of elevators simply free-falling and killing the passengers inside; of the 20 to 30 elevator-related deaths each year, most of them are maintenance-related - for example, technicians leaning too far into the shaft or getting caught between moving parts, and most of the rest are attributed to easily avoidable accidents, such as people stepping blindly through doors that open into empty shafts or being strangled by scarves caught in the doors. In fact, prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks, the only known free-fall incident in a modern cable-borne elevator happened in 1945 when a B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building in fog, severing the cables of an elevator cab, which fell from the 75th floor all the way to the bottom of the building, seriously injuring (though not killing) the sole occupant - the female elevator operator. While it is possible (though extraordinarily unlikely) for an elevator's cable to snap, all elevators in the modern era have been fitted with several safety devices which prevent the elevator from simply free-falling and crashing. An elevator cab is typically borne by six or eight hoist cables, each of which is capable on its own of supporting the full load of the elevator plus twenty-five per cent more weight. In addition, there is a device which detects whether the elevator is moving faster than its maximum designed speed; if this happens, the device causes bronze brake shoes to clamp down along the vertical rails in the shaft, stopping the elevator quickly, but not so abruptly as to cause injury. In addition, a hydraulic buffer is installed at the bottom of the shaft to cushion any impact somewhat.
Most recently, there was an incident in a modern cable-borne elevator that took place in a children's hospital in Seattle, Washington on October 9, 2007. The elevator involved was a ThyssenKrupp ISIS machine room-less elevator; The ISIS used Kevlar fiberglass ropes instead of conventional braided-steel ropes all other traction elevators use. One of the ISIS elevators broke free from its cables, slipping between the 6th and 4th floors; the Kevlar ropes were the cause of this incident. After the incident, ThyssenKrupp discontinued production of the ISIS and, the following year, replaced it with the Synergy machine room-less elevator, which uses conventional braided-steel ropes, making it much safer.
Hydraulic elevators [ change | change source ]
Past problems with early hydraulic elevators meant those built prior to a code change in 1972 were subject to possible catastrophic failure. The code had previously required only single-bottom hydraulic cylinders. In the event of a cylinder breach, an uncontrolled fall of the elevator might result. Because it is impossible to verify the system completely without a pressurized casing (as described below), it is necessary to remove the piston to inspect it. The cost of removing the piston is such that it makes no economic sense to re-install the old cylinder; therefore it is necessary to replace the cylinder and install a new piston.[source?] Another solution to protect against a cylinder blowout is to install a "life jacket." This is a device which, in the event of an excessive downward speed, clamps onto the cylinder and stops the car. This device is also known as a Rupture Valve in some parts of the world.
In addition to the safety concerns for older hydraulic elevators, there is risk of leaking hydraulic oil into the aquifer and causing potential environmental contamination. This has led to the introduction of PVC liners (casings) around hydraulic cylinders which can be monitored for integrity.
In the past decade, recent innovations in inverted hydraulic jacks have eliminated the costly process of drilling the ground to install a borehole jack. This also eliminates the threat of corrosion to the system and increases safety.
Types of hoist mechanisms [ change | change source ]
There are at least four means of moving an elevator:
Traction elevators [ change | change source ]
Geared and gearless traction elevators
Geared traction machines are driven by AC or DC electric motors. Geared machines use worm gears to control mechanical movement of elevator cars by "rolling" steel hoist ropes over a drive sheave which is attached to a gearbox driven by a high speed motor. These machines are generally the best option for basement or overhead traction use for speeds up to 500 ft/min (2.5 m/s).
Gearless traction machines are low speed (low RPM), high torque electric motors powered either by AC or DC. In this case, the drive sheave is directly attached to the end of the motor. Gearless traction elevators can reach speeds of up to 2,000 ft/min (10 m/s), or even higher. A brake is mounted between the motor and drive sheave (or gearbox) to hold the elevator stationary at a floor. This brake is usually an external drum type and is actuated by spring force and held open electrically; a power failure will cause the brake to engage and prevent the elevator from falling (see inherent safety and safety engineering).
In each case, cables are attached to a hitch plate on top of the cab or may be "underslung" below a cab, and then looped over the drive sheave to a counterweight attached to the opposite end of the cables which reduces the amount of power needed to move the cab. The counterweight is located in the hoist-way and rides a separate rail system; as the car goes up, the counterweight goes down, and vice versa. This action is powered by the traction machine which is directed by the controller, typically a relay logic or computerized device that directs starting, acceleration, deceleration and stopping of the elevator cab. The weight of the counterweight is typically equal to the weight of the elevator cab plus 40-50% of the capacity of the elevator. The grooves in the drive sheave are specially designed to prevent the cables from slipping. "Traction" is provided to the ropes by the grip of the grooves in the sheave, thereby the name. As the ropes age and the traction grooves wear, some traction is lost and the ropes must be replaced and the sheave repaired or replaced.
Elevators with more than 100' (30 m) of travel have a system called compensation. This is a separate set of cables or a chain attached to the bottom of the counterweight and the bottom of the elevator cab. This makes it easier to control the elevator, as it compensates for the differing weight of cable between the hoist and the cab. If the elevator cab is at the top of the hoist-way, there is a short length of hoist cable above the car and a long length of compensating cable below the car and vice versa for the counterweight. If the compensation system uses cables, there will be an additional sheave in the pit below the elevator, to guide the cables. If the compensation system uses chains, the chain is guided by a bar mounted between the counterweight rails.
Hydraulic elevators [ change | change source ]
Conventional hydraulic elevators. They use an underground cylinder, are quite common for low level buildings with 2-7 floors, and have speeds of up to 200 feet/minute (1 meter/second).
. They use an underground cylinder, are quite common for low level buildings with 2-7 floors, and have speeds of up to 200 feet/minute (1 meter/second). Holeless hydraulic elevators were developed in the 1970s, and use a pair of above ground cylinders, which makes it practical for environmentally or cost sensitive buildings with 2, 3, or 4 floors.
were developed in the 1970s, and use a pair of above ground cylinders, which makes it practical for environmentally or cost sensitive buildings with 2, 3, or 4 floors. Roped hydraulic elevators use both above ground cylinders and a rope system, which combines the versatility of inground hydraulic with the reliability of holeless hydraulic, even though they can serve up to 8-10 floors.
Climbing elevator [ change | change source ]
A climbing elevator is a self-ascending elevator with its own propulsion. The propulsion can be done by an electric or a combustion engine. Climbing elevators are used in guyed masts or towers, in order to make easy access to parts of these constructions, such as flight safety lamps for maintenance. An example would be the Moonlight Towers in Austin, Texas, where the elevator holds only one person and equipment for maintenance.
Emergency power operation (EPR) [ change | change source ]
Many elevator installations now feature emergency power systems which allow elevator use in blackout situations and prevent people from becoming trapped in elevators.
Traction elevators [ change | change source ]
When power is lost in a traction elevator system, all elevators will initially come to a halt. One by one, each car in the group will return to the lobby floor, open its doors and shut down. People in the remaining elevators may see an indicator light or hear a voice announcement informing them that the elevator will return to the lobby shortly. Once all cars have successfully returned, the system will then automatically select one or more cars to be used for normal operations and these cars will return to service. The car(s) selected to run under emergency power can be manually overridden by a key or strip switch in the lobby. In order to help prevent entrapment, when the system detects that it is running low on power, it will bring the running cars to the lobby or nearest floor, open the doors and shut down.
Hydraulic elevators [ change | change source ]
In hydraulic elevator systems, emergency power will lower the elevators to the lowest landing and open the doors to allow passengers to exit. The doors then close after an adjustable time period and the car remains unusable until reset, usually by cycling the elevator main power switch. Typically, due to the high current draw when starting the pump motor, hydraulic elevators are not run using standard emergency power systems. Buildings like hospitals and nursing homes usually size their emergency generators to accommodate this draw. However, the increasing use of current limiting motor starters, commonly known as "Soft-Start" contactors, avoid much of this problem and the current draw of the pump motor is less of a limiting concern.
Elevator convenience features [ change | change source ]
Elevator floor indicator
Elevators may feature talking devices as an accessibility aid for the blind. In addition to floor arrival notifications, the computer announces the direction of travel, and notifies the passengers before the doors are to close.
In addition to the call buttons, elevators usually have floor indicators (often illuminated by LED) and direction lanterns. The former are almost universal in cab interiors with more than two stops and may be found outside the elevators as well on one or more of the floors. Floor indicators can consist of a dial with a rotating needle, but the most common types are those with successively illuminated floor indications or LCDs. Likewise, a change of floors or an arrival at a floor is indicated by a sound, depending on the elevator.
Direction lanterns are also found both inside and outside elevator cars, but they should always be visible from outside because their primary purpose is to help people decide whether or not to get on the elevator. If somebody waiting for the elevator wants to go up, but a car comes first that indicates that it is going down, then the person may decide not to get on the elevator. If the person waits, then one will still stop going up. Direction indicators are sometimes etched with arrows or shaped like arrows and/or use the convention that one that lights up red means "down" and green means "up". Since the color convention is often undermined or overrided by systems that do not invoke it, it is usually used only in conjunction with other differentiating factors. An example of a place whose elevators use only the color convention to differentiate between directions is the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where a single circle can be made to light up green for "up" and red for "down." Sometimes directions must be inferred by the position of the indicators relative to one another.
In addition to lanterns, most elevators have a chime to indicate if the elevator is going up or down either before or after the doors open, usually in conjunction with the lanterns lighting up. Universally, one chime is for up, two is for down, and none indicates an elevator that is 'free'.
Observatory service elevators often convey other facts of interest, including elevator speed, stopwatch, and current position (altitude), as with the case for Taipei 101's service elevators.
The mechanical and electrical design of elevators is dictated according to various standards (aka elevator codes), which may be international, national, state, regional or city based. Whereas once many standards were prescriptive, specifying exact criteria which must be complied with, there has recently been a shift towards more performance-based standards where the onus falls on the designer to ensure that the elevator meets or exceeds the standard.
Some of the national elevator standards include:
Australia – AS1735
Canada – CAN/CSA B44
Europe – EN 81 series (EN 81-1, EN 81-2, EN 81-28, EN 81-70, EN 12015, EN 12016, EN 13015, etc.)
USA – ASME A17
Because an elevator is part of a building, it must also comply with standards relating to earthquake resilience, fire standards, electrical wiring rules and so forth.
The American National Elevator Standards Group (ANESG) sets an elevator weight standard to be 2200 lbs.
Additional requirements relating to access by disabled persons, may be mandated by laws or regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act.PLACENTIA – The Yorba Linda Water District board on Thursday held firm in maintaining a $25 monthly water-rate increase.
Nearly 300 people packed the board room and filled the lobby holding signs that read, “Do the right thing. Rescind the rates!”
More than 40 customers expressed their opposition to the increase that went into effect Oct. 1.
District officials say a rate increase is necessary because water conservation mandated by the state during the next year would result in a projected $9 million loss in revenue and district reserves would empty by 2018. The district serves most of Yorba Linda and parts of Placentia and Brea.
The meeting was called after the Yorba Linda Taxpayers Association collected more than 5,500 signatures in an effort to overturn the increase, which was approved by the board Sept. 17. The county Registrar of Voters certified that there was a sufficient number of signatures, which the Taxpayers Association said meant the district had to eliminate the increase or present the issue to voters.
But the board rejected the petition because, according to a staff recommendation, the referendum process is not allowed by the law that applies to the water rate resolution. Those laws are governed by California’s Proposition 218, which deals with local government finance.
“Yorba Linda taxpayers chose the wrong avenue,” Yorba Linda Water District President Ric Collett said.
Jeff Decker, the taxpayers association’s co-founder, said the fight isn’t over.
“We expected it,” Decker said of Thursday’s decision, adding the association will take the next legal steps. “They had a chance to act as leaders, and they acted like bureaucrats.”
Denise Salcido, a part-time college professor who has lived in Yorba Linda for five years, said she was charged the rate increase prior to the effective date of Oct. 1 and asked for an audit to look into the issue.
“We had to cut back, but I’m not seeing anything where you guys are asked to cut back,” Salcido said during a public comment period of the special meeting.
Others also asked the district to look at cutting costs.
“I do believe that we should have a fair, short-term increase,” Marshall Burke said. “You guys need to be transparent.”
Since the increase went into effect, the basic service charge increased to $41.57.
Contact the writer: 714-704-3709 or desalazar@ocregister.comDeadly Premonition Director’s Cut vs original Deadly Premonition video comparison
A lot of people have been wondering how the new Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut visuals stack up to that of the original Xbox 360 release. More notably to see if the Director’s Cut framerate is as poor as some people have been reporting. Thanks to supergreatfriend on Youtube, we can finally see the two games side by side, and draw our conclusions from there.
The most noticable difference is the removal of the green filter in the Director’s Cut, that and the framerate does chug a few times in the new iteration of the game. Also, strangely enough, in the Director’s Cut, it appears they removed the flowing water effects entirely from the river, and the new water in the Director’s Cut look pretty awful.
Maybe it’s just the video, but overall, the new release doesn’t look much better than the original release so much as it just looks slightly different, and in some cases, even worse. It’s a shame that it didn’t look and perform better in every regard, after all this release is coming out 3 years after the original game and costs twice as much now than it did back then. Either way, I’m sure the Director’s Cut still looks better in other areas of the game. Watch the video for yourself below!
[Source]Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo were amused to be asked about their'relationship' during Thursday's pre-event press conference for the Australian MotoGP.
The Movistar Yamaha team-mates are separated by 18 points at the head of the world championship with three rounds remaining and, given their 'frosty' past history, it wasn't a surprising question.
Both admitted the increasing title intensity has changed the atmosphere, but insisted they are experienced enough to handle the situation.
"We are very happy about your interest," joked championship leader Rossi. "We have a diary about our relationship, which we will keep secret until the last race!
"No, it's always difficult when you fight for the championship. Sometimes you have also difficult moments, but I think it's normal. We get used to staying together in the same team and also we are very focussed on our own work and at the same time have respect from both sides.
"So I think this is a good situation, but for sure now we are hard rivals and the battle is difficult but is normal."
Lorenzo, winner of six races compared with four for Rossi, added: "Usually in MotoGP we are asked about the circuit, tyres, or settings... But anyway [our relationship] is ok. We are two world champions that this year want the same thing and it's normal that the relationship gets a little bit more tense.
"But it would be the same with Dani, Marc or any other riders if we are fighting together for the world championship. I'm sure in the future we will again have a more relaxed relationship."
For the third time this season, Rossi got the better of Lorenzo in wet conditions at Motegi, snatching second place from the #99 as both struggled with front tyre wear in the closing stages.
That result means Rossi can afford to finish one place behind Lorenzo even if the Spaniard wins the remaining three races, but few - least of all Rossi - believe it will be that simple.
"18 points can be a good advantage but also can become very small," Rossi said. "We have three races but now we have this track that I like very much with some great races and great results. But as always, all the rivals are very strong and especially Jorge is also very fast here. So from tomorrow morning, will start another battle here at Phillip Island.
"This year in MotoGP, from the first race, can have six riders ready for the victory or at least for the podium," Rossi added. "So it is very difficult to make any calculations [with the points] because for example in the last races also Pedrosa come back very, very strong.
"He beat me in Aragon on the last lap and in Motegi he was able to win. Have also Marquez and the two Ducatis that are very strong. You have to be at 100% because if not it is very easy to lose a lot of points.
"Every year is a story, but this year [the title] is still completely open with three races to go. So I think it is the most difficult yes."
Lorenzo is currently considered the quickest of the title rivals in normal dry conditions, but Rossi has made the least mistakes and coped better with bad weather.
"Usually I am very constant," confirmed the seven time MotoGP champion. "In the last two years we improve a lot the way to work and the setting of the bike, so more-or-less I am always competitive in the races. I can ride at the maximum and make always good results and I'm quite strong in the wet.
"But anyway it is not finished yet and the best rider will be the one that wins [the title] in Valencia."When we set out to destroy science fiction with this Kickstarter, we didn't want it to be your ordinary, run-of-the-mill campaign. We wanted it to be full of smashing, crashing POC voices, telling what it really means to be POC reading and writing science fiction. One of the ways we hope to do that is by sharing a series of personal essays about the experience of being POC in science fiction.
Personal Essay: "The People Men Don’t See" by Nisi Shawl
“Why am I the only black person here?”
I asked myself this during the James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium hosted by the University of Oregon. As a person of color involved in the science fiction community since 1983, I was used to being what Nalo Hopkinson terms “the fly in the sugar bowl.” But over the years my isolation had diminished. Yet in December 2015, I might easily have resumed my old habit of shaking the hand of every POC at a given public SF-related function. Another African-American woman came into the auditorium for a while at one point. That and the presence of half a dozen ethnically Asian attendees would have kept me at it for a few minutes, but introductions to everyone of color could have been made during a bathroom break. The rest of the people in the room were unambiguously white.
Why?
Putting the question to my fellow attendees (I’m not shy), I learned that Eugene, the town where the University of Oregon is located, has long been a bastion of Caucasianhood. I learned that the two black women other than me who had won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award (given annually to a work of speculative fiction which expands or explores our understanding of gender) were East Coasters. Since the symposium’s organizers focused on panelists who’d contributed to the correspondence forming most of the Tiptree archive they’d just acquired, they didn’t offer to reimburse anyone else’s travel expenses. Which meant that the effort of finding the time to attend and shouldering the financial burden of doing so fell to 2011’s winner Andrea Hairston and 2012’s Kiini Ibura Salaam. Which effort and burden they had declined.
Logistical reasons aside, there was another, deeper cause for the absence of POC. L. Timmel Duchamp touched on it in her remarks on the panel on publishing when talking about popular culture’s awakening SF sensibility. This awakening is ambiguous in its effects; though it can render SF accessible to mass audiences, it can also privilege mainstream narratives, imposing them on a formerly marginalized genre and the marginalized voices seeking representation there. As Duchamp noted in her blog post about the symposium, “intelligibility is neither obvious nor ‘natural’... Some stories are simply invisible to those who don’t venture outside mainstream culture.”
What happens when a story is unintelligible? It’s labeled worthless, weak, ineffective. It is rejected, unpublished, unsupported. Sometimes, as in the real-life case of Professor Steve Locke, a different and more easily accepted story is substituted. Police stopped Locke in the street and detained him because he “fit the description” of the burglar who had broken into a woman’s nearby home. Writing about the incident (bit.ly/1m3sk3R), Locke points out that, despite a lack of physical mistreatment, the encounter infuriated him. The violence he experienced was done to his personal narrative, the story each of us tells ourselves about who we are. This personal narrative is how we make sense of the world. Locke’s clearly visible Massachusetts College of Art and Design ID card, and the several discrepancies between his appearance and the sketchy outline of the suspect’s, counted for nothing in the face of the policemen’s preferred story.
Are my fictions subject to being discounted because they don’t “fit the description” of SF? Are my authorial imperatives, my plots, characters, and settings misunderstood because they diverge from the mainstream? Anecdotes are my only answers to these questions, and they’re hardly conclusive. I once had to rewrite a story when an editor told me I’d failed to evoke the criminality and danger of a neighborhood modeled on the completely middle-class one where I lived as a child. Once a different editor rejected another story because he didn’t believe a girl would kill her sister out of envy of her straight hair. And so on.
Digesting nonstandard narratives is an intellectual attainment, one the Tiptree Motherboard is conscious of as such and which it promotes via the award. Throughout James Tiptree, Jr.’s life, though—the years 1967 to 1977, during which the majority of his oeuvre was published (including “The Women Men Don’t See,” basis for this essay’s title), before his exposure as the pseudonymous persona of Alice Sheldon—there was no Tiptree Motherboard, no award advocating for marginalized stories. Other than Samuel R. Delany, there were no major black SF authors. No major SF authors of any color. The milieu in which Tiptree’s correspondence took place, and which the symposium’s organizers perhaps unwittingly duplicated, was that of nearly exclusive whiteness.
Yet it was also a magical time, a time in which one sort of divergent narrative did begin to emerge. As I’ve said elsewhere, my realization that I could make a career of writing SF came from reading Tiptree correspondent Suzy McKee Charnas’s 1974 novel Walk to the End of the World. “Wow,” I thought, “you can get away with doing this, and people will even pay you for it.”
There are significant connections between the rise of feminist SF and the rise of POC SF, though the timelines aren’t exactly concurrent. Intersectionality is an actual factor in how the world works: SF’s feminist Aqueduct Press published the three black James Tiptree, Jr. Award winners; in his welcome to the symposium, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Doug Blandy quoted the Octavia Butler-inspired anthology Octavia’s Brood, co-edited by two more black women, Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. And then Imarisha and brown were announced as winners, respectively, of the brand new James Tiptree, Jr. Fellowship, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Fellowship, created in 2014 to support research at the University of Oregon’s Tiptree archive. These connections validate POC’s place in the genre today and assure the strength of our presence here in the future.
Let’s keep moving forward, even as we glance back occasionally over our shoulders at the past. Let’s tell our own stories and insist we’ve got them right. Let’s keep on writing what needs to be written. Eventually it will be of no real consequence that there are people men don’t see. Our actions will speak for us. Our words will make our worlds known.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
______________
Nisi Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. Her story collection Filter House co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award. Shawl has edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars and WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity; she also co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. With Cynthia Ward she coauthored 2005 Tiptree Longlist book Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out from Tor in September 2016.He also refused to reconsider his decision to sit out the network’s Thursday night debate — the last before the Iowa caucuses in five days — and said he’d move forward with his own competing event to raise money for wounded veterans.
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Speaking on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Trump continued his long-running feud with Kelly, who he has been criticizing ever since she challenged him on his derision of women at the first GOP debate, in August.
“I have zero respect for Megyn Kelly,” Trump said. “I don’t think she’s good at what she does and I think she’s highly overrated. And, frankly, she’s a moderator; I thought her question |
who cooperates with one another…but we do actually have a reasonable approximation of who associates with one another. It’s called Facebook. Meaning, it seems to me, that we — by which I mean Facebook itself — may actually have the power to measure and quantify individual (relative) morality. (Which is presumably a vector in some kind of N-dimensional space rather than a single-digit rating from 1 to 10.) What’s more, Facebook could actually observe how that value changes over time.
So, in theory at least, it may already be within our power to identify some of the factors that cause otherwise intelligent people to adopt and propagate essentially fascist and misogynist ideas, such as Stormfront, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Red Pill. That, I think — unlike certain other examples I could name — would be an experiment worth trying.Over R570-billion will be needed for investment across South Africa’s water value chain, in the coming 10 years, according to Minister for Water and Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa.
The money is needed to pay for water resources infrastructure, water services and water conservation and demand management across national government, municipalities and the country’s existing 12 water boards.
The vast funding needs raise the probability that water tariffs for consumers are likely to rise in the coming years.
Molewa was speaking at a briefing in Cape Town on the progress being made in her department’s turnaround strategy.
R162-billion was needed for water resources infrastructure, R394-billion was needed for water services, and a further R16-billion was needed for conservation demand management.
The figures form part of a long-term investment plan currently being finalised by the department, according to its chief operations officer Trevor Balzer.
At current funding levels this represented a rate of 44%, he said.
In other words this represented a 56% shortfall in funding over the next 10 years of around R320-billion.
“We’ve really got to ramp up to meet that target,” he said.
But Molewa said the gaping funding gap did not represent a “train smash”.
The government has identified water as a critical resource, she said. Through the presidential infrastructure co-ordinating committee, critical projects would be elevated for funding.
The department also did a number of projects off budget, such as the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, where the private sector partners played a role.
Similarly plans to create the R20-billion Umzimvubu dam, announced during President Jacob Zuma’s State Of The Nation speech was likely to include private sector role players she noted.
The amount of money needed does raise the spectre of increased water prices for consumers.
The department is currently undertaking a tariff review, in a bid to standardise the tariffs set across various sectors, which will be finalised by the end of the year.
Once this was done an increase in water tariffs was “probable”, said Molewa.
“It is very clear that we are going to have a lot of money needed,” she said.
“When you have a lot of money that needs to be repaid, it goes without saying that the costs are likely to be very high, and therefor the charges that have got to be paid may also be high.”
There was the possibility of cross-subsidisation across various consumers, she said, as well as the possibility of subsidisation by government, and these issues still needed to be negotiated with treasury.
But she declined to say more as discussions were in their early stages.
The country’s water boards are also owed billions from local municipalities.
In reply to a parliamentary question from the Democratic Alliance last month, Molewa noted that municipal debt to the 12 water boards has sky-rocketed to over R2.1-billion as of December last year.
This was against annual sales by the water boards of around R8-billion in total sales.
Molewa said that in some cases, interest on the debt to these bodies had to be written off, but the principal debt however had not.
The department could not give immediate figures regarding how much debt had been written off against which municipality.
The department has also been criticised for its poor handling of water license applications with delays impacting on industrial and mining developments.
The department had made marked inroads into the backlogs however said Molewa.
From the launch of its Letsema project in January 2010 it has reduced outstanding applications to the current 470. The department had finalised 3263 licenses from April 2010 to March 2012, while the 470 current backlog was being processed alongside 509 new applications received in 2011 and 2012.
There were however new applications being received all the time. But “strategic ones” were being handled simultaneously to the backlog said Molewa.
As part of the turn around, a Business Process Re-engineering Committee (BPRC) was set up to address these and a number of other challenges that have plagued the department.
One of the recommendations by the BPRC was that the 12 water boards be reduced through merging them with others.
The intention was to build fewer, stronger and more financially viable bodies.
The BPRC also looked at infrastructure and asset management improvement in the course of its work.
Interventions had already been introduced to address problems in this arena.
They include the capturing 90% of water assets on the department’s SAP systems; the development of a mechanism for continuous asset evaluation, and the investigation of all the department’s current lease agreements.
This entailed cooperation with the department of public works in the examination of 15 major leases, to ensure that they are market related and not open to legal dispute, according to the department.The Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI was pictured at a meeting with Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and other members of the campaign on March 31, 2016, just days after he met with two people tied to the Russian government.
You can see the photo featuring George Papadopoulos, sitting two seats from the left of Sessions, above. It was posted to Instagram by Trump, who was touting his campaign’s foreign policy and national security team. Sessions is now the U.S. Attorney General and has recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his ties to the campaign.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 5, but the conviction was unsealed on October 30, the same day that two other former members of the campaign, ex-chairman Paul Manafort and adviser Rick Gates, were indicted on charges unrelated to the campaign.
Papadopolous worked for the Trump campaign starting in March 2016. Trump described him as a “an oil and gas consultant; excellent guy,” during a conference call with the Washington Post that same month. He was part of a national security team led by Sessions that also included energy industry executive Carter Page, former government inspector general Joe Schmitz and former Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg.
The meeting pictured in the Trump Instagram photo occurred on March 31. According to court documents, Papadopoulos had multiple meetings with two people tied to the Russian government in the weeks before that meeting. At the meeting, Papadopoulos identified himself as having “connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin, prosecutors said.
According to court documents, Papadopoulos, then living in London, met with an unnamed “campaign supervisor” on March 6, 2016, and learned he would be brought in as a foreign policy adviser. He told prosecutors that the supervisor told him “that a principal foreign policy focus of the campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia.”
On March 14, Papadopoulos, while traveling in Italy, met with a London-based professor who “took great interest” in him after learning of his role with the campaign. The professor claimed to have “substantial connections” with Russian government officials, and Papadopoulos thought he could use those to increase his importance with the campaign, according to court documents. On March 24, the professor introduced Papadopoulos to a “female Russian national.” The professor told Papadopoulos he was the niece of Vladimir Putin, but Papadopoulos later learned she was not a relative. At that meeting, Papadopoulos said the topic of the discussion was “to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.”
After the March 24 meeting, Papadopoulos emailed the unnamed campaign supervisor and was told “great work.”
You can read the court documents outlining the offense Papadopolous admitted to below:
According to court documents, Papadopolous was first interviewed by the FBI on January 27, 2017, prior to Mueller’s involvement in the case, but during the agency’s investigation into the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Papadopoulos admitted to lying about when he began working as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign. He also lied about his contacts with two foreign nationals, an “overseas professor” and “a certain female Russian national.”
“Through his false statements and omissions, defendant Papadopoulos impeded the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election,” prosecutors said in court documents. The document was signed by Mueller and authored by prosecutors Jeannie Rhee, Andrew Goldstein and Aaron Zelinsky, all members of Mueller’s team.
Papadopoulos told the FBI that the professor, who has “substantial connections to Russian government officials,” told Papadopoulos the Russians had “dirt” on then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos admitted that he lied during his interview he told FBI agents when he said that he learned that information from the professor prior to the campaign. “In truth and in fact, however,” Papadopoulos, “learned he would be an adviser to the campaign in early March and met the professor on or about March 14, 2016; the professor only took interest in (Papadopoulos) because of his status with the campaign.” He also admitted that the professor told him on or about April 26, 2016, about the “thousands of emails,” when Papadopoulos had been an adviser for more than a month.
Papadopoulos also told the agents that the professor was “a nothing,” and “just a guy talk(ing) up connections or something,” but he admitted the professor “had substantial connections to Russian government officials (and had met with some of these officials in Moscow immediately prior to telling (Papadopoulos) about the ‘thousands of emails) and over a period of months, (Papadopoulos) repeatedly sought to use the professor’s Russian connections in an effort to arrange a meeting between the campaign and Russian government officials.”
He also claimed he met a “certain Russian national” before joining the campaign and “their communication consisted of emails such as ‘How, how are you?’,” when “in truth and fact,” Papadopoulos “met the female Russian national on or about March 24, 2016, after he had become an adviser to the campaign.” Papadopoulos also admitted “he believed that she had connections to Russian government officials; and he sought to use her Russian connections over a period of months in an effort to arrange a meeting between the campaign and Russian officials.”
Papadopoulos was arrested on July 27, 2017, and “following his arrest,” has “met with the government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.”On January 22, 1998, Theodore Kaczynski pleaded guilty to a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23. The "Unabomber," now serving a life sentence in prison without parole, had been designing explosives in a one-room cabin deep in the Montana wilderness.
When FBI agents arrived at the tiny house after Kaczynski's arrest, they discovered a live bomb, packaged and ready to be mailed, under the bed. Kaczynski built his bombs so that they couldn't be linked back to him, and thus far the FBI had gleaned only a few clues from debris fragments. Normally, a bomb disposal squad could simply remove the device and explode it harmlessly, but the FBI needed this bomb intact for forensic evidence. How could they defuse the explosive without destroying it?
The FBI knew it couldn't handle the problem alone, so it called in a crack team of nerds: Chris Cherry, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque; veteran Sandia assistant Rod Owenby; and Vic Poisson, a long-time associate of the Riverside, Calif., police department. The team flew to Montana and, one by one, entered the chemical-filled, 10- by 12-foot cabin, Popular Science reported in October 1998.
Cherry's team constructed wooden ramps up and into the cabin, and a remote-controlled robot carefully carried the device to a nearby field. The bomb was then placed on a wooden stool; the team built an igloo of heavy timbers around the stool, covering the structure with a blue tarp held down by sandbags. Nobody was overly concerned that the bomb would detonate while it was being moved, because Kaczynski's bombs were always designed to explode when they were opened. But from this point on, the wooden structure would contain any explosion, with the blue tarp acting like a big tablecloth to capture any forensic crumbs.
Read the rest of the story in the October 1998 issue of Popular Science.More help is on the way for workers who get laid off or struggle to carve out new careers for themselves in an uncertain economy.
Professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs), for example, will be able to join companies on training attachments without having to be on their payroll. The Government will chip in with a training allowance of up to $4,000 a month for them.
Rank-and-file workers will receive allowances to try out new jobs for up to three months before they decide if these are suitable for them.
The Government has also made special efforts to help the vulnerable segment of PMETs aged 40 and above. There will be higher salary subsidies for employers who hire people from this group or those who have been unemployed for one year or more.
These were among a series of measures to help workers announced yesterday by Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say when Parliament debated his ministry's budget.
The biggest rise in subsidy was for the Professional Conversion Programme that helps PMETs switch sectors and jobs. The Government will continue to subsidise 70 per cent of a worker's salary under this scheme, but has doubled the cap from $2,000 to $4,000 a month. This will encourage employers to hire PMETs seeking to switch careers at higher salaries.
In another incentive to hire PMETs aged 40 and above who have been unemployed for more than a year, employers will be offered higher wage subsidies under the Career Support Programme for 18 months, up from 12 months.
To make it easier for smaller firms to join this programme, the minimum salary of eligible workers will be lowered from $4,000 to $3,600 per month for them.
In an unprecedented move, the Government will engage two foreign employment agencies - which have worked with governments in Britain and Australia - to help PMETs find jobs. "They were selected because of their business focus on active job seekers - these are the workers who are actively looking for jobs - rather than passive job seekers where the jobs were looking for the workers," Mr Lim said.
The workers must take responsibility for their careers, too, instead of having a sense of entitlement. "We can only help those who want to help themselves," said Mr Lim.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has formed a task force to study how freelancers can be given more protection.
Mr Lim also hit out at firms that continue to prefer foreigners over Singaporeans. The number of companies on MOM's watch list has swelled to 250 from 100 a year ago. "About 50 of them have not been receptive or cooperative," he said. These companies will not be allowed to hire any more foreigners until they improve, he said.
Besides helping workers with jobs, Mr Lim announced that the Central Provident Fund Board is reviewing its investment schemes so that Singaporeans can save enough for retirement. In Parliament yesterday, Ministers of State Teo Ser Luck and Sam Tan also spelt out the ministry's plans to do more to protect foreign workers and improve the lot of low-wage workers.
The ministry's budget of $1.73 billion for this year was approved by the House after a 4 1/2-hour debate - the longest period allocated among all ministries. MOM also had to field the most questions from MPs in the Budget debate, reflecting rising worries over jobs.
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Logistics sector first to tap Attach and Train scheme
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Lifelong freelancer who saves with discipline
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Charles Chong calls out Workers' Party on issue(Natural News) Two recent events have forced a glaring spotlight on the $30 billion a year vaccine industry: First, President Donald Trump announced a plan to establish a commission chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) to investigate vaccine safety and scientific integrity. The second, again featuring RFK, is when he and actor Robert De Niro announced a $100,000 reward to any scientist (or anyone else) who could conclusively prove the safety of mercury (in the form thimerosal) in vaccines.
Both events have unleashed a veritable storm of fury from the mainstream media, many of whom label both De Niro and RFK “vaccine skeptics” or “anti-vaccine,” despite the men’s repeated objections and insistence that they are pro-vaccine and dutifully had all their children vaccinated. Their very specific concern is the volume of vaccines being added to the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule, and the presence of mercury in many of those vaccines. (RELATED: Keep up with the latest in the debate on mercury in vaccines at Thimerosal.news)
The CDC determines the immunization schedule, and failure to comply with it means children can be refused admittance to public schools. And that schedule certainly merits closer scrutiny. The agency has doubled the number of required vaccines since the mid-1980s, with nearly 40 doses now required before the age of two years. Coincidentally – or so the CDC would have you believe – autism numbers have increased 10-fold since the 1980s, and asthma has more than doubled in the same period.
While the media has busily been defending the vaccine industry, labeling all who question it as “anti-science” and a risk to public health, they have managed to avoid broadcasting a glaring conflict of interest that should have made headlines worldwide: The CDC’s own cozy relationship with and direct involvement in the vaccine industry. (What has the CDC been hiding? Find out at Vaccines.news)
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The CDC proudly claims the following about its own Immunization Safety Office: “Sound immunization policies affecting children and adults in the U.S. depend on continuous monitoring of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. CDC uses many strategies to assess vaccine safety, to identify health problems possibly related to vaccines, and to conduct studies that help determine whether a health problem is caused by a specific vaccine. CDC also works with other federal government agencies and other stakeholders to determine the appropriate public health response to vaccine safety concerns and to communicate the benefits and risks of vaccines.” [Emphasis added]
Were any of this true, it would mean that the CDC would have to be 100 percent divorced from the industry which it is policing, yet this is not the case.
The media has consistently derided RFK for his claim that the CDC holds patents on over 20 vaccines. In an independent effort to confirm or refute this allegation, Ginger Taylor of Green Med Info recently asked a friend, Mark Blaxill, an Intellectual Property expert, to determine just exactly how many such patents the CDC does in fact own.
To everybody’s shock, Blaxill found not 20, but 57 patents granted to the CDC. Since one of the patents did not seem to be directly applicable to a vaccine, the official number was reduced to 56, and included patents on vaccines for: flu, rotavirus, Hepatitis A, Pneumococcal disease, gastroenteritis, SARS, and interestingly enough, a vaccine to be used for Zika, among many, many others.
This is the ultimate example of appointing the fox to guard the hen house. How could anyone ever trust the CDC to genuinely assess the safety of a vaccine, considering it costs half a billion dollars to develop one, and they clearly have a vested financial interest in getting these shots to market?
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, summed it up perfectly when she said, “The CDC has a very hard time investigating in an unbiased way what is happening to our children because of ideological and financial conflicts of interest.”
It is time that the mainstream media stops dutifully parroting whatever information it is fed by the CDC and the vaccine industry, and starts holding them accountable for the damage they have inflicted and continue to inflict on our children.
Sources for this article include:
EcoWatch.com
WorldMercuryProject.org
GreenMedInfo.com
UPI.com
LaLeva.orgMaryland State Police said a trooper fatally shot a suspect Monday in Frederick. The trooper opened fire after an SUV rammed into a police car, pinning a Frederick police officer inside, state police said. The shooting was reported at a Sheetz gas station in the 1300 block of East Patrick Drive.
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Maryland State Police said a trooper fatally shot a suspect Monday in Frederick.State police identified the suspect as Kevin T. Brunson, 45.The trooper opened fire after Brunson rammed into a police car with a stolen SUV, pinning a Frederick police officer inside, state police said.The shooting was reported at a Sheetz gas station in the 1300 block of East Patrick Drive.A state police spokesman said that around 8:30 a.m., a trooper noticed expired tags on a parked vehicle that turned out to match the tags of a vehicle stolen Sunday night in an armed robbery in Baltimore City. The trooper waited for backup, which included a member of the state police aviation unit and a Frederick police officer.Police said two troopers approached the vehicle, and Brunson then got into the vehicle and used it to ram the approaching Frederick police officer's vehicle, pinning the officer inside."The preliminary investigation shows he rammed that officer, drove him up on the curb, pinning him in the vehicle, and jumped out of his vehicle while both vehicles were still in motion," Maryland State Police spokesman Greg Shipley said.Police said the Brunson got out of the vehicle with one or both hands in his pockets. State police said a witness told investigators that Brunson was seen pulling his hand out quickly and rapidly lunging toward a trooper, who then fired his weapon, striking Brunson in the torso. Witnesses said they heard four to five shots."The trooper was on foot and encountered the individual and fired his weapon, striking the suspect," Shipley said.State police identified the trooper who shot the man as Trooper First Class William B. Jansen, a five-year veteran of the Maryland State Police.State police said Brunson had a large folding knife, cash, a crack pipe, clothes and other belongings. No other weapons were found.The Frederick police officer was treated and released from a hospital.Bill Day, of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, said it happened as he washed the windshield of his truck."He told him numerous times, 'Put your hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up,'" Day said.Carl Castle, who did not see the shooting, said he talked to Brunson inside the gas station. Castle said Brunson told him he was going back to Cumberland."All I saw was he had shampoo, a razor, and he did have a stack of cash on the counter in the bathroom. He started flipping through $100 bills," Castle said. "When I heard the tires screech. I looked up and saw his vehicle."Jansen was placed on administrative leave per standard procedure.The gas station remained closed all morning. It reopened around 2:30 p.m.WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller contributed to this story. Refresh wbaltv.com and our app, and watch 11 News for late-breaking updates.Jean-Claude Juncker's grandiloquent State of the Union speech is being hailed by Brexiteers as proof that the UK is better off out. The European Commission President spoke of his desire for deeper EU integration, including the creation of a European defence union, the establishment of a single European president and finance minister and greater control over taxation.
Brexiteer and former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith told the Sun: "This tells you why the vote last year makes sense. Jean-Claude Juncker’s bar room utterances have given the game away. It’s the future of the EU – the march of the super-state."
Never mind that Juncker's proposals depend on the support of member states (Germany above all) to become a reality. What concern is it of the UK if the EU uses its departure to pursue integration? (So often hindered by Britain.)
The irony of the UK demanding "flexibility" from Brussels during the Brexit negotiations is that the EU so often showed it before. Britain enjoyed a formal opt-out from the euro (the only member state other than Denmark to do so), it remained outside the borderless Schengen Zone, it received a £4.9bn budget rebate and was granted numerous home affairs opt-outs.
True, the EU did not grant the UK greater control of free movement (which helped lead to Brexit). But David Cameron was awarded significant concessions during his renegotiation of the UK's membership. They included an official exemption from "ever closer union" (which would have covered Juncker's proposals), a four-year ban on in-work benefits for EU migrants (activable for seven years) and greater safeguards for the City of London).
And in the case of free movement, as I've noted before, the UK already has the flexibility to impose greater control.
Though EU citizens are initially permitted to live in any member state, after three months they must prove that they are working (employed or self-employed), a registered student or have "sufficient resources" (savings or a pension) to support themselves and not be "a burden on the benefits system". Far from being unconditional, then, the right to free movement is highly qualified.
Yet the supposedly immigration-averse UK has never enforced these conditions. Even under Theresa May, the Home Office judged that the cost of recording entry and exit dates was too high. Since most EU migrants are employed (and contribute significantly more in taxes than they do in benefits), there was no economic incentive to do so.
The Brexit negotiations have now stalled as the UK seeks to retain the economic benefits of EU membership from outside the union. As Britain is forced to realise that it cannot have its cake and eat it, it may yet recall that it was already doing so.SoCal won the gold at the US National Championships 2017 when they defeated Texas by 3-4 at the Silver Creek Sportsplex in San Jose.
The game was an even one with both teams having their chances and the first goal comes about 3 minutes into the first when Gabor Busser scores for Texas. But about five minutes later Chris Harte scores the equalizer and he doesn’t stop there. Harte completes his hattrick with a second do go of the first giving SoCal a 1-3 lead.
Much of the second period is a goalie battle but with about six minutes left to go James Briders finds Pauli Kervinen who scores for Texas making it 2-3 and the heat is on! But just as Texas is getting into it SoCal takes it back through Ernest Darma, 2-4. Texas makes a final push as Dan Torretta finds the net, 3-4 but that is as close as they come.
SoCal are the new US National Champions!New research from Queen Mary University of London has found youth, wealth, and being in full-time education to be risk factors associated with violent radicalisation. Contrary to popular views - religious practice, health and social inequalities, discrimination, and political engagement showed no links.
The pioneering research assessed population prevalence of sympathies for terrorist acts - a key marker of vulnerability to violent radicalisation - and their relationship with commonly assumed causes of radicalisation. The community study surveyed over 600 men and women of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Muslim heritage in London and Bradford, aged 18-45.
A small minority of people (2.4%) expressed some sympathy for violent protest and terrorism, whilst over 6% remained neutral - i.e., they did not show sympathies but nor did they condemn such acts. However, sympathy levels increased among those under 20, those in full time education rather than employment, those born in the UK, and high earners (£75,000 per year or more).
Interestingly, migrants and those speaking a language other than English at home, and those who reported having poor physical health, were all less likely to show sympathies for terrorist acts. In addition, those who reported suffering from anxiety and depression were no more likely to display sympathies, provoking some new research questions about the relationship between radicalisation and mental health.
As part of the study, researchers developed a new way of measuring radicalisation based upon on asking participants about their sympathies for or condemnation of 16 different actions that fell under the heading of terrorism (for example, use of suicide bombs to fight injustice).
The study was undertaken with support from relevant community agencies, and public engagement informed the study design and execution. This ground-breaking research shows the value of Life Sciences, whereby medical and social scientists are working closely with researchers from the humanities and the public to solve the greatest challenges in global health and security.
Kamaldeep Bhui, lead author and Professor of Cultural Psychiatry & Epidemiology, Queen Mary University of London, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, comments:
"It is important to note that sympathy towards terrorism is uncommon. However, we know it's a crucial indicator for being recruited into violent radicalisation. From a public health standpoint, if we can pinpoint population contexts that promote sympathies for terrorism, we can then work to shift them and hopefully reduce overall vulnerability to radicalisation. But up until our research, there was no way of measuring this.
"We now need to continue working closely with local communities and carry out larger studies to put this new measurement into practice. Our aim is to discover population contexts that promote sympathy towards terrorism and violent protest, and come up with interventions to reduce this."
Experts have argued that radicalisation is a staged process that starts with pre-radicalisation and moves through stages of self-identification, indoctrination, and finally Jihadization.* In this study, researchers believe a preventive intervention needs to interrupt the 'pre-radicalisation' phase, a period when individuals begin to develop sympathies for extremist ideas or terrorist movements without becoming directly involved.
This fits in with the preventive approaches taken on other public health issues, where common 'warning signs' are targeted for intervention. However, to apply this method to the issue of radicalisation, we need a better understanding of the personal and situational characteristics that would act as warning signs (or markers of risk) for this early phase.
One of the key challenges up until now has been the absence of a measure of the early stages of radicalisation. Because the perpetrators of many recent, high-profile terrorist attacks were citizens who worked and were educated in the countries they attacked, a core issue for prevention is how to identify people who have no history of criminal behaviour but have become radicalised enough to commit acts of terrorism.
Kamaldeep Bhui continues:
"As a nation, we spend a great deal of time, effort and money on counter-terrorism - but virtually no attention is given to researching preventive interventions. Health practitioners and local government have targeted preventive initiatives on many issues such as gun crime and domestic violence, but as yet the same approach hasn't been applied to radicalisation. We believe this is because we don't, at the moment, have a proper understanding of who is at risk and that is why our research is so vital."
"Once terrorists are captured, there is often debate about what motivated their behaviour. Whether they came from disadvantaged backgrounds, have mental health issues or a criminal record, and whether their acts were purely political. Characteristics identified during interrogation are uncritically assumed to be of relevance to the early phase of radicalisation. But in reality, there's little empirical research on the early stages of radicalisation and it's still unclear what factors make potential recruits open to persuasion to join a terrorist movement. This 'open-to-persuasion' phase is marked by growing sympathies for terrorism and violent protest, and must be investigated further."
The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
###
For more information contact:
Charli Scouller
PR Manager (School of Medicine and Dentistry)
Queen Mary University of London
c.scouller@qmul.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7882 7943
Notes to the editor
Copies of the full paper are available upon request.
We define radicalisation in accord with the British Terrorism Act of 2000 as the process by which a person comes to support terrorism and forms of extremism leading to terrorism. Violent extremism is described as endorsement of violence to achieve extreme ends.
About Queen Mary University of London
Queen Mary University of London is among the UK's leading research-intensive higher education institutions, with five campuses in the capital: Mile End, Whitechapel, Charterhouse Square, West Smithfield and Lincoln's Inn Fields.
A member of the Russell Group, Queen Mary is also one of the largest of the colleges of the University of London, with 17,800 students - 20 per cent of whom are from more than 150 countries.
Some 4,000 staff deliver world-class degrees and research across 21 departments, within three Faculties: Science and Engineering; Humanities and Social Sciences; and the School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Queen Mary has an annual turnover of £350m, research income worth £100m, and generates employment and output worth £700m to the UK economy each year.
Unique for London universities, Queen Mary has an integrated residential campus in Mile End - a 2,000-bed award-winning Student Village overlooking the scenic Regents Canal.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – In a back-and-forth battle with nationally-ranked No. 1 SUNY New Paltz, the No. 6 MIT men's volleyball team registered a 25-22, 23-25, 25-22, 17-25, 16-14 victory on Tuesday night. Senior Kenny Siebert (St. Louis, Mo.) paced the Engineers (12-2, 6-1 UVC) with a match-high 18 kills on a.536 hitting performance to go along with six digs, three blocks, and an ace. The Hawks (13-2, 5-1 UVC) saw four players reach double-digits in kills with freshman Steven Woessner (Massapequa Park, N.Y.) and sophomore Tim Ferriter (Rochester, N.Y.) leading the way with 13 apiece.
MIT gradually established a 17-10 advantage in the first set but New Paltz put together a 5-1 spurt to stay within striking distance. The Engineers picked up three of the next four points on errors as a Siebert ace increased their margin to 22-16. Back-to-back kills from sophomore Christopher Husmann (Massapequa, N.Y.) sparked a rally that saw the Hawks come within one (23-22) on a block by Husmann and junior John Lutjen (Smithtown, N.Y.). MIT responded with a strike by junior Andrew Busse (Mount Prospect, Ill.) and then clinched the set on a New Paltz hitting miscue.
The Cardinal jumped out to a 4-1 lead in the second stanza. Fueled by strong serving from Ferriter, which included two aces, the Hawks rattled off four straight points and eventually went ahead, 10-7. MIT slowly mounted an 11-5 run as a block by Siebert and freshman Aaron Zalewski (Buffalo Grove, Ill.) gave it an 18-15 edge. New Paltz replied with its second 9-3 streak of the frame, reaching set point on a Husmann block. A kill from junior Alex Klein (San Diego, Calif.) coupled with a hitting error extended the frame but Ferriter thwarted the late rally with a strike of his own.
The early stages of the third set were closely played as it featured two lead changes and eight ties as a Siebert kill evened the score at 11. The Hawks used a Husmann kill and an MIT hitting error to gain some breathing room before creating a 15-12 lead. The Engineers battled back, capitalizing on a Zalewski-Klein block to knot the frame at 17. An exchange of points ensued until a kill from Siebert and an attacking miscue put MIT up, 20-19, and prompted a timeout by the visitors. Following the break, the back-and-forth affair resumed but a pair of errors pushed the Engineers ahead to 23-21. Coming out of its final timeout New Paltz cut its deficit in half on a Woessner blast; however, a Zalewski kill and a ball-handling error by the Hawks gave the hosts the win.
New Paltz built a 10-7 lead in the fourth set that was narrowed to one point on two occasions, the last at 12-11 on a service error. The Hawks responded by going on a 13-6 run to finish off the frame and force a fifth set.
In the final set, MIT raced out to an 8-3 advantage as kill by Siebert resulted in the changeover. After switching ends, New Paltz registered six of the next eight points with a strike from sophomore Christian Smith (Massapequa, N.Y.) closing the gap to 10-9 |
of the area no suspect was located and the perimeter was opened to traffic.
A host of officers from numerous agencies were initially in the vicinity of Wilcox Boulevard and Wheeler Avenue looking for the suspect.
SWAT teams and helicopters were being used in the search.
Several nearby schools were placed under lockdown.
At McCallie School, the doors were locked while students continued their studies inside.
At approximately 4 p.m., the HCSO received information that an alleged suspicious person was located within the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences. According to the information received, the suspicious person matched the description of the suspect.
The HCSO immediately responded, including the SRO for CSAS, and secured the school. Sheriff's deputies performed a thorough search of the school. The search was concluded and no suspicious person or persons were found matching the description offered by the CPD regarding the suspect wanted for the shooting earlier in the day.
At this time, no indication has been found to confirm that the individual being sought by CPD was ever at CSAS. However, to ensure the safety of the students, deputies did take additional precautions and conducted a thorough search of the school.
Crime Stoppers as well as concerned community businesses have contributed $6,000 as a reward for information leading to the capture of the suspect
Police said, "Chattanooga PD is asking for help from our community members. A CPD officer was shot multiple times in the Glenwood/Mission area at approximately 9:24 a.m. Suspect is described as a black male, 5'10" to 6' tall, thin build, medium complexion, low hair cut. Last seen wearing a dark hoodie with large lettering. CPD officers are canvassing the area. Our partner agencies are also assisting in the the search on the ground and in the air. If you see this fugitive call 911, do not try to apprehend. Suspect is concerned armed and dangerous. Please spread the word."Should we or shouldn’t we?
That’s the big question now facing communities throughout the South – and beyond – in the wake of the turbulent and tragic events in Charlottesville. Some areas have already removed and/or relocated Confederate statues, and others are beginning the difficult conversation about what to do with their monuments.
Interestingly enough, Robert E. Lee, whose statue was at the center of the “alt-right” protest in Charlottesville, was very clear on his position. According to Lee biographer Jonathan Horn, “So sensitive was Lee during his final years with extinguishing the fiery passions of the Civil War that he opposed erecting monuments on the battlefields where the Southern soldiers under his command had fought against the Union.”
Lee wrote:
“I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”
So strong were Lee’s feelings that he refused to have Confederate flags at his funeral and was not buried in his Confederate uniforms; his soldiers also didn’t don their uniforms at the funeral. Lee’s daughter said that having those symbols present would almost be “treasonous,” as her father had take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution the day he took office as president of Washington College (now knows as Washington and Lee University). Lee urged his fellow Confederates to do the same.
In December 1866, Lee wrote this about a proposed Confederate monument:
“As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; [and] of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”
So, here we are, 150 years later, still having the same conversation. It’s doubtful that true white supremacists will be pacified by Lee’s words, but perhaps they will be a north star for communities struggling with how to proceed.Leonora Russo can often be found perched on a bench along Bedford Avenue, making conversation with passersby. View Full Caption Jessica Hullinger/DNAinfo
WILLIAMSBURG - It’s not every day you meet a royal.
But if you take a stroll through Williamsburg, you might have the honor of running into the neighborhood's queen, Leonora Russo. The 89-year-old has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment on North 11th Street for 66 years and has become a local icon for her extravagant wardrobe and brassy commentary.
MORE NEIGHBORHOOD CELEBRITIES:
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►Murray Hill's Dancing Traffic Officer
DNAinfo New York found Russo sitting outside on Bedford Avenue and North Eighth Street and asked her a few questions as part of our Neighborhood Celebrities series:
What do you like about Williamsburg?
I’m here so many years, at this age where am I gonna meet people like I know here? You know what I mean? This is part of me. If I was to change, I would be hurt. I would be unhappy. You understand? I can just sit here and be happy. If I were to move away, you know what it takes to make friends? Good friends? And know people? It’s very hard.
How has the neighborhood changed in 66 years?
The population is much more expanded and we have people from all nations here. I’m not prejudiced about that but what I’m saying is we have a mixture of everything. So many changes here. The doctors used to come to your house and visit. Not now. That was nice. It’s very hard to live today for some people. The rents are so high, the rent is over $1,000, how you gonna live? When I moved here the rent was $125. The bus was a quarter.
I love this neighborhood, especially now at this age. Don’t forget… it’s part of me. I had my son here. My husband died here, my son died here. Not only that, I know everybody here. You know my title is “Queen of Williamsburg.”
How did you get your title?
I didn’t expect this, the people gave me this name. I had nothing to do with it. It was their choosing. I used to sit here, wherever I was, and I didn’t know why, but they used to take pictures of me. I said go ahead. I didn’t know they were gonna put it here and there and on the Internet. Now I’m in five magazines. I’m in six countries. My picture is in the pizza shop. Look me up in the Internet. Everybody knows me. Everybody. My picture’s in the New York magazine, centerfold.
It was a shock to me. You know how I found out about me being in New York magazine? My neighbor across the street said, “Hey Leonora, you’re in New York magazine!” I said “Get out of here.” I couldn’t believe it. And that’s how I became famous.
What did you do when you were younger? Did you have a career?
I didn’t do nothin’, I was married. I lived my life. I lived a beautiful life. I came from Manhattan, I wasn’t born here. When I was a young girl, at night I wined and dined with my husband. I lived my life, honey. I went to the best of casinos, I went to the best of racetracks. Now I wanna sit down and relax. What do you want me to do at the age of 89?
You’re known for your sense of fashion.
Yeah I’m a good dresser. Every day I dress different. I know how to put clothes together. I have three fur coats. I have mink, I have leopard and I have raccoon. I have a full-length raccoon. As a matter of fact I’m gonna give it to somebody because it’s too heavy for me, I can’t walk in it. By the time I put it on I’m half on the floor it’s so heavy. I don’t need it, anyhow.
When I was 19, honey, not that I wanna brag, I was a beauty. I was a beauty. I used to cause car crashes here.
Do you have a local celebrity in your neighborhood? You can submit them here, or on Twitter using the hashtag #neighborhoodceleb:Genome of Black Death bacterium is remarkably similar to that of modern strains that cause bubonic plague
Europeans must have thought it was the end of the world. War was spreading across the continent, there was famine after flooding made crops rot in the fields, and an incurable plague was wiping out entire settlements.
The Black Death is considered to have been the deadliest pandemic in history.
Starting in 1347 and lasting five years, the plague killed 30-50% of the population of western Europe. In London, people were dying so fast the town had to establish two new cemeteries outside the city walls. At its height, 200 bodies a day were being sent to the burial sites in East Smithfield, not far from the Tower of London, to be stacked up.
Now, by examining remains from some London cemeteries, scientists have deciphered the genetic makeup of the bacterium that caused the pandemic and have discovered that its DNA is not very different from that of the modern bug that causes bubonic plague.
"We have covered about 99% of the ancient Yersinia pestis [the bacterium that caused the disease] genome," said Johannes Krause, of the University of Tübingen, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and also leader of the research team. "When we compare this reconstructed genome with modern strains of Yersinia pestis … we do not see a single position in this ancient genome which cannot be found in modern strains."
The researchers published the results on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
To construct the genome sequence, the scientists needed a sample of Y. pestis DNA. They took that from skeletons which were once buried in East Smithfield cemetery. The site was bought late in 1348 or in early 1349 specifically for the burial of Black Death victims, said Kirsten Bos, of McMaster University, one of the paper's authors.
About 2,500 people were buried at the cemetery, which was excavated between 1986 and 1988 by Museum of London staff. The remains of about 600 individuals were unearthed.
Bos extracted the DNA she needed from four teeth, taken from four skeletons: a man, two women and a child. "We were wiggling the teeth out of the skulls in the Museum of London to free them," said Bos.
Until now, no other pathogen sequence has been constructed from material that is more than 100 years old, and, up to now, nothing has been sequenced from ancient skeletons. In 2005, scientists recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the deadliest ever to emerge, to try to understand why it was so virulent.
Based on the rate of mutation in the genome, between the Black Death bug and its modern descendants, the researchers were able to extrapolate to when the last common ancestor of all modern Y. pestis strains must have emerged. It appeared to have arrived some time between 1282 and 1343.
"This is when the common ancestor of all modern strains lived," said Krause. "This really suggests that the Black Death pandemic was the first big pandemic that disseminated Y. pestis."
Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist at McMaster University, Ontario, said the high death rate was probably caused by the population being immunologically compromised and poorly nourished, and had never before encountering this particular pathogen.
The sequencing of Y. pestis from ancient DNA opens up an area of research into pandemics. The genomes of other pathogens could be sequenced, for example, that of tuberculosis.
"Potentially there were variants [of TB] present in the native Americans that got lost after the Colombian colonisation," said Krause.
The evolution of other pathogens such as cholera and syphilis could also prove useful for historians and doctorsThe Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), has accused Turkey and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of blocking aid, trade and closing of PYD-controlled border crossings. Moreover, Turkey is building a 2-meter (6.5-feet) high wall to prevent smuggling and the bypassing of checkpoints by Syrian Kurds.
Turkey is opposed to the PYD controlling Kurdish areas and worried about their links to PKK rebels, while KDP leader and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani has been critical of the PYD and accused it of working with the Syrian government.
The PYD hopes that a recently captured Iraqi border crossing in Yaroubiya can provide an alternative to Turkey and Barzani's policies.
PYD leader Salih Muslim told a Kurdish TV station, "Developments in Til Kocer [Yaroubiya] would also lead to changes in the political and economic situation in West Kurdistan [Kurdish areas of Syria], and said this success has created an alternative against the efforts and intentions to hold the entire West Kurdistan territory under embargo,” reported Firat News Agency on Oct. 27.
The People’s Protection Units (YPG), affiliated to the PYD, took control of the Syrian-Iraqi Yaroubiya border crossing on Oct. 24 with the help of a local Arab tribe in response to a suicide attack by al-Qaeda-affiliated groups on Oct. 19 in the town of Qahtaniyah. Reportedly, the local Arab tribes want to share the control of the Iraqi border crossing with the PYD in exchange for their support against al-Qaeda groups in the area.
“We especially thank the tribe of Shamar for their contributions in the success of this mission,” the YPG said in a statement following the operation.
The Syrian National Coalition accused the PYD of cooperating with the Iraqi army and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki against the Free Syrian Army, although only al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were stationed near the Iraqi border.
However, the YPG denied any relations with the Iraqi government. “We in the YPG do not have any official relations with the Iraqi party [government], and these matters are related to the Supreme Kurdish Committee,” said Redur Xelil, YPG spokesman, referring to the Supreme Kurdish Council, which was formed in July 2012 as part of an agreement between the PYD and the Barzani-backed Kurdish National Council to jointly administer the Kurdish areas of Syria.
The PYD does not have any official relations with the Iraqi government, although Muslim met with Maliki on Dec. 20, 2012, as part of a delegation of the National Coordination Body.
Barzani Iso, a Kurdish veteran journalist, told Al-Monitor by Skype that Iraq could support it. “The KDP and Turkey have the same policy for Rojava, but now we have another side [Iraq] on the border with Rojava that has problems with Turkey and the KDP. So for regional power balances it’s very important. The Iraqi side [government] two days ago said it's important for the border crossing to open for trade and economic relations.”
Nevertheless, the Iraqi border crossing is not operational yet, and the Kurdish Hawar News Agency — close to the PYD — claimed that Barzani might pressure Maliki to keep the border crossing closed in exchange for his support for Maliki to lead the next Iraqi government. New talks are currently taking place between Iraq and the Turkish government after a visit of Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to Turkey on Oct. 26.
Nechirvan Barzani, the KRG prime minister, will visit Baghdad soon to discuss Kurdish oil deals with Turkey.
The capture was also seen by some as a message to Massoud Barzani by the PYD. “It is a response and a message to the KDP and Barzani after a recent conflict between them and expresses the fact that they can have another important border with Iraq instead of the Semalka crossing,” said Zara Saleh, a member of the Kurdish Unity Party, based in the United Kingdom.
On Oct. 23, Muslim was barred from entering Iraqi Kurdistan at the Semalka border crossing, with the KDP accusing the PYD of capturing Kurdish areas with the help of the Syrian government and excluding other Kurdish parties from power. After the incident, the border crossing was closed by both sides.
“The PYD is fighting for the interests of the regime and working closely with it. The PYD is not respecting the will of the Kurdish people,” said the KRG statement as reported by the World Bulletin.
Abdulsalam Ahmed, the co-chair of PYD People’s Council of West Kurdistan, in an interview with Rihab News said that they hope the opening of the Yaroubiya border crossing can alleviate the suffering of the Kurds in Syria, who are preparing for winter and need aid, electricity generators and food supplies. But he said they are still waiting for the approval from Baghdad despite negotiations with them.
Kurdish news website Welati reported that the Iraqi government has two conditions for the PYD: for the Syrian flag to be hosted at the Syrian border and the border to be administered by the regime. But a PYD source indicated that they will not accept the Syrian regime or the Syrian opposition coalition to administer the border. They are only willing to administer the crossing together with local Arabs and Kurds.
Abdulsalam Ahmed told Al-Monitor, "The border is practically closed by the KRG because of preventing the passing of humanitarian aid and border trade. There are attempts to open other parts of the border crossings with Iraq and Turkey. There is no news yet, but it will be announced once there is an agreement.”CLEVELAND — They dropped confetti from the ceiling here at Quicken Loans Arena at the end of Sunday’s first-round, Game 1, 13-point Cavaliers victory over the 40-42 Boston Celtics.
Yikes.
It seemed a little over the top. A little needy.
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Confetti? Really? First round? First game? Against a sub.-500 team?
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We can’t really blame these folks. It’s easy to be smug when you come from a city that has celebrated nine championships in this century. I had to brush confetti from my jheri-curl head as recently as Feb. 1, when Pete Carroll made the worst play call in the history of sports. I wasn’t expecting a celebration in the sky when Gigi Datome slinked off the floor Sunday, but anything these Cleveland folks do is OK because they have truly suffered.
What must it be like? Cleveland has not won a major sports championship since quarterback Frank Ryan and running back Jim Brown led the Browns to a 27-0 victory over the Baltimore Colts at Municipal Stadium in the 1964 NFL Championship game.
It answers the question about the confetti. How is a city supposed to act like it’s been there before when... it hasn’t been there in more than a half-century?
I love this city. But it is a hungry place, peppered with people with hungry faces.
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They come downtown and they see a diminished city where commerce and activity once thrived, before the foreclosures and rampant unemployment. Cleveland once was one of America’s five largest cities. Today, downtown Cleveland is a sad space with many vacant buildings and boarded-up stores. The city is quiet on weekends and empty on weeknights after the workforce goes home. It feels like the local economy runs on lottery tickets.
At the corner of East Fourth Street and Prospect you can still get a 16-ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for $3 at Flannery’s Pub. Not far from the other end of Fourth Street, there’s the Horseshoe Casino, connected to the Tower City Center. This is not a high-roller crowd. It’s not Ocean’s Eleven. It’s more like Atlantic City-on-the-Cuyahoga.
LeBron and the Cavaliers are important because Cleveland is dead or dying, and there hasn’t been a team to make the city feel good about itself since Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the White House.
Progressive Field (a.k.a. “The Jake”) is virtually empty on game nights. Terry Francona (remember him?) has pushed the Tribe to overachievement in the last two seasons, but folks who run the franchise are worried that the Indians may not survive.
The Indians play in a beautiful ballpark and feature a worthy team, but not enough folks are going to the games. It’s a far cry from the early years at the Jake, when the Tribe sold out 455 consecutive games and featured the star power of Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle, Eddie Murray, Jim Thome, Roberto Alomar, and Omar Vizquel. That crew made it to the seventh game of the World Series in 1997, but Jose Mesa gave it up against the Florida Marlins. Cleveland’s last World Series victory came in 1948 against the Boston Braves.
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The Browns are a legitimate laughingstock in today’s NFL. They have their own Bill Buckner/Bucky Dent moments. Folks still talk of John Elway thwarting Cleveland with “The Drive” in 1987 and Earnest Byner’s costly fumble one year later. The franchise — last coached by Bill Belichick — moved to Baltimore after the 1995 season, only to come back as an expansion team in 1999. Today they are a clown show, especially at quarterback. Johnny Manziel was at Sunday’s Celtics-Cavaliers game.
The Cavaliers made it to the NBA Finals with LeBron in 2007, but were swept by the Spurs. They thought they were going to win in 2010, but that was when the Celtics’ Big Three shocked Cleveland in the conference semifinals and LeBron ripped off his Cavs jersey for (we thought) the last time as he exited Boston’s parquet floor in disgrace.
Then came “The Decision’’ and the burning of LeBron’s jersey on the streets of Cleveland.
But now LeBron is back and the Cavs are back and everybody in this godforsaken/hopeful town is “All In.’’
During an ESPN interview aired Sunday, James was asked about bringing a championship to Cleveland. He said, “I have that vision. Is it promised? No. But that’s what I work toward.’’
The Celtics represent a mere speed bump for this LeBron locomotive. Cleveland is desperate for the Cavaliers to win. ESPN is desperate for the Cavaliers to win. And the forecast for Tuesday night’s game at the Q is partly cloudy with a strong chance of confetti.
Dan Shaughnessy can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.comGaye Levy, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
This week I would like to explore some of the special preparedness needs of the senior and elderly members of our families and communities. At first blush, you may be saying, “Yes, I understand that there are elderly people, but how would their needs be any different than mine?”
That is a great question and certainly one that I have asked myself. But consider this: the elderly are less mobile and far less likely to be able to evacuate on their own. Their eating habits may be more finicky and, for health reasons, restricted. The need for life-sustaining prescription medications and medical devices increases with age and, perhaps most difficult of all, the a sense of fear may result in profound depression as the familiar and comforting world around them has changed.
For those embarking upon the family preparedness lifestyle, it is important to consider the special needs of elderly adults and to help educate and assist them now, before they experience a true SHTF situation caused by natural, man made or economic disasters.
The checklist below is designed to be shared one on one with members of our older adult population (our moms and dads, grandparents, and neighbors). Review this list and use it as a guideline for initiating a discussion with these important members of our community.
1. Prepare Now for a Sudden Emergency
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In the event of a disaster, rescue workers will do their best to arrive quickly, but there may be physical or other impediments to a swift recovery effort. The key is to prepare now for a sudden emergency. Here are some things you can do:
Assemble a disaster kit that includes food, water, first aid items, a flashlight, batteries and some cash. Click here for a printable list of these and other suggested items.
Arrange to have someone check on you on a periodic basis.
Plan and practice the best escape routes from your home.
Get to know the types of emergencies most likely to occur in your geographical area and find a safe place to shelter in your home if disaster strikes.
Create window signs that you can use to signal the need for assistance.
Post emergency phone numbers close to your phone. Do not rely on your memory. If you require special equipment (medical devices, oxygen, wheel chairs), keep a list and the location of operating instructions handy so that rescue workers can find them.
Be prepared to defend yourself. Get some pepper spray or even some aerosol hair spray to squirt at an intruder who is trying to loot or otherwise steal your stuff.
2. Take Care of Your Medical Needs
Assemble some spare medical supplies in an easy-to-carry, transportable container such as a backpack, shoulder bag, or duffle bag. Include a 7 to 14 days supply of prescription medicines and be sure to include written instructions regarding the dosage, and a list of allergies, if any.
Pack up an extra pair of glasses (even if they are old) and hearing aid batteries
Label your stuff. This includes your bags or other containers, walkers, canes, wheelchairs or anything else that you are likely to need.
Make copies of your medical insurance and Medicare cards and include them with your medical supplies along with a listing of your doctors. Also include a list of the style and serial number of medical devices such as pacemakers. Share copies of these documents with a trusted family member or friend.
3. Prepare for a Possible Evacuation
Learn how to shut off water, gas and electricity.
If you can, take your pets with you. But, also keep in mind that pets may not allowed in shelters. Ask! If not, you will need to allow for sufficient food and water for an extended period. Put a sign in the window indicating that there are pets inside.
Leave a note taped to the refrigerator or elsewhere indicating when you left and where you are going.
4. Assess Your Physical Limitations and Coordinate a Plan for Assistance in Advance
Contact a friendly neighbor in advance and make them aware that you have limitations that will preclude your evacuation in an emergency. Ask for their assistance in helping you or in contacting family members.
In the event of an evacuation, wear warm clothing (even if it is hot outside) and sturdy shoes. You can always peel away the extra clothing later if you are too warm.
Make sure that someone you know has an extra key to your home and knowledge of where you keep your emergency supplies.
If you don’t already have one, get a cell phone. In most recent disasters, cell phone service was active long before land lines became functional.
What else can you do?
Survival Solar Battery Charger - Free Today! In addition to having a discussion with the older adults in you life, I would like to suggest that you help them gather supplies and educate them regarding the proper storage of extra food and water. You know what I am talking about: keep your supplies sealed and keep them cool. You also might want to consider putting a Bug Out Bag together to give to them as gift, or to take them shopping to purchase the necessary supplies. Perhaps most important of all, you can start to educate the elderly so that when and if the time comes, they are less fearful and less inclined to panic or worst case, shut down completely. I highly recommend that you download this free booklet, Red Cross Disaster Preparedness for Seniors By Seniors which was written a group of older adults who experienced a two-week power outage during a ice storm. It is excellent. Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation!
Gaye Levy, the SurvivalWoman, grew up and attended school in the Greater Seattle area. After spending many years as an executive in the software industry, she started a specialized accounting practice offering contract CFO work to emerging high tech and service industries. She has now abandoned city life and moved to a serenely beautiful rural area on an island in NW Washington State. She lives and teaches the principles of a sustainable, self-reliant and stylish lifestyle through emergency preparation and disaster planning through her website at BackdoorSurvival.com. SurvivalWoman speaks her mind and delivers her message with optimism and grace, regardless of mayhem swirling around us. var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’The start of the trial of a man charged with the murder of Calgary Stampeder Mylan Hicks has been delayed a week on the chance the team plays in the 2018 Grey Cup.
Crown prosecutor Tom Spark said Friday that although a two-week trial period was available as early as Nov. 26, 2018, he asked Justice David Gates to schedule it to begin a week later.
“The Grey Cup is the 25th,” Spark told the Court of Queen’s Bench judge.
“There’s a lot of Calgary Stampeders who are going to be witnesses,” he said, adding the team could be in Edmonton playing in the CFL championship.
“Mr. Spark, that’s a new one for me,” Gates replied, of the prosecutor’s reason for delaying the case.
Defence counsel Alain Hepner did not oppose Spark’s request.
Nelson Tony Lugela, 19, is charged with shooting Hicks outside the Marquee Beer Market on Macleod Trail on Sept. 25, 2016.
He was committed to stand trial on second-degree murder in May, when provincial court Judge Catherine Skene ruled there was sufficient evidence that a properly instructed jury could find him guilty as charged.
Hicks, 23, was from Detroit and had been on the Stampeders’ practice squad since the previous May. He played his college football with the Michigan State Spartans.
Shortly after Hicks’ death, defensive back Joshua Bell said he was one of a few Stamps at the nightclub celebrating a comeback win against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers hours earlier, adding the young player was “family” to him.
“I lost my little brother today,” he said while fighting back tears at a news conference just hours after the incident.
Lugela, who did not address the court Friday, remains in custody pending his trial.
KMartin@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @KMartinCourtsFalls Church, VA Cardiologist Azita Moalemi, MD, performs a stress test on Patricia Livelsberger, 63. (Photo11: Joe Brier for USA TODAY)
This week I got lucky. I scored a business trip to a Lockheed Martin facility where they make all kinds of warfare simulators—everything from tank mock-ups to pretend F-35 jet fighters. I got to play, but even playing was stressful.
I can't imagine how stressful it must be in real life, being a soldier on patrol in hostile territory for hours at a time.
Well, actually, I can imagine it a little bit. It's called "going to the office."
My job is sooooooo stressful. You have no idea.
We Americans love talking about how stressful our work is, how tough it is to juggle all the demands put upon us, as if our ancestors wondering if they had enough food for winter were living on Easy Street.
My grandparents scraped out a living on a farm in Arkansas. My grandmother gave birth ten times. Eight babies lived. My mom was the youngest (and she hopped a train to California pretty much the day she turned 21).
The few photographs I've seen of my mother's mother show a woman who looked pleasant but serious. Grandma didn't need to "Lean In" and network with others to find a work-life balance. She didn't need anti-anxiety meds. By all accounts, she wasn't especially stressed. She was too tired to be stressed.
Now, in the 21st century, we are a nation filled with people who are stressed about being stressed. We brag about how exhausted we are. I do it all the time. Maybe if I had to raise eight kids and run a farm, I'd be too exhausted to talk about how exhausted I am.
A recent survey by Monster.com found that 2 out of 5 Americans have actually changed jobs because of a stressful work environment. More than half say they experience "very stressful lives." Meanwhile, in India, the number of people changing jobs due to stress is only 19%. Perhaps the prospect of no job is even more stressful there.
'Physical ailments'
What is the biggest cause of stress? Forty percent of respondents to the Monster survey said "professional relationships with their boss is the greatest cause of work stress." That's not even counting the stress related to a personal relationship with the boss.
We're so stressed out at work it's making us sick. Monster.com's survey claims 80% of us—4 out of 5!—have experienced "somewhat severe illnesses including missing time at work and other physical ailments" due to work stress. Seven percent say the stress has even sent them to the hospital!
When one out of every dozen working Americans is being hospitalized over work stress, either this survey is out of whack or we have a serious problem on our hands.
Perhaps we need to put it all in perspective. I realize jobs are important because they pay the bills, keep us off the streets and put food on the table. But it's all relative. Living in North Korea is "very stressful." Trying to avoid roadside bombs in Afghanistan is "very stressful." Sitting with a sick child in the hospital is "very stressful."
Being passed over for promotion, dealing with a worthless manager, fighting for a better parking space... my grandmother would look at you like you were an idiot. Here's the upside to all this: If these things stress you out, it means the important things in life must be fine.
So, yes, I will continue to complain about stressful deadlines, grueling hours and the need for "date nights." And then I will thank God my grandparents worked so hard, so I don't have to.
MORE: The best (and worst) jobs for 2014
MORE: The No. 1 source of stress at work
MORE: Workaholic Americans don't take all their vacation
CNBC is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
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In the SundanceTV series Hap and Leonard: Mucho Mojo, Hap Collins (James Purefoy) and Leonard Pine (Michael K. Williams) found themselves in a whole heap of trouble while unraveling a murder mystery with too many twists and turns to keep track. Between the discovery of a skeleton, Trudy’s missing ashes and a literal pissing match with a neighborhood drug dealer, Hap and Leonard must learn to get out of their own way, if they’re going to survive all of the crazy things that life throws at them.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, the incredibly talented and always compelling to watch actor Michael K. Williams talked about why he loves the relationship between Hap and Leonard, that he’d be game to continue this series, the fun in working with the different supporting characters that make up this unique world, the show’s female energy, and the fact that these guys are too vain to not do the right thing even though it often gets them into trouble. He also talked about his experience on The Night Of, and why he finds himself drawn to the pain of life.
Collider: When you did the first season of Hap and Leonard, did you think that would be it, or did you think it had a good chance of coming back?
MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS: I didn’t know. On paper, it read really well. But we shot it in Baton Rouge, and it was a brutal shoot. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what we had or what it was gonna look like ‘cause I couldn’t get a gauge from what we were shooting. It was a foreign genre for me, with all the action. It was over the top and big, and I was like, “No one is gonna buy this ticket!” But, they did.
This relationship between Hap and Leonard is just so great, but so different from what we get to see on TV.
WILLIAMS: The relationship is what I loved the most. What brought me to the project was the relationship between Hap and Leonard. I loved the diversity and the two different worlds in which they live in. It’s really beautiful. We have a real friendship, James [Purefoy] and I, so I know that that translates into Hap and Leonard’s world. You couldn’t pay for this. Me, him and his wife have sat down, many nights, over a bottle of wine, just kickin’ it about life. He and I are both so opinionated. He feels comfortable enough to have comments about the black experience to me, and know that I won’t judge him or feel offended. I can tell him to go fuck his British self off, and he won’t get mad or offended. We have that relationship and that type of honesty with each other, and it really makes for a great working experience with him.
James Purefoy told me that he could see this show going for seven seasons. Would you be up for continuing this?
WILLIAMS: You know what? There are worse things in life to be attached to. I love James. It’s in Atlanta, and we shoot during the fourth quarter of the year, so the weather is great. It’s good Christmas money. I’m telling good stories with someone who I admire. Life could be worse. Atlanta has got great people and great food. It could be a whole lot worse, at this stage in the game.
This show has some big moments of drama, but it also has a great sense of humor to it, with some great supporting characters, in such an interesting world.
WILLIAMS: It’s a lot of fun. It’s an out there world. I’m glad you find it interesting, but it’s out there. It’s definitely unique. It’s very unexpected and fresh. For me, the best experience is to get to watch all of these different actors that come to the different seasons and bring these A-game performances. I’m just like, “Wow, can you do that again, so that I can take notes? How did you do that?!” That’s the greatest joy, in doing a show like this. I get to watch all of these thespians come rip it a new asshole.
Christ |
mann was also instrumental in helping Gatt return to the field. The German coach gave Gatt his first of two caps in November 2012 against Russia, just days after he won his second Norwegian title. According to Gatt, it was Klinsmann who steered him toward Dr. Prof. Stefan Hinterwimmer, who successfully performed his most recent surgery.
So thrilled for @JoshuaGatt after 3 tough years!! What a special day to be back on the field for @Molde_FK #USMNT https://t.co/zvTpO7l5FM — Jürgen Klinsmann (@J_Klinsmann) September 12, 2016
“My agent felt that the best thing to do would be to find a surgeon in Germany,” Gatt recalled. “My club was leaning toward having an operation in Norway. A lot was up in the air. Eventually I just kind of called Jurgen myself and asked him point blank, 'What do you think I should do?'
"He told me he wanted me to see this surgeon. He gave me the name and put me in contact with him. I started e-mailing with the doctor and within two weeks of meeting him, I was having surgery under him. My knee is great. I've had no issues. I am so happy I went to him. Even going into this surgery he was so confident that he could make me play again.”
Following the surgery, Gatt also spent a lot of time rehabbing in Germany at a facility Klinsmann recommended. Also training there were fellow U.S. internationals Joe Gyau, Terrence Boyd, and Aron Johannsson—all of whom were trying to overcome serious injuries.
The opportunity to train with other Americans in similar situations added as extra motivation for Gatt.
“These are all things where people said we’d never bounce back from,” Gatt said. “That we were done. To be there together and work through this together, we motivated each other. We were all saying, 'If they can get through this, then I can get through this.’ We showed everybody we could beat this.”
Great to see our players connect and making progress in Munich:
Keep going strong!! @36finest @TBoyd91 @JoshuaGatt pic.twitter.com/mGMwP3WySx — Jürgen Klinsmann (@J_Klinsmann) March 31, 2016
Now back on the field, Gatt is feeling more gratitude for those that helped him as opposed to anger at the circumstances that have kept him away from soccer for more than three years. He feels particularly indebted to his club.
“Molde offered me a contract when they didn't have to,” Gatt stated. “Most teams would have said, 'Sorry.' They were willing to give me a chance to get back. They’ve been there through everything and I couldn’t appreciate them more for it.”
Then of course there is the U.S. national team, which remains a huge priority for Gatt. Like Solskjaer, Klinsmann has been a powerful ally for Gatt the past three years. Like he did with Molde, Gatt is hoping to pick up where he left off on the international front as well.
“The goal of mine ever since I was a little kid was to participate in a World Cup for my nation,” Gatt said. “I would love that. I will work as I can for Jurgen and the U.S. team if they choose me. I am just going to keep working as hard as I can so if or when the time comes, I will make a difference."Dixie Chicks
Dixie Chicks will return with a 2016 tour, the group's first run since a handful of dates in 2013. (Vijat Mohindra)
(Vijat Mohindra)
This week, Ticketmaster has handed out credits and ticket vouchers to seemingly every concertgoer in America as part of a class action lawsuit settlement. If you've used Ticketmaster to buy tickets in the last 15 years or so, check the "active vouchers" page of your account and you should find some freebies: Ticketmaster tells me I have six pairs of "General Admission" concert tickets. My wife has 17, the max the company will be offering. That's the good news. The bad news is that we've already allegedly help pay for these passes in previous Ticketmaster fees--
--and worse, if you live in Oregon, there will be no free shows. Only a select number of Live Nation-promoted events will be eligible for the passes, and of the
across the U.S., not a single one is in Oregon or at nearby Ridgefield, Washington's Sunlight Supply Amphitheater, despite Ticketmaster currently selling passes for summer shows there, the Moda Center, the Edgefield, the Les Schwab Amphitheater and other local venues. This summer's slate includes shows from the Dixie Chicks, Boston, Modest Mouse, Diana Ross and many more. Here's what a Ticketmaster rep had to say about it:
However, there are no Live Nation owned and operated venues in Oregon, which leaves the entire state out of luck. The promotion company merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. Several events will be available this summer at Auburn, Washington's White River Amphitheatre, including Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa, Daryl Hall & John Oates and new supergroup Prophets of Rage. In the meantime, Ticketmaster claims it will honor the passes until 2020, giving it the chance to expand its concert roster--or for Oregonians to plan a few road trips. -- David Greenwald
503-294-7625;
Instagram:Once upon a time in America, grown men were expected to work a job, women were expected to stay home with the kids, and families were expected to cover expenses with their own earnings. There was no welfare state to step in for the unfortunate, or the feckless. This was the land for which the "unemployment rate" was invented.
The "unemployment rate" was a pretty good tool for measuring the problem of workless-ness in that long-forgotten America. But we don't live in that country any more. Consequently, our old-fashioned "unemployment rate" has become an increasingly inaccurate barometer for measuring the health of the American labor market and the well-being of the American public.
About a century ago - say, at the time of the 1920 Census - women comprised only a fifth of our formal workforce. (Women back then worked very hard-probably harder than men even-but almost all of their labor was unpaid toil at home.) In this earlier era, paid work was more or less a male occupation, and practically all men capable of working were in the labor market: either working for pay or looking for paying jobs. They had to. In a society that lacked not only public welfare guarantees, but even rudimentary social insurance, the prospect of not finding work raised the terrifying possibility of utter destitution- for oneself and one's family.
But that old world no longer exists even though we use that same unemployment rate today. The workplace is no longer a men's club -- in 2014, fully 47% of the civilian labor force is female. And while being without work still entails hardship, it is no longer the financial disaster and source of shame it once was. In that former America, there was basically no alternative to paid work for able-bodied men; no alternative economically, and no alternative socially. But this is no longer true today. Thanks at least partly to the growth of government support programs, voluntary joblessness - or something close to that - is, increasingly, a viable lifestyle option.
Thanks to fundamental changes in the nature of work and society in modern America, the unemployment rate has progressively been losing its erstwhile significance as a social indicator -- and even as a marker of labor market performance.
Under old America's unforgiving conditions, the "unemployment rate" and the "work rate" (or employment-to-population ratio) were likely to correspond quite closely. Today, by contrast, a declining unemployment rate no longer presages recovery in the labor market. Why? Because the rate does not account for people who have stopped looking for work.
As recently as the 1970s and early 1980s, the unemployment rate and the work rate tracked closely (but of course inversely) as may be seen below in the first two graphics. With the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, unemployment rates went up-and work rates simultaneously went down. Conversely, when unemployment rates fell, work rates snapped back up.
A very different dynamic is at work nowadays. We can see this by looking at the period from 1999 to the present. Since the crash of 2008, there has been an obvious and almost total disconnect between the U.S. unemployment rate and the nation's work rate. We have seen a gradual and continuing improvement in reported unemployment since 2010, but for the past four years the work rate has essentially flat-lined. Our unemployment rate doesn't tell us anything about the work rate any more.
How can this be? The answer is straightforward, if troubling. Simply put, there are no longer just two employment statuses in America. There are now three: 1) employed; 2) unemployed; and 3) choosing neither to work nor to look for it: i.e., the "flight from work" group.
The postwar phenomenon of "flight from work" has been most evident, and acute, among men. As women moved into paid positions over the past two generations, a growing share of men seem to have checked out of work altogether. This is even true for men of prime working ages-the 25-54 group.
The flight from work among men of prime working age can be seen in Figure 5. There is no stable long-term relationship between the unemployment rate and the work rate here for the postwar era as a whole. In the early postwar period, a 6 percent unemployment rate meant about 8 percent of this group had no work. Today it means about 18 percent have no work. For any given unemployment rate, the proportion of prime working age men actually at work seems to be inexorably falling over time. This discrepancy is due to the flight from work
Even for men of prime working age, the flight from work now looks like the dominant determinant of male workless-ness. We can see this from Figure 6, which presents the fraction of the non-workforce accounted for by the unemployed from 1948 to the present for this key working age group. Although the annual readings are erratic (more or less following the business cycle), they trend downward. For most of the postwar era, the flight from work group has comprised a majority of such non-workers-and today they are a distinct majority. For every such unemployed man today who is looking for work, there are another two who reportedly are not even looking. Note this is not a new situation to be attributed to the 2008 crash (or alternatively, to the Obama Administration). It is many decades in the making.
If we want to understand - much less fix - what ails our labor force today, we have to measure its problems first. Unfortunately, our old-fashioned "unemployment rate" has become an increasingly inaccurate barometer for measuring the health of the American labor market and the wellbeing of the American public. Other, better tools exist. We must learn to use them.A Beginner’s Guide to Control Systems and Controllers
Soham Chatterjee Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 16, 2017
Hey! In this article, I’ll be talking about controllers: What they are, what are their types and why we use them. Controllers are one of the most important, but often, the most neglected part of a system design and even I didn’t know much about them until I had to use them in a project I was working on very recently. While I was researching into controllers, I did not come across any good material on them and most of what was online was written in terms of what might be asked during an exam, but not in terms of designing and making your own project. So this article will be more of a hacker’s guide of sorts to understand controllers and implementing them in projects.
I was recently building a robot that would take a position as input and it would then move to that position. This was a simple project in which the robot could move only in one direction, that is, forwards and backwards and it would calculate its distance from a wall and that would be it’s position. It was supposed to be an easy project that shouldn’t have taken more than a few hours to complete, but even after three days, my robot would still not stop at the position given to it as input. There would always be an error of a few centimeters. It took me a long time to realize that what I was missing was a feedback loop and an error corrector in my system. Both these problems are solved by a very simple device(or code, which we’ll talk about later) called a controller.
Controllers are very important, but neglected at the same time. They are used in systems to change and maintain a system state. In my case, it was to change the position accurately and maintain it. Pretty much any electrical, mechanical, robotic, embedded…any system really, has a controller in them. Motors use controllers to to maintain speed, quad copters use them to maintain height or to stay level, cars use them to move and robots use them to pick up objects and perform tasks. Controllers are so versatile, that despite being decades old, we still haven’t found an alternative for them(partly because we don’t need to).
So what is a controller?
Formally, a controller can be a digital/analog circuit or a software, that tries to keep a variable like temperature, speed, position or angle set at a certain value called the set point or the set value. A controller does this by having a feedback loop that looks at an error signal(which is the difference between the real signal and the desired signal). The job of the controller is to minimize that error signal. If a motor is spinning too fast, reducing the error will reduce the speed, if the temperature is too low, it will increase the temperature etc.
It is very important to have that feedback loop as that is what will tell the controller whether it is at the desired set value or not. Once it reaches the set value, the controller will try to keep the system at the set value.
We use controllers because it helps keep our system stable. Stability means that the system will stay at the set point. If the motor on a crane wasn’t stable(at the same speed), then a crane operator would never be able to pick up or move any object. Stability in a system is important and a controller helps us maintain that. You also want your system to be robust and disturbance resistant. If your robot moves from a carpeted floor to a slippery marble floor then the friction changes, but you still want your robot to perform similarly. This ability to perform the same task under different conditions, environments or disturbances makes the system robust.
Another thing that we might want to look at while designing a system is optimality: Is the system performing at its optimal state? If a robot is moving from point A to point B, is it taking the shortest path? This is an optimality problem and controllers can be designed to take that into account.
As you can see, controllers are very robust and versatile objects. Now that we have pretty much understood what a controller is, and why we might want to use one, let’s start designing our own controller.
Note: The following sections are a bit math intensive, but it shouldn’t be a problem if you know your basic maths really well. I have tried my best to explain everything I do, but in case you do find anything that I have not explained well enough or if I have made some mistake, do mention it in the comments.
Designing the simplest controller
When I was first trying to design a position robot, it was always a few centimeters off from the set value or my desired position. What I did at that time was design what is probably the world’s simplest controller, which looked kind of like this:
Let’s say that our desired position is = y
Let’s say our current position is = x
So our error is = e = y-x
What this means is that if e is positive, then our car still hasn’t reached the set value or has probably stopped before it has reached the set value. If e is negative, then it has overshot the set value and we need to make the car move backwards.
Let the speed of the car be = U
So what if we design a controller like this:
What this system of equations means is that if our error is greater than 0, or our robot has not reached the desired point yet, then we set the robot’s speed to Umax. This will make the robot move towards the desired position. In case the robot has a negative error, we will have to move it backwards and so we set its speed to -Umax. And, if the error is 0, then the robot has already reached it’s position and it does not have to move. Seems reasonable right? I mean, intuitively, that is what we want our robot to do. Or is it?
A system like this will give an output as shown above. Here the value on the y-axis represents the error and the x-axis the time. The reason for such an output is simple: At first, the speed of the car increases and we accelerate until we hit zero error. But, the speed of our robot is still pretty high, it’s still at Umax, so we overshoot and now the error becomes negative. At this point, our controller switches the speed to -Umax and eventually we start going backwards, gaining speed and we overshoot again. And this gets repeated over and over.
This kind of control is known as Bang-Bang Control. When we switch between two extremes, the controller reacts harshly to even small errors and causes the kind of output we see.
So what were the problems in this system?
Well, for one, our response to the error signal e was constant. But this should not be the case. Instead the closer we are to the set value or the smaller our error signal is, our response needs to get smaller and smaller, until it is zero when we get to the set point.
Another thing you might have noticed was that our response, U, was jerky or unstable. It would randomly change values that would cause the response to change rapidly over time.
None of these are characteristics that we want a controller to have. A controller should not only be robust and stable, but it should also have a very smooth response. In short, we want our response to be large when the error signal is large and we want the response to decrease with a decrease in the error signal, that is, we want the response to be proportional(or inversely proportional) to the error signal.
The Proportional Controller
In the previous problem we saw that the response was same irrespective of the error signal. However, we want a controller that has an output that is proportional to the error. To model that, we use a proportional controller. The formula of a proportional controller looks something like this:
where e is the error signal, and kp is called the proportionality gain.
In this case, a small error will yield a smaller value of U, and a large error will yield a larger value of U. Also, in the case where e is negative, the value of U will also be negative. So we get a nice and smooth response unlike our Bang-Bang controller in the previous example.
Say we want our robot to move 60 mm or 6 cm. So we make our set point as 6 cm and we run the program. We get an output like this.
Amazing right! We got a smooth response and the system is stable. Well, not really. If you check the graph properly, you’ll see that our position is actually 5.8 and not 6. This is because once our error signal decreases up to a certain level, the value of ekp becomes very less. This means that the value of U becomes very less and no changes occur. This error is more or less constant and is known as the steady state error. So what if we increase the value of kp? We could do that, but that would cause our value to overshoot again. So, even though the system will have a smooth response, it will not achieve tracking, or it will not be able to reach the correct value of set point.
The proportionality gain tends to act like a spring, by increasing the value, the system tends to overshoot. But the advantage of the proportional controller is that for a large error, it gives a very fast response and this will come in handy when we will design more complex systems.
But for now, we need a system that can further reduce the error and get the real value closer to the desired value.
The Integral Controller
If you look at the graph of the proportional controller, it actually did a good job at reducing the error quickly in the beginning, but then, it lost steam and was not able to reduce the error any further. And for a large value of Kp, our controller overshoots.
While we are using the value of error to define our response, what we are not taking into account is the amount of error buildup over time(marked in red). By trying to reduce this buildup of error over time, we should be able to get our error down to zero as this error will also include the steady state error of we got from the P controller.
An Integral can be used to calculate this error buildup over time. The I Controller looks something like this:
That might look like a confusing equation so we’ll break it down into parts. The first part is U which is our systems response. This is followed by Ki which is our Integral Gain constant. That is followed by the integral symbol. We integrate form 0, the starting time to t, our ending time. e(t) is our error signal as a function of time, which is a fancy way of saying that it represents our error at any given time. What the integration part means is that we sum up all the error values from 0 to t and then we multiply it with our Integral Constant.
The I controller on its own has a very slow response. This is because it needs the error to build up before it can start working. So an I controller on its own will act like a damped system. We can overcome this however by using the fast responsiveness characteristic of the P controller. Hence we define a PI or a Proportional-Integral Controller as:
All I did was add the equation of the P and I controller to get the above equation. The PI controller takes into account both the effects of the proportion of error and the integral of the error over time. By changing the values of Kp and Ki, we can change the amount of proportional and integral response we want our system to have. I’ll talk about how to choose the values of Kp and Ki later. But for now, its safe to know that our system will be able to reduce all errors and maintain stability. In fact, PI controllers are so good at their job that more than half of the controllers used today are PI controllers. Everything from the cruise control in your car to the speed regulators in your fan uses a PI controller.
However, we still haven’t solved one problem: The problem of a smooth response. A PI controller does have a smooth response, and it is smooth enough for most systems, but for many sensitive systems, you might need a slower response time. For example, to design a system that mixes chemicals in specific amounts, you might want to mix the chemicals slowly and you definitely do not want the quantities to overshoot their desired values. To do this, we add a derivative term in our system.
The Derivative Controller
The derivative of our error gives the slope of the error signal at that time. The slope represents the rate of change of our error at that time. The derivative controller looks like this:
Kd is the derivative gain and it acts as a damper that makes sure that our system response is slow and that it never overshoots the set value. By combining P and D controllers, we get a PD controller:
These controllers are widely used in aerial robotic applications. By choosing appropriate values of Kp and Kd, we can get a stable system that does not overshoot. Some points to consider for PD controllers are:
1)If we choose a small value for Kd, the system might overshoot like so
2)If we increase the value of Kp too much, we will have a system with a fast response, but we will also have oscillations in the system like so
3)If however, we have a system with a large value of Kd, then we will have an over damped system like so
Enter PID controllers
We now know what P, PI and PD controllers are. To have a system where you can take advantage of the different properties of P, I and D, we use a PID controller. By choosing smaller or larger values of the constants, we can give the system more or less properties of different controllers.
There are essentially, 3 parts to that equation that you can tweak while designing a system. They are the Proportional Gain or Kp, the Integral Gain Ki and the Derivative Gain Kd. Tweaking these different values have the following effects:
Kp: It has a Fast Response, it improves Stability, But there is a constant Steady State Error and there is no tracking. A small value of Kp increases stability, but causes a large steady state error. A larger value tends to make the system overshoot.
Ki: Improves tracking, but it has a very slow rate of response and may cause oscillations. It also increases the disturbance rejection of the system.
Kd: By increasing the derivative gain, we tend to make the system overdamped. The derivative is also sensitive to noise as the slope at a time will change if you have a noisy signal.
OK, So now that we know what a controller is, what the different parameters are and how tweaking each parameter can cause a different output, we can now finally move on to learning how to implement controllers. But before that, I should probably answer the next question first.
What’s the difference between a Controller and a Micro-controller?
Many people don’t know the answer to this, and after searching online for the better part of a day, even I could not find any material online that properly answers this question, so I’ll try my best to answer it.
A controller and a micro-controller are actually quite different from each other. A micro-controller is a device that can be used to control a system. It has I/O ports that can take both digital and analog inputs and outputs and based on some input signals, it does some calculations and gives an output signal. While a micro-controller is a hardware device, a controller, is a mathematical process or function that can be used to get a desired result. This means that a PID controller can be implemented inside a micro-controller and most of the time, that is what is done today. For example, in my example robot project, I had a distance sensor that could measure the position of my robot, this would be given as feedback to my micro-controller that would then calculate the error and the value of response and tell the wheels of my robot to move based on that.
How to Implement a Controller
We’ll be implementing a controller using a micro-controller. We’ll be implementing a motor speed controlling system. To do so, we’ll need to first tell the micro-controller what speed to maintain. We also need a feedback loop that tells the micro-controller what speed the motor is running at currently. To change the speed of the motor we usually control the voltage using a converter.
Using these two values we can calculate the error value. This error value will then need to be fed into the equation for whatever controller you want to use. By tweaking the values of Kp, Ki and Kd, we can make sure that when we change the speed of the motor, there are reduced oscillations and that the system is stable. The value outputted by the controller can be then given into the voltage converter which will in turn change the speed of the motor.
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Many of the images in this tutorial were taken from online courses on Coursera and edX. The courses were “Aerial Robotics” by Prof. Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania and “Control of Mobile Robots” by Dr. Magnus Egerstedt from Georgia Institute of Technology. They are both amazing courses and are highly recommendedThe reaction to another Clayton Kershaw tour de force Wednesday — striking out 15 and going the distance on 132 pitches to pretty much eliminate the Giants from the NL West race in the first week of September — was to wonder if he was now the Cy Young frontrunner.
But that kind of misses the point, like seeing just the first 10 floors of the Freedom Tower.
Kershaw no longer is playing just for the 2015 Cy Young. He is playing to be Cy Young.
His competition is not teammate Zack Greinke and the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta. That is too limiting in scope, to just this year. The competition is Greg Maddux and Tom Seaver and Sandy Koufax and Lefty Grove and the best who have ever worked 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate.
“Twenty or 30 years from now, the next generation will think of Kershaw the we talk about Koufax, Seaver, [Nolan] Ryan,” said Dan O’Dowd, who as general manager of the Rockies from 2008-14 saw Kershaw’s first seven seasons up close in the NL West. “You are dealing with consistency of performance, an overwhelming competitive fire, a great passion for the game, a great teammate, a great ambassador for the game. The only thing that can derail him from being one of the greatest of all time is injury.”
Sometimes it is hard to appreciate in real time, but we are watching a historic pitcher at the peak of his powers.
Yes, I know, he has not been good in the postseason and that will have to change — beginning this year — for him to remove the one smudge on his résumé.
But are you going to define a pitcher by eight starts in October or the 236 so far on his regular-season ledger?
“The thing I don’t think he gets enough praise for is just how good of a pitcher he is,” a scout said. “His stuff is obviously overwhelming, but he has a really good feel for the craft of pitching. He throws a ton of strikes, he commands everything, and he can make an adjustment on the fly. This is not the type of guy who is going to fall off the map, he’s built to be great for a really long time.
“If he stays healthy — always a huge if — it’s hard to imagine him not being one of the all-time greats given how young, talented and committed he is.”
Kershaw has been brilliant for the length of his eight-year career, a genius for seven and — well — Koufaxian now for the last five.
As a lefty and a Dodger, Kershaw is often bonded to Koufax, who actually has become one of the leaders of the Clayton Kershaw fan club.
Koufax created his legacy over his final six seasons (1961-66), when he won three Cy Youngs and finished third once (in fairness, before 1967 there was a single Cy Young given to cover both leagues). In the past four years, Kershaw has won three Cys and finished second once, and likely will wind up no worse than third this year.
“It goes beyond the stuff in the comparison to Koufax, it is about will and having to wrestle the ball out of their hands,” said Joe Torre, who faced Koufax as a player and was Kershaw’s first Dodgers manage. “The makeup is essentially that he wills himself to success. Long-term contract, short-term contract, [Kershaw is] basically going to take the ball and give you everything he has got. He has no back off in him. He is strictly a very aggressive pitcher and I mean pitcher — not thrower. If you spend any time with him he is special and belongs in the group of the best I have seen with [Juan] Marichal, Koufax, [Don] Drysdale, [Bob] Gibson. He certainly fits that group.”
Koufax had an ERA-plus of 156 for those elite six seasons. I use ERA-plus because it is a fairer stat to compare players of different eras since it factors in the league and ballpark, then gives a result against league average — an ERA-plus of 156 is 56 percent better than league average.
Kershaw’s career ERA-plus is 154, it is 164 for the past six years and 172 since 2011 when he won his first Cy. The only pitchers in major league history to have a better five-year run for ERA-plus are Pedro Martinez from 1999-2003 (228), Maddux from 1994-98 (202), Randy Johnson from 1998-2002 (174) and Grove from 1935-39 (173).
Kershaw is not yet through his age-27 season, but just to give an idea, that career 154 ERA-plus is bettered through the same age by just two pitchers in history — Walter Johnson (176) and Martinez (156).
Kershaw has had an ERA-plus of at least 133 in each of the past seven years. Whitey Ford did it eight times in his whole career, Seaver nine, Maddux and Christy Mathewson 10.
At this moment, Kershaw is tied with Martinez for the best career ERA-plus among starters. Of course, he has a lot of miles to go. But that includes what appears several more in his prime.
There actually was a narrative earlier this season wondering what was wrong with Kershaw. He was 2-3 with a 4.32 ERA through nine starts. Did I mention that Koufax is a leader of the Kershaw fan club? This is what Koufax told the Los Angeles Times at that point: “Before the season is over, those numbers are going to be right where they always are.”
In his 18 outings since, Kershaw is 10-3 with a 1.26 ERA, a.175 batting average against and — get this — 178 strikeouts and 18 walks in 135 2/3 innings. In other words as brilliant as ever.
On Aug. 23, Kershaw said his underachieving, $300 million squad needed to play with greater “urgency.” He offered that after Los Angeles had lost earlier that day when Kershaw had allowed one run in eight innings, striking out 10 and walking none.
What stands out to so many around the Dodgers is not just the greatness in Kershaw’s arm, but how competitive he is and how much he cares about winning. So if you say those words that challenge others, you have to rise yourself.
In the two starts since that statement, Kershaw has faced the wild card-bound Cubs and the Giants — the lone NL West team that is a threat to the Dodgers. He has pitched 17 innings, yielded two runs, walked two and struck out 29.
That left him at 251 strikeouts. That is the most by a Dodger since Koufax fanned 317 in his final season, 1966. It also means that with either five or six starts left, depending likely on just when (if) the Dodgers clinch the NL West, Kershaw has a chance to become the first major leaguer to whiff 300 since Johnson and Curt Schilling in 2002.
No disrespect to Greinke and Arrieta, but these are the names that Kershaw dances with now — Johnson and Schilling, Pedro and Unit, Seaver and Grove. It is not about one Cy Young any more with Kershaw, it is about being compared to the original.I see my forebears, warriors in retirement, laboring in endless fields, bustling markets, and desolate seas. One by one they all stop, turn to me, and say: “If you have good hands, anything can happen.”
Media Gallery
1.
“Who’s ever seen a fat Chinese kid?”
Laughter erupts and Sister O’Reilly hushes the class. She explains in a calm voice that, in fact, I’m Vietnamese, but it’s already too late—Kevin Connor’s words are out, and they’ll remain there for infinity, like dinosaur particles in deep space. Everyone turns to see the fat Chinese kid’s reaction: me.
According to my library book SCIENCE ANSWERS: How Will I Die?, the chances of a sinkhole opening up under my desk are infinitesimal but I bury my head into the desk and push my sneakers against the floor anyway, hoping it’s enough to loosen up the earth. As punishment for speaking out, Sister O’Reilly smacks Kevin Connor on the back of the head with a Bible—a softcover, not a hardcover, even though there’s a stack of them right there on her bookshelf. When she turns her back to the class, his friends give him high-fives and some of the girls look at him with concern because maybe he got hurt.
There is another not-white student in the sixth grade at St. Margaret’s, a Black girl named Elise, who reads during lunch and recess by herself under the single oak tree on the playground. Following her example, I bring a book to lunch on the second day but before I can follow her, Kevin steps in between us and says, “You don’t want to be seen with her.”
I hear my father’s warnings and settle for admiring Elise from a distance. She’s the smartest student at St. Margaret’s, successfully defending her spelling bee championship title year after year. She’s also the best-dressed: her black Mary Janes are always polished, her uniform freshly pressed, and her braided hair swirls into a bun that rests on the crown of her head like a laurel wreath. We glance at each other during my week-long visit but don’t share any laughter or conversation, because our classmates will tease us or accuse us of plotting against them. When the other kids point and laugh at her, she ignores them, but if they interrupt her reading, she shoots them a look—an optic blast—and it’s enough to shut them up. I tell my father about Elise, how she likes reading and has good hands (I saw her drawings in art class), but he says I’m mistaken, it doesn’t count. I mean, does he know any other sixth graders who can shade and crosshatch?
In front of Elise’s oak tree is where Kevin Connor and his friends surround me on |
Back at his church, I sat down with Fr. Jan myself. I asked him about all these allegations of abuse.
In your life, have you ever been sexually attracted to children? Have you ever abused children in any way?
Jan Van Deal: No.
Will Carless: He said all the accusations against him are lies. They're drummed up by an abusive parent, envious competitors or naive college students. When we asked him literally what does it mean to be a pedophile, he gave us this bizarre answer.
Jan Van Deal: Literally, pedophilia comes from the Greeks, pedos meaning child and phelia, meaning friendship with children. People have translated this word as pedosexual.
Will Carless: You would say using the real sense of the word?
Jan Van Deal: Yes. In the real sense of the word, I'm a pedophile, but not a pedosexual.
Will Carless: Since our investigation came out this past fall, Fr. Jan's no longer allowed to celebrate mass at all. So far, we've heard all about priests being sent to South America after they were accused but not convicted of abusing children despite the evidence against them.
Then across the continent, in Peru, we tracked down this case of an admitted child molester who's still a priest and still working with kids.
Speaker 15: Hi.
Will Carless: [Foreign language 00:46:13] I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 15: Fine.
Will Carless: My name is Will Carless. I'm a reporter with the GlobalPost. We are...
Back in the 1970s, Paul Madden was accused of repeatedly molesting and raping a 13-year-old boy while they're on a mission trip together out of Jackson, Mississippi. He was sued twice by the victim. In 1994, the diocese agreed to pay the family $50,000, and Madden signed his letter of apology to the victim's parents. The letter said, "I've been played with remorse and guilt for my molestation of your son. There is no excuse for my actions. I assume responsibility for them as a humble penitent." Here, in the small fishing village of Puerto Huarmey, a few hours north of Lima, Peru, Fr. Madden was still performing mass when we caught up with him last year. He's a middle-aged man originally from Ireland. He was wearing this crisp, white robe with gold trim.
I guess my first question to you would be your congregation here in Puerto Huarmey, are they aware of the allegations that were made against you back in...
Paul Madden: No.
Will Carless: They don't know about it. Do you think they should?
Paul Madden: I don't think so since that the case has been dismissed and all the rest of it.
Will Carless: I understand, the second lawsuit was dismissed, but the first lawsuit was settled. I believe the diocese paid something like $50,000.
Paul Madden: That's right.
Will Carless: I also understand that there was a letter that you wrote to the family, actually admitting the abuse happened and everything else.
Paul Madden: I didn't write that letter actually. The lawyers for the diocese wrote that and I signed it.
Will Carless: Okay. The important thing is whether it happened or not, right?
Paul Madden: Something happened. I was drunk. I had never drunk before in my life. It was the first time ever. I woke up in the middle of the night and.... Yeah, something happened.
Will Carless: In the year or so I spent tracking down these priests, I'd run through every possible scenario for how these confrontations could go. In all those scenarios that I ran through, I never expected one of them to actually confess.
It's something that you regret obviously?
Paul Madden: Obviously. Obviously.
Will Carless: With that, we tried to interview the bishop of Madden's diocese. He wouldn't talk to us but his second in command, Vicar General Juan Roger Rodriguez did.
Did you know Paul Madden was accused of admitted to sexual abuse in the United States?
J. Rodriguez: No. This is a surprise to us.
Will Carless: You didn't know?
J. Rodriguez: It's a surprise. To some, it may seem hard, even painful for a bishop to have to investigate a priest, but it must be done because there is a greater good, which is truth and shall we say, the innocence of a minor.
Will Carless: Whether or not Rodriguez followed through with his promise of an investigation isn't actually clear. He stopped taking my calls. Since our original investigation, Madden is the only priest we tracked down who still has his job. He can still be found celebrating mass each week in Puerto Huarmey.
Al Letson: After hearing that piece, I just wanted to process it a little bit. We got Will on the line to talk it through. Will, how are you doing?
Will Carless: Hi, Al. How are you doing?
Al Letson: Good, man. After listening to that piece and also watching the documentary you made on the same subject, the big question I had is these are kids, man. They're kids. Why is there even a question of what to do with these perpetrators?
Will Carless: Right. As a father of two kids, it's definitely... I have a pretty visible reaction. A lot of my friends actually asked me, "How do you control yourself? How do you know? Just unleash yourself at the man, obviously." We're professionals and we spent a lot of time considering how we're going to do it and planning things out, and we keep our cool. Yeah, there's certainly a part of you that is bringing [mad 00:50:26] at these people when you're going into these situations.
Al Letson: We've heard about the zero tolerance policy throughout the show. The fact that they need the policy is crazy. Are they actually doing it?
Will Carless: Honestly, what's even crazier is that it's never been defined actually what that means. Pope Francis has gone out to every bishop in the world and said, "We want you to have this zero tolerance policy." It sounds very good. It gets a lot of headlines. Then he's never actually substantiated what that means. He's never issued actual rules or guidelines about what bishops are supposed to do when they're confronted with a situation like this. You get the situation that we have today, where these men are allowed to move around the world with impunity and carry on working as priest and carry on working with children day in, day out.
Al Letson: With Pope Francis coming in, there were high hopes that he was going to be a big reformer and change things. Specifically dealing with this subject, is he getting serious about these priests that are abusing children?
Will Carless: Man, that's the million-dollar question. He's set up this commission that's supposed to be advising him on how to proceed and what policies to change. The bottom line is, if you talk to people who work in this world and you talk to them and you say, "What does this Pope need to do?" They say, "It's simple. What he needs to do is he needs to go out tomorrow with one swipe of his pen. He needs to make all of the records public. He needs to make very clear what a zero tolerance policy means. He could fix this very quickly with minimal effort."
Al Letson: Give me the long view here. This is something that's been going on for a really long time in the church. Where do we go now, now that we have all this information about what's happened? What's next?
Will Carless: I think it's possible to look forwards without looking backwards. The work done by the Spotlight team in Boston, by all of these journalists across the decades, there's no doubt that we're looking at a Catholic Church that's in a very different place now than it was before. We've already had huge strides forwards. I think what we need to see next is to see whether this Pope is going to, frankly, put his money where his mouth is and start making some actual changes that will really tangibly help people moving forward.
Al Letson: That's correspondent Will Carless with the GlobalPost. You can find a link to his print piece and the documentary where Will hunts down these fugitive fathers at revealnews.org.
We want to thank Minnesota Public Radio and The Boston Globe for their help on this show. We'll be watching The Oscars on February 28 to see how the film Spotlight does.
[Inaudible 00:53:00] and Michael [Shiela 00:53:01] were our lead producers on this episode. [Julie B. Chin 00:53:03] produced our digital content. Thanks to Michael Paulson and Rob Harris for additional reporting and editing help. Our show was edited by [Patch Lin 00:53:11]. Our lead sound designer and engineer is my man, Jay [Breezy 00:53:14] Jim Briggs. Our associate engineer is Claire [inaudible 00:53:18]. Our managing editor is Amy [inaudible 00:53:21]. Our head of studio is Christoff [inaudible 00:53:23]. Susan [Weaver 00:53:24] is our executive editor. Our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. Our theme music is from Camerado-Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by The Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.
Reveal is a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I'm Al Letson. Remember, there is always more to the story.Did you know that if you pick up a crab (very gently) and look at its belly you can determine the sex of the crab? They have a little pouch or apron under their bellies and if this pouch is large and wide its a female crab. This is were they store their eggs. The male’s pouch looks like a penis um, it looks like a smaller pouch.
Yeah….a smaller pouch.
Well done, you have now determined the sex of your crab (without injuring said crab!). This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, you may now name your crab and gently release him or her. Do not replace the rock you moved to find him/her, you may crush him/her. Of course, naming your crab may not affect the crab in any way, they might shrug off your petty human name and even the sex you have dubbed them and make their own rules. They don’t care what you think, they a crab.wozzot Profile Joined July 2012 United States 1226 Posts Last Edited: 2012-10-27 14:25:52 #1 ST_ PartinG
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We would like to hear your thoughts on your team advancing to the semifinals.
I began showing results in the GSTL after I started living in the team house. During that time, my hyungs scolded me for being so preoccupied with the individual leagues, so I decided that I would begin contributing to my team in the team leagues. I'm glad that my practice led to such great results.
You hauled your team to victory with an all-kill.
Starting from several days ago, I promised that I would definitely all-kill IM. I'm happy that I was able to keep that promise and prove to others that I'm not just a bluffer.
This is the fourth all-kill by a StarTale player in the GSTL, as well as the fourth all-kill by a Protoss.
I didn't know that before, but it's great that our team has such high prestige. When I watched Protosses like YongHwa all-kill, I was always jealous of them, but I feel happy now that I've done one myself. Now, I hope that no other Protoss will be able to perform another all-kill in the future (laughs).
You won your match against LosirA with one of your soul-filled Immortal all-ins.
I think that my PvZ is always the same. I dared my opponent to try and defend once I attacked, then I won handily. When I was able to bulldoze down my opponent's Spine Crawler line, I got the feeling that my Immortal timings are indeed the strongest.
When did you predict that you it would be possible for you to perform an all-kill?
I started feeling confident once I beat MC even after revealing my proxy Gateways to him.
During your last match, YongHwa gave you a lot of trouble with his Dark Templar, but you still won using an Immortal-Archon attack.
I did wonder whether my streak would end at four kills, but I saw that I might have a chance if I kept careful track of YongHwa-hyung's army movements. Thanks to his DTs killing my Probes, I was able to fill the gap in my supply back up with army units. Knowing that this was my only opportunity to win and that I would lose if I were stopped, I proceeded to attack and took the victory.
In the Round of 4, you will meet the team in Group A that advances in second place. Which team would you like to face?
I want to meet Prime. I want revenge for our loss in the Las Vegas finals, and since I already have experience all-killing them in the IPTL, I want to try doing it again. My team is feeling great right now, and I hope that our streak of momentum lasts until the day of the match.
Has Life, your teammate, been able to stop your Immortal rushes?
In practice matches, I've performed around 70 Immortal timing attacks, and I have never seen anyone block one. There are no Zergs who can defend against my Immortal rush in Wings of Liberty. If a Zerg player ever comes out who can stop my attack, he will be able to beat me.
Numerous people have wanted to learn the secret to my Immortal attacks, but even if you check out my VODs, you won't be able to find out. If I manage to win the Code S championship, I will reveal the secret to my Immortal rush, so if there are any other Protosses who want to know, they'll have to cheer for me to win.
There aren't very many Zerg players in Code S.
I feel confident even if I don't ever meet a Zerg. Throughout the last season, Life stated in interviews that he always had confidence in himself, and I am just the same. If I meet any Zergs on the way, I can Immortal rush them whenever I want, so I hope that they start sweating.
Do you have any last words?
I'm thankful to my team's sponsors, Red Bull, Zowie Gear, and Joy Gear. My manager used to be disappointed in me for only practicing for individual leagues and not showing good results in team leagues. With today's all-kill, I hope that he forgets all of that and starts to see me as an ace. I plan to make a lot of noise in the team house today (laughs). Source: This Is Game I began showing results in the GSTL after I started living in the team house. During that time, my hyungs scolded me for being so preoccupied with the individual leagues, so I decided that I would begin contributing to my team in the team leagues. I'm glad that my practice led to such great results.Starting from several days ago, I promised that I would definitely all-kill IM. I'm happy that I was able to keep that promise and prove to others that I'm not just a bluffer.I didn't know that before, but it's great that our team has such high prestige. When I watched Protosses like YongHwa all-kill, I was always jealous of them, but I feel happy now that I've done one myself. Now, I hope that no other Protoss will be able to perform another all-kill in the future (laughs).I think that my PvZ is always the same. I dared my opponent to try and defend once I attacked, then I won handily. When I was able to bulldoze down my opponent's Spine Crawler line, I got the feeling that my Immortal timings are indeed the strongest.I started feeling confident once I beat MC even after revealing my proxy Gateways to him.I did wonder whether my streak would end at four kills, but I saw that I might have a chance if I kept careful track of YongHwa-hyung's army movements. Thanks to his DTs killing my Probes, I was able to fill the gap in my supply back up with army units. Knowing that this was my only opportunity to win and that I would lose if I were stopped, I proceeded to attack and took the victory.I want to meet Prime. I want revenge for our loss in the Las Vegas finals, and since I already have experience all-killing them in the IPTL, I want to try doing it again. My team is feeling great right now, and I hope that our streak of momentum lasts until the day of the match.In practice matches, I've performed around 70 Immortal timing attacks, and I have never seen anyone block one. There are no Zergs who can defend against my Immortal rush in Wings of Liberty. If a Zerg player ever comes out who can stop my attack, he will be able to beat me.Numerous people have wanted to learn the secret to my Immortal attacks, but even if you check out my VODs, you won't be able to find out. If I manage to win the Code S championship, I will reveal the secret to my Immortal rush, so if there are any other Protosses who want to know, they'll have to cheer for me to win.I feel confident even if I don't ever meet a Zerg. Throughout the last season, Life stated in interviews that he always had confidence in himself, and I am just the same. If I meet any Zergs on the way, I can Immortal rush them whenever I want, so I hope that they start sweating.I'm thankful to my team's sponsors, Red Bull, Zowie Gear, and Joy Gear. My manager used to be disappointed in me for only practicing for individual leagues and not showing good results in team leagues. With today's all-kill, I hope that he forgets all of that and starts to see me as an ace. I plan to make a lot of noise in the team house today (laughs). (ﾉ´∀`*)ﾉ ♪ ♫ ヽ(´ー`)ノ ♪ ♫ (✌ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞ ♪ ♫ ヽ(´ー`)ノ ♫ ♫ (ノ´＿ゝ｀）ノ彡 ┻━┻EUR/USD Exchange Rate Could Plunge in 2016
The euro to dollar exchange rate has shown weakness in 2015, setting the stage for deeper losses in the EUR/USD. As we head into 2016, Europe is struggling to starve off economic collapse, while the dollar is catching a bit of a tailwind.
America’s central bank, the almighty Federal Reserve, is gearing up for an interest rate hike in December, creating a strange environment for the EUR/USD. The U.S. economy is finally performing well enough for the Federal Reserve to step back and let go, but Europe’s economy is not.
Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, recently hinted that interest rates will remain low for the near future. (Source: “ECB ponders options as it looks to inject fresh economic stimulus,” CNBC, November 29, 2015.) His coded language basically translates to, “Sorry, the economy isn’t strong enough to stand on its own two legs yet.”
This disparity between the U.S. and Europe tells us a lot about where the euro to dollar exchange rate is headed. After all, we’ve been living in extraordinary times and the normal rules of economics don’t apply; almost everything is counterintuitive.
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Why has the EUR/USD exchange rate fallen by 12.7% since the start of 2015? And how much further can it fall? The answers to those questions lie directly in the Federal Reserve’s actions this month. Let me explain…
The Euro to Dollar Outlook 2016
There are two reasons why the EUR/USD relationship could collapse in 2016.
First off, a limitless money supply and rock-bottom interest rates saved the U.S. dollar. Cutting interest rates was supposed to promote lending (and spending) in the economy, while the money supply was used to purchase toxic assets from troubled banks.
While that worked at the start of quantitative easing, it’s doesn’t anymore. Just take a look at the total loans made to businesses this year.
For the latter half of 2014, most investors believed the Fed would raise rates in the following year. Then came a dip in sales and consumer sentiment, forcing a resurgence of pessimism. It looked like the central bankers would kick the can down the road.
And when it looked like no rate hike was coming, lending to businesses shrank. How does that make sense? If low interest rates make it cheap to borrow cash, why would banks react negatively to the absence of a rate hike?
I think it’s because we became comfortable with low interest rates. There was no urgency to lend because no one really believed that a rate hike was coming. However, now we have a credible threat of higher interest rates on the table and everyone is lining up for a loan.
These aren’t the type of bad loans that crushed the U.S. economy in 2008. Business loans are used by companies looking to expand and grow. That’s the kind of capitalism that will keep the U.S. dollar strong for the next few years.
Things look much worse across the pond. Europe was slow to react to the financial crisis, opting for weak, half-measures instead of decisive actions. The continent’s deep-rooted fears of inflation kept the European Central Bank (ECB) averse to Fed-like stimulus.
Then there were the (multiple) Greek tragedies that wreaked havoc on financial markets. Europe seemed to be coming apart at the seams. To pacify uneasy investors, Mario Draghi promised a little more stimulus and so the day of judgment was pushed back. (Source: “ECB ponders options as it looks to inject fresh economic stimulus,” CNBC, November 29, 2015.)
Now the euro’s ultimate test is coming. The Federal Reserve is about to raise interest rates and markets will likely have momentary jitters before calming down. That’s when the truth becomes obvious. The U.S. economy will be free of all support, growing on its own merits, and Europe will be stagnating.
The Bottom Line on the EUR/USD Outlook
Simply put, one country recovered and the other did not. Currency speculators could flee the euro, driving up the relative value of the dollar. It’s not a very hopeful prediction, but all the evidence points to a coming storm for Europe. I’m going to make sure my money is as far away as possible.
Stay in the loop. Follow Gaurav on Facebook and Twitter.What is Guitarix?
Guitarix is a modular, virtual amplifier for Linux. With Guitarix you can choose different preamp and amp models, combine them with various effects and speaker cabinet emulations to come up with your very own tones. Guitarix comes as a standalone application but its modules are also available in the LV2 plugin format, which you can incorporate into your DAW of choice. Furthermore, it can even be run headless, so you can turn a Raspberry Pi, or any other such devices, into a dedicated amp modeler. You can even control Guitarix via a MIDI controller or foot-board.
Connecting up your guitar into Guitarix
Before you get started, you will need to know how to correctly get your guitar signal into your computer. You will first need to make sure your audio interface is selected by the Jack Audio Connection Kit. This must be selected and JACK must be started before starting up Guitarix. There are various ways to do this but two of the most popular are to use Qjackctl or alternatively, Cadence, which is bundled with KXStudio. To learn more about getting JACK set up and to understand the fundamentals of using it, you can read the LMP guide -
Demystifying JACK – A Beginners Guide to Getting Started with JACK
Your next consideration depends on what type of audio interface you are using. It's important to match the guitars high output impedance level to that of your audio interfaces input or else there will be degradation of the guitar signal, notably, the high frequencies will drop off and you will have a thin, noisy and possibly distorted signal. There are a few ways to do this correctly -
If your audio interface has an instrument input, use this. Alternatively, some interfaces have inputs that can be switched between 'line in' and 'instrument'. In this case, make sure the input you are using is set to 'instrument'. Note that on some interfaces, instrument inputs are labeled Hi-Z.
If your audio interface doesn't have an instrument input, you will need a DI box. This will correct the impedance mismatch so that you can then connect it up to a 'line in' or'mic' input.
Next, start up Guitarix. When you have your guitar hooked up into your computers soundcard, you will next need to connect up it up to Guitarix. You can use the patchbay area of Qjackctl or alternatively more graphical programs such as Patchage or Catia, to make your connections. For the standalone Guitarix application, here is how your connections should look.
The guitar is connected into input one on the audio interface. It is then routed through Guitarix while the sound goes out through output 1 and 2 of the interface and into the speakers
Note that Guitarix is broken up into two JACK modules. The first one is called gx_head_amp, which is a mono module containing the amp and mono rack effects. The second is a stereo module for stereo rack effects. If these are not correctly connected up, make sure the output of the amp is going into the input of the stereo effects section. You can then treat them as one module in most cases; however, you can insert effects from other JACK applications in between gx_head_amp and gx_head_fx if you wish.
Understanding and setting your latency settings
Latency is the length of time that it takes your computer to process a signal and give you back the result. Audio latency is not something that you want if you are playing your guitar live through Guitarix. This will result in the sound being played back through your speakers with a slight delay. These delays, while small, can completely throw you off your performance. For this reason, you will want to get your audio latency low enough that the delay is not perceivable. However, this comes at the cost of increased CPU usage.
How low you can get your latency settings depends on both your hardware and software set up. For this purpose, an audio based Linux distribution is recommended, as these will have a low latency kernel and other optimizations that will allow you to get superior performance over stock Linux distributions for low latency audio.
You can adjust your latency (frame rate) in Qjackctl or Cadence but if you are using the standalone Guitarix client, there is an easier way of doing this. If you go to Engine > Latency, you can choose your frame rate setting here. The advantage of changing it from within Guitarix is that you can change the setting on the fly, i.e. there is no need to stop and restart JACK each time you change the setting. It will default to either 1024 or 512 frames. Those settings will typically cause a noticeable delay. Try lowering the frame rate in increments until you get the audio latency low enough that it is not perceivable. A setting between 64 and 256 will usually give you the best results.
Interface explained
When you first start up Guitarix, you will be presented with the amp head and nothing more. You will find some toggle buttons along the top. These do the following -
Pool
Toggles the visibility of the effects plugin bar
Order
Collapses the height of all effects modules and allows you to easily click and drag around their order. This is useful for reordering large amounts of effects.
Tuner
Toggles the visibility of the tuner rack
Rack
Toggles the visibility of rack effects modules.
Split
Displays rack modules across two columns, mono plugins in the left column, stereo plugins in the right.
Fold and Show buttons
The 'Fold' button collapses the height of all rack effects modules. The 'Show' button expands them again. As opposed to the 'Order' button which is for reordering your signal path, 'Fold' doesn't collapse the height of the amp head and folded modules still have access to a slider control, presets, etc.
Live play
Shows a minimal fullscreen display with preset information. Useful for live performance.
Next you will want to start adding and arranging modules and effects. Press the 'Effects' toggle button. You will now see all available plugins and effects down the left hand side. These are categorized into collapsible boxes. You can expand any of these categories by clicking on a category box.
To add an effect to your signal chain, simply click and drag it across to the rack area and drop it into position. Effects default to disabled when first added to the rack. On the left hand side of each effect module is a button, which you can toggle to enable or disable the effect. These modules can be moved around in various orders, and can be added before (above) or after (below) the preamp section. Just hover over the rack handles on either side of a module, click and drag to rearrange the order. To remove a module from the rack, grab it and drag it back into the plugin bar. The signal is processed through these modules from top to bottom.
Note – If you add stereo plugins, they can only be added to the bottom of the rack. This is because stereo effects are processed after mono effects, and hence why Guitarix shows up as two separate JACK modules. If you are using the horizontal option for displaying rack effects, the signal flows from top to bottom through the mono rack on the left and then into the stereo rack on the right, again being processed from top to bottom.
More about Signal Flow
The order of your signal chain is important. Below is the basic structure that will mimic a real amp and speaker cabinet set up. You will need to add a tonestack and cabinet module below (after) the preamp. You will find both of these modules in the 'Tone control' category.
Preamp – boosts your guitar signal, with tube emulation
Tone Stack – processes the guitar sound. There are selectable amp models which you can choose
Cabinet – emulates the playback through selectable guitar cabinets
Guitarix comes with the following preamp models
Tube Type Application 12AX7 (also known as ECC83) Dual Triode (high gain) Most common preamp tube, notably used in Marshall and Vox amps 12AU7 (also known as ECC82) Dual Triode (low gain) Used in some vintage Gibson and Marshall amps 12AT7 (also known as ECC81) Dual Triode (medium gain) Used in driver and phase-inverter stages 6DJ8 (also known as ECC88) High Transconductance Dual Triode (medium gain) Used in some Hi-Fi amps, also in TV's 6C16 Triode-Pentode Used in some Hi-Fi and headphone amps 6V6 Beam power tetrode Very common power amp tube
Amp Head Controls
Pregain – input level of the guitar
Master gain - amount of signal sent from the pre-amp to the power section
Clean/dist – amount of distortion
Drive – signal gain
Master out – This control is an exception to the top to bottom signal flow rule. Turning this up and down it will boost or attenuate the final output signal (to JACK signal). This is useful for attenuating the signal so it doesn't clip on its way out of Guitarix.
Effects modules
Guitarix comes with an extensive list of effects including compression, distortion, modulation, reverb, delay, EQ, etc. Some of the effects modules that are included in Guitarix are influenced by some popular hardware units, for example the Tube Screamer is, not surprisingly, based off of the Ibanez Tube Screamer.
As well as its inbuilt effects, Guitarix can also load up LAPSPA and LV2 plugins. These have to be specifically enabled for them to show up in the plugin sidebar. To do this, go to Plugins > LADSPA/LV2 Plugins. Any enabled plugins will now show up in your plugin side bar under the category 'External'. Between Guitarix's built in plugins and third party plugins, there is a vast amount of effects to choose from.
Note - while most LV2 plugins will work in Guitarix, some may use LV2 features that Guitarix does not support
There are no hard and fast rules for which order to place your effects in. If something achieves the sound you are looking for, then it is the correct way for that purpose, however, there are some generally accepted best practices for the order in which most guitarists prefer to have their effects. The following are some effects and their recommended order, from top to bottom, in the signal chain
EFFECT RECOMMENDED GUITARIX MODULE NOTES/TIPS
PRE AMP EFFECTS Noise gate Built in noise gate Cuts off low level noise. This is built into Guitarix as first in the signal path. Compressor Compressor
Category – Guitar Effects Compressors work best when placed before any sound shaping effects. Overdrive/Distortion Tube Screamer
Category - Distortion The tube screamer is a popular guitar pedal. It's often used to add a signal boost without driving up the gain setting too much. This hotter signal can drive the preamp section harder. Graphic EQ Graphic EQ
Category – Tone Control Useful for sculpting your tone, cutting problematic frequencies, mid boost, etc. Wah GCB 95
Category – Guitar Effects The GCB 95 is based off of a crybaby wah pedal. If you have a MIDI controlled expression pedal, you can use it to control this.
Chorus Chorus Mono
Category – Modulation
POST AMP EFFECTS Reverb Zita Rev1
Category - Reverb Can add space around your guitar. More suited to clean/lead tones. Delay (sometimes called Echo) Digital Stereo Delay
Category – Echo/Delay Delay, or Echo, can often be more suited than reverb. Whereas reverb can blend a guitar into the back, delay can make a guitars sound more upfront. Convolution Convolver
Category - Reverb Can be used for adding reverb impulse response files but also is a good alternative to using the cabinet module if you have impulse response files of cabinets
Convolution
Guitarix includes a convolution module, called Convolver, that allows you to load up impulse response files. You will find Convolver under the Reverb category. With this you can load up reverb impulses although another very good use for convolution is using it as a speaker cabinet emulator by loading up speaker cabinet impulses.
Any impulse responses in the.wav file format can be used with Guitarix. There are many of these that can be found in various forums on the internet. To get you started though, Guitarix comes with some guitar cabinet impulse response files preinstalled. To load these up, click on the Setup button in the Convolver module. Next, click on File. You will see two bookmarks on the left called ‘amps’ and ‘bands’. In these folders you will find.wav files that you can load up as impulse responses.
Note – If you are using impulse responses for your cabinet emulation, make sure you disable your cabinet module.
Controlling Guitarix via MIDI
Almost all parameters in Guitarix can be controlled via MIDI. This includes changing the values of knobs right through to turning on and off modules and even scrolling through menus.
Before you create any MIDI bindings, you will first need to make sure that your MIDI device is hooked up to Guitarix. You can make this connection using any of the many connection tools that Linux has to offer but here we will use the inbuilt MIDI connections window. Go to Engine > Jack Ports and click on MIDI tab. You can select your MIDI device here.
Patchage showing an Akai MPK mini connected into Guitarix
Once you have your MIDI device connected up, creating bindings is as simple as pressing the middle mouse button on whichever parameters you wish to control, followed by moving what you want to bind it to on your controller.
Being able to control so much this way makes Guitarix a very good tool for live use. If you have a MIDI foot-board, for example the Behringer FCB1010, you can bind your foot switches to turn various effects modules on and off. If your MIDI controller has knobs, you can also bind parameters to these. Expression pedals can be binded to Wah effects, etc. Bindings can be viewed and edited by navigating to Engine > Midi Controller. These bindings can also be saved in presets so that they can easily be recalled.
Preset Management
If you press the 'Preset Selection' button on the bottom left of Guitarix, the preset manager will pop up along the bottom. There are already a few presets here but it's easy to add and manage your own. To create a new preset, click on new in the scratchpad section. This will prompt you to name your preset. You can then press save to save your new preset, or tweak it more before doing so. You can also create new banks for your presets and organize them.
Also, thanks to the wonderful musical-artifacts.com, you can now find and load up presets from directly within Guitarix. To do this, click on the 'Online' button on the left of the preset selection dialog. This will pop up a new window where you can search through Guitarix presets that are hosted on musical-artifacts.com. To install a preset, simply press on a presets 'download' button. This will download it and place it into your list of presets. It's really that simple.
Search Guitarix presets on musical-artifacts.com, without leaving Guitarix!
The various ways of using Guitarix
Guitarix can be used in many different ways, as a practice tool, a recording tool and a reamping tool. Having both the standalone version and LV2 plugin versions, allows for great flexibility of use -
Standalone
As a live/live practice tool
To record directly into your DAW
As an insert in your DAW
LV2 Plugins
Another option is to use the LV2 plugins on a channel strip and record your guitar signal into your DAW dry. This way you have great flexibility in processing your sound later, and tweaking it to perfection, as you always have the original dry performance.
GxAmplifier LV2 plugin running in Qtractor
Gxamplifier is |
the possibiltieis, exalting the greatness of Australia’s native game,” Postecoglou says in his book Changing the Game.
PODCAST: Adam Peacock, Simon Hill and Daniel Garb dissect the Socceroos squad for Thailand, the FFA Cup semis and all the other big issues in the Fox Football podcast.
“If a prime minister, on behalf of a trade mission and business leaders, is going to impress the Chinese in the world of sport, surely he should use a sport common to both, like football, where Australia and China actually have relations and that the Chinese actually care about.”
Turnbull actively spruiked Australian Rules Football as the “most exciting” football code at the game’s launch in April.
Port Adelaide will play a game in China in 2017.Picture Sarah Reed Source: News Corp Australia
“AFL is the most exciting football code,” Turnbull said.
“An enormous field, extraordinary athleticism, it is the leaping, jumping, flying game, where the big men fly — as they say.
“Where possession is everything, possession is everything, it is a game that moves faster than any other. So exciting.”
But Postecoglou said there was one particular flaw to the prime minister’s promotion of AFL: at the time, Chinese president Xi Jinping was investing heavily in football.
Given China and Australia had faced off in an Asian Cup match in early 2015, Postecoglou said the Australian contingent missed an opportunity and should have captialised on China’s pre-existing love of the sport - summed up perfectly this week by the announcement of World Cup winning coach Marcello Lippi as China’s national team boss on a staggering $5m a year deal. That appointment has come after a year where China’s Super League has started to flex its financial might in the transfer market, taking Europe’s biggest leagues head on competing for high profile talent.
Tim Cahill scored against China PR in the 2015 Asian Cup match. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images) Source: Getty Images
“Neither the PM nor anyone in his office noticed that Chinese President Xi Jinping is actually a football fan,” Postecoglou said.
“That around the same time as the trade mission he was outlining his plans for football in China, plans that involve investing billions of dollars, hosting the FIFA World Cup, building the Chinese professional league, opening 22,000 football-specific high schools and working towards winning the FIFA World Cup in 2050.
“All this after Australia had hosted the Asian Cup only a year earlier, during which the Socceroos played China in the quarter-finals. As winners of the Asian Cup, it might have been prudent to celebrate this most unifying of Asian events.”
Ange Postecoglou’s book. Source: Supplied
With Tim Cahill leading a contingent of Socceroos plying their trade in the Chinese Super League at the time, Postecoglou suggested the star power of those players would have been far more likely to wow President Xi than their AFL counterparts.
“The problem is that our players are bigger stars in the eyes of China than they are in ours,” he wrote.
“With whom might Preisdent Xi have preferred a photo, Timmy Cahill or Gary Ablett Jr?”Brian Kelly worked as a business journalist in Chicago, where he saw declining advertising decimate the paper he worked at, the Chicago Sun-Times, and strangle the Chicago Daily News.
He saw a similar occurrence in Washington, where he presided over Regardie’s monthly business magazine from its inch-thick heyday in the 1980s to its famous flame-out during the early-1990s real estate bust.
So after Kelly — a former editor at The Washington Post — ascended to the top spot at money-losing weekly news magazine U.S. News & World Report in April 2007, he had one thought:
Not on my watch.
In 2009 Kelly and his publisher, Bill Holiber, went to see their boss, billionaire businessman Mortimer Zuckerman, to discuss a disturbing trend.
The mood in the mogul’s book-lined, 18th-floor offices on the east side of Manhattan hardly reflected the sunny view of Manhattan and the nearby CitiCorp Center, one of the jewels in Zuckerman’s real estate crown. Zuckerman in 1984 bought the magazine, founded in Washington in 1933, and had many years of robust profits. The publication earned more than $20 million some years.
But by the time of the fateful Manhattan meeting, U.S. News, known for its right-of-center, meat-and-potatoes style, was losing money — drip, drip, drip. 2006. 2007. 2008.
Print circulation had dropped to 1 million from 2.5 million a decade earlier, and advertising pages were down by half. Bureaus had been closed. Layoffs followed layoffs.
Kelly recognized an abyss he had seen before.
“I never had faith that things were coming back,” he said. “I’ve witnessed advertising declines for the last 30 years. The Chicago Daily News was a great newspaper. The same with Regardie’s. Great readership. People love the magazine. We are winning awards. But that ad market dried up and boom... it was over. When the market turns, you’ve got to do something else.”
The “something else” was to wind down the print edition and invent a new business with a proven source of revenue: lists.
Starting in 1983 with its ranking of best colleges, U.S. News was mining a data trove that Zuckerman marketed as “news you can use.”
First came the lists of colleges. Then law schools. Business schools. Hospitals. By the time Kelly was sitting in Zuckerman’s office trying to map a salvage operation, U.S. News had made a name for itself with its rankings.
And those rankings did well on the Web. The magazine’s online audience at the time was 3 million and climbing — fast.
“I thought it had a real chance, but nobody had ever done this before,” said Zuckerman, a modern-day press baron who sold the Atlantic magazine to Washington businessman David Bradley in the 1990s and who still owns the New York Daily News.
Thanks to the rankings, “we were... better positioned to take advantage of a Web platform than most other magazines.”
Kelly and Holiber had been salivating over the rankings’ online opportunities for years, recognizing that the bite-size information is similar to the journalism U.S. News had in its DNA. The lists were easily digestible, orderly and full of facts. Readers ate it up.
And it was bottomless.
“We had the potential of hundreds of thousands of pages of data to put online,” Kelly said. “It told me we had tremendous scale and longevity.”
The shift transformed U.S. News & World Report. Today its fourth-floor “newsroom” in an office building near the Georgetown waterfront is eerily quiet and variously empty, with few grizzled journalists and none of the fast-moving intensity that rings through some newsrooms. But there are reminders of the glory days, such as glitzy magazine covers and iconic photos from its long history.
The company employs 130 journalists, staffers and producers. There are an additional 40 or so employees on the business side.
It survives thanks to a variety of revenue sources. The company made several million dollars last year and probably could hit $10 million in 2013. That’s on revenue well over $40 million.
And there’s still the subscriber-only U.S. News & World Report weekly magazine, which is heavy on Washington news, gossip and political analysis, as well as health and financial policy and news you can use. The edition includes a weekly quiz, pro and con debates on issues, and a commentary by Zuckerman.
“We put out a whole magazine every week,” Zuckerman said. “It so happens we are able to support the journalism. We try to cover everything we think is appropriate. We do it well. I’m sure we could improve on it.”
But the real money isn’t in old-fashioned journalism. It’s in the rankings. You can surf through “best of” lists on travel, health, education, cars, law and money. All have content stories and blogs layered around the rankings. Dive into the best vacations in Europe and you may find yourself staring at a reservations site for a hotel in Nice, France. Or follow the list of best family cars and you may arrive at the best price for a Toyota Prius in your Zip code. There are 26 lists on nursing homes alone.
In the world of webbies, it’s pretty sticky stuff.
“When you are researching for something you want, you are using a different part of your brain than when you are just grazing the news,” said Kelly, 58, who graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in economics.
There have been embarrassing stumbles, including when the magazine chose not to rank George Washington University last year following a disclosure that the school had misreported statistics about the academic achievement of its incoming freshmen.
But the brand is powerful. Punch in a search for “best hospitals” or “best colleges” on Google and up comes the U.S. News rankings.
In December 2006, the magazine drew 1.6 million unique visitors to its Web site. It’s 20 million a month now. By comparison, The Washington Post has about 35 million and the Huffington Post gets 40 million to 50 million.
About 20 percent of total revenue comes from the search for cars, hospitals and the like. An additional 30 percent comes from online display advertising. Then there’s the hospitals, colleges and financial institutions that pay from a few hundred dollars to more than $20,000 to license the U.S. News “best of” badge, which brings in an additional 15 percent of the total revenue.
The rest comes from a hodgepodge of joint ventures, partnerships and digital products, including its Compass search engine, that help customers explore in detail a college for their child or a hospital for themselves. There’s an online store for consumers, where you can buy e-books on the rankings or on specialty topics dealing with religion, science and history. They even host conferences such as the upcoming “Hospital of Tomorrow” this fall in Washington, which medical industry types pay through the nose to attend.
Like his boss, Kelly doesn’t run from the rankings. He defends them as a vital form of journalism.
“When we rank something like mortality rates in hospitals, it’s more powerful than 100 news stories.” he said. “Long-form, narrative journalism can’t cover the number of institutions we assess. The facts are there.”
And so is U.S. News & World Report, which celebrates its 80th birthday this week.
For previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/business.The great sandwich sign scoop is stirring up downtown London.
City bylaw officers confiscated 49 sandwich-board signs, mainly in the core, in a crackdown on Monday.
That sparked sharp protests from store owners, especially when they were told they would have to pay $175 to get their signs back.
Kayla Gibbens, the new owner of Uber Cool Stuff on Dundas Street, accused the city of being heavy-handed in taking away her sign. Officials should have told her to move or remove it instead of taking it, she said.
“It was the first Monday I was open and they took my sign. It was a slap in the face for trying to make more business hours downtown.”
Sandwich board signs are an affordable way for small businesses to draw walk-in traffic, Gibbens said.
Uber Cool Stuff is a few doors down from the former Kingsmill’s building that Fanshawe College is renovating to expand its downtown campus.
The disruption caused by construction increases the challenge of getting people to come in off the street into her store, Gibbens said.
She said she tried to comply with the city’s rules for sandwich board signs but they aren’t clear about the need for a licence.
An information package delivered to businesses said, “It may be necessary to complete a licensing agreement and certificate of insurance.”
Gibbens said she wouldn’t pay to get her sign back because it’s likely cheaper to have another one made.
Orest Katolyk, the city’s bylaw enforcement manager, said downtown businesses were warned in April they would have to comply with rules for sidewalk signs.
City officials visited stores and dropped off information, including specifics on the size and placement of signs, he said.
A licence and proof of liability insurance is required if the sign is on city property. The city doesn’t charge for the licence, Katolyk said.
“There was ample communication. In the past, we have mailed these notices. This time we went a step further and hand-delivered and discussed the matter with store owners.”
The signs and canopy bylaw has been around since 1991 and is intended to ensure safety and ease of access to public sidewalks, Katolyk said.
The city does a crackdown every few years, he said.
“We get complaints from people in wheelchairs or walkers and need a clear path on the sidewalk.”
Many store owners do follow the rules for sandwich-board signs, Katolyk said.
Gord Mood of L.A. Mood on Richmond Street discovered his sign was missing Tuesday morning.
He said he has complied with the permit for sandwich-boards signs for years and had his insurance company send in an annual notice of renewal of the liability insurance.
Mood said he isn’t sure what happened this year and thinks the city may have changed the procedure for renewing permits. He said he likely won’t pay $175 to get his sign back.
“It makes you wonder why you should comply with these rules if they are just going to take your sign anyway.”
Janette MacDonald, manager of Downtown London, said the association received advance warning of the sign crackdown and sent out notices to members. She said she was surprised at the number of signs that were confiscated.
Sandwich board signs can clutter the streets or get blown over by the wind, posing problems for people with mobility issues, MacDonald said.
“I can see both sides of the coin. People are indignant about this one and I get that. It seems our businesses get dumped on all the time."
hdaniszewski@postmedia.com
twitter.com/HankatLFPress
What the rules say
City regulations for A-Frame (sandwich board) signs posted on city property (sidewalks and road allowances):Image copyright stockvisual
Safety at four in five hospital trusts in England is not good enough, a leading hospital inspector has warned.
Professor Sir Mike Richards says that the NHS stands on a "burning platform" and that the need for change is clear.
His warning follows a review which said staffing and overcrowding were major concerns and that unprecedented pressures on hospitals were putting patients at risk.
Ministers said the findings should be used to root out poor practices.
The Care Quality Commission review also highlighted delays getting tests and treatments, and poor care of life-threatening conditions such as sepsis.
But inspectors warned some of the problems were beyond the control of hospitals because of rising demands being placed on them.
The review of all 136 hospital trusts in the country found 11% were rated as inadequate on safety and 70% required improvement.
Among the problems highlighted were:
Bed occupancy rates routinely above recommended levels
Poor care given to patients with life-threatening conditions such as sepsis and kidney injuries
Too many long waits for operations, such as knee and hip replacements
Too few nurses in medical and elderly care wards, midwives in maternity units and doctors in A&Es
Temporary escalation wards - set up during busy periods - predominantly staffed by agency workers who were not familiar with the hospital practices
Poor control of infections because of insufficient hand hygiene and patients with infections not being isolated properly
Problems with medicines management, including out-of-date drugs, and maintenance of equipment
Tests being delayed because of poor information-sharing and record-keeping
Hospital chief inspector Professor Sir Mike said: "The NHS now stands on a burning platform - the need for change is clear, but finding the resources and energy to deliver that change while simultaneously providing safe patient care can seem almost impossible."
But he said "transformational change" was possible, even in "the most challenging of circumstances".
He went on to say that safety remained a "real concern" with many trusts failing to learn when things go wrong.
But he also said he had some sympathy for hospitals given the rising demands being placed on them.
"The scale of the challenge that hospitals are now facing is unprecedented - rising demand coupled with economic pressures are creating difficult-to-manage situations that are putting patient care at risk.
"What is clear is that while staff continue to work hard to deliver good care, the model of care that once worked well cannot continue to meet the needs of today's population."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption This animation explains how the NHS system works, and what happens when hospitals face too much pressure
He also highlighted strengths, saying staff were good at providing care with compassion and leadership remained strong in many places.
When these factors were taken into account, it meant a third of trusts could be rated as good or outstanding overall.
The hospital that bucks the trend
University Hospitals Bristol has one of the more remarkable stories to tell about the new inspections regime. It was one of the early trusts to undergo the new system in 2014 - and ended up with a requires improvement rating. Two years later it was a completely different story.
Its re-inspection resulted in an outstanding rating with the Care Quality Commission praising it for its culture on safety.
The regulator said the trust was open and transparent with timely apologies provided to patients when things go wrong. Staff in A&E are given checklists to spot the signs of deterioration, while plans are in place to re-deploy staff during really busy periods.
The CQC also inspected 18 specialist hospital trusts, including sites dedicated to cancer and heart treatment. They tended to fare better.
The report marks the culmination of three years of new tougher inspections brought in after the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal.
The Department of Health said carrying out the inspections was essential to make the NHS the "safest and most transparent healthcare system in the world" and would "shine a spotlight" on poor practice.
Faster inquiries
It comes as the government is promising families of children who suffer brain injuries at birth faster investigations into what went wrong and swifter compensation payments under changes being proposed.
Ministers want to overhaul the system after families complained they were being tied up in litigation for years after mistakes are made.
The NHS safely delivers nearly 2,000 babies every day, but each year there are around 500 cases where things go wrong and babies are left with serious injuries.
At present families wait on average for more than 11 years for a final resolution if a compensation case goes through the courts.
But the Department of Health has proposed an alternative system of compensation.
It would include a mandatory, independent investigation panel to learn the lessons of what went wrong, regular payments to help with care costs and personalised counselling, case management and legal advice.
But while the Royal College of Midwives has supported the idea, the campaign group Action against Medical Accidents has warned the plans are not well thought through and there needed to be greater guarantees about the independence of the new system.
The plans will now be consulted on for 12 weeks.
Read more from Nick
Follow Nick on TwitterI was so excited to receive my Arbitrary Day PLUS gifts. My gifter had been in touch to say that I would be receiving TWO parcels, and that shopping for them had been fun, so needless to say I was looking forward to the postman's arrival!
I explained to my gifter that (despite being almost 23 and studying to be a doctor..) I'm essentially a big kid at heart - I'm easily pleased, love surprises, and try to find fun in everything, even the little things. I'm studying for exams at the moment and mentioned that stuff to provide some relief from study-brain and library cabin fever would be appreciated - and my gifter definitely delivered! I'm also going into hospital for some surgery at the end of July, and my gifter took this into account too!
I love my gifts. Opening everything up was great fun, and each individual item will provide its own fun, too!
Thank you so much smudgicle for cheering up my gloomy revision days!It was a Sunday early in May and most Premier League footballers were probably fast asleep when Alfie Mawson’s alarm went off at 7am, telling him it was time to get out of bed to set up a stall at a car-boot sale in Berkshire, only 12 hours after picking up the man‑of‑the‑match award for marking Romelu Lukaku out of the game during Swansea City’s crucial victory against Everton.
Although the Mercedes may have looked a little out of place among the rows of cars parked up on the grass in the village of Swallowfield, not far from where Mawson’s parents live in Wokingham, the England Under-21 international felt totally at home among the other traders as he helped Beth, his girlfriend, display a few unwanted belongings as well as a couple of things that he thought were still in their apartment back in Swansea.
England Under-20s’ World Cup win can boost English game, says Paul Simpson Read more
“My missus loves a car boot, I don’t know what it is about them,” he says, chuckling. “I help put all the stuff in the car and then stand there with her. I think she just likes getting rid of everything, all the clutter, so that she can get more clutter. Even if it’s something of mine that I don’t really want sold, it will be in there somewhere.”
For Mawson, who was playing non‑league football little more than three years ago and helping out on his dad’s fruit and veg stall at Ealing market, mingling with the public still seems a perfectly normal thing to do. Yet times have changed for a man who started 27 Premier League games for Swansea last season and it is hardly surprising the sight of him flogging things from his car boot proved a distraction – much to the annoyance of the lady in charge of the stall.
“My missus told me off,” Mawson says. “I was helping out and then some geezer remembered me from Maidenhead. He said: ‘You used to be at Maidenhead, didn’t you?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, I was.’ He said: ‘You should have stayed there – we got promoted.’ I had a little laugh, then I said: ‘They’ve done really well, National League now.’ He looked back at me, smiled and said: ‘I think you did a bit better, though, didn’t you?’
“Another fella then came up and said: ‘You play for Swansea.’ I said: ‘Do I?’ He said: ‘Yeah, you do.’ He said: ‘I’ve never seen a Premier League footballer at one of these before.’ I said: ‘Well, you’ve got to keep grounded one way or another.’ I remember one bloke said: ‘You can’t need any more money.’ I explained that I wasn’t there for that reason and it was because of my missus. Then loads of other young lads walked by and my missus said: ‘Right, I’m not having this. I haven’t brought you here to talk about football. We’ve had enough of that all week. Sit in the car and play on your phone.’”
It is a terrific story that Mawson tells with a smile as he reflects on how far he has come in such a short time, shaking his head when it is pointed out there were mocked-up images on social media after the Everton match showing Lukaku tucked away in his back pocket. “Yeah, and the next day I’ve earned £40 in pound coins from a car boot!” he says, breaking into laughter.
Mawson’s life has been turned upside down during a journey that has taken him from the greengrocers to the Premier League via spells with Brentford, Maidenhead, Luton, Welling, Wycombe and Barnsley, yet the lovely thing about speaking to him is that he still comes across as exactly the same person. “Sometimes I have to sit back and realise what I’m doing,” Mawson says. “It’s just gone mental. You have to pinch yourself to believe it.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfie Mawson in action for England’s Under-21s against Germany in March. ‘I know there’s going to be pressure on us,’ he says of the tournament in Poland. Photograph: Matthias Hangst/Bongarts/Getty Images
This week he is away with England in Poland, competing in the Under-21 European Championship finals, and it is hard to believe there will be anyone prouder to represent the country in Aidy Boothroyd’s squad. Mawson won his first cap last November, a month after making his Premier League debut for Swansea, and his face lights up when he thinks back to how he felt when he got that call-up.
“If you’ve never been with England before, you have to turn up in your club tracksuit, so I sat there in my Swansea gear at St George’s Park. I didn’t know what was going on, to be honest,” he says. “Then I got given my England tracksuit so I put it on straight away and took a photo, which I sent to my mate and said: ‘Look at this – I’ve got the kit!’
“I ended up taking loads of kit home, my mum and dad wear it all the time – they’re proud as punch. I wear it sometimes lounging around, just because it’s cool. But the best bit about being with England was singing the anthem when we were out in France. I stood there and I’ve never been so proud in my life. It was a great feeling and I remember thinking after the match: ‘This can’t be replicated. Will it really feel the same if I sing it again?’ But when I played in the Germany game, in March, it was exactly the same. And this is for the under-21s. I’m not taking that lightly but imagine what it would be like for the senior team.”
This is for the Under-21s. I’m not taking that lightly but imagine what it would be like for the senior team
Plenty of people expect Mawson to find out the answer to that question one day. Signed from Barnsley for £5m last summer, the Londoner was an integral part of the Swansea team that spectacularly turned their season round under Paul Clement, starting every top-flight game under the new manager, scoring vital goals and, more than anything, looking like an accomplished centre-half.
“The manager put massive faith in me but we all bought into what he was like,” Mawson says. “There are a lot of one-on-ones with him. Sometimes I ask for them. Sometimes he calls you in. We’ll watch games back, he’ll say: ‘This is good but I need you to do this better.’ So it’s in your head and you go away and work on it. I had a meeting with him the other day and he said he’d looked at the way I’ve come into the game and recognised that my path was different.
“He said: ‘You want to do well, you want to learn, and what’s to stop you from doing certain things in your career? What’s to stop you from becoming the captain of this club? What’s to stop you from pushing on to a bigger club? What’s to stop you from being a full England international? The only thing that will stop you is yourself.’”
Jordan Pickford: ‘I was a young lad thrown in at the deep end but I felt ready’ Read more
Mawson has no intention of letting that happen. He talks at length about his thirst for knowledge and desire to improve, explaining that he once played an entire reserve game for Brentford using only his weaker left foot and how he also likes to “pick the brains” of older players, whether that be Paul Hayes and Matt Bloomfield at Wycombe or Gylfi Sigurdsson and Fernando Llorente at Swansea, to soak up as much information as possible. “I want to be seen as a young leader,” says Mawson, who was given the captaincy at Barnsley at the age of 21. “I want to be that player that in five or six years’ time young players come to me and ask for advice.”
Asked where his appetite for learning comes from, Mawson replies: “I think it’s down to where I’ve been, my journey compared to some lads that have been with Premier League clubs, played in the under-23s but not really played in the first team. I think my path was made for me. Now I’m at a level where it’s the big league but I still feel that I’ve got a lot more to do to establish myself as a regular Premier League player.
“My best mate, Charlie Puddle, who was an amateur boxer and is like a big brother to me, said recently: ‘When will you think you’re a Premier League footballer?’ I said: ‘Well, I could say it now because I’m in the Premier League.’ But if I went and asked, let’s say, a 17-year-old scholar at Man City what he is, he’d probably say: ‘I play for Man City.’ But you don’t play for Man City; you play for Man City’s youth set-up. With me, I think I’ve showed what I’m about a bit, but until I’ve played 100 Premier League games, I don’t think I can say I’m established at that level.”
If a couple of personal highlights of the season were that win over Everton and leaving Stamford Bridge with a signed John Terry shirt – “I was a Chelsea fan growing up and he was my hero” – a low point came at Watford in April, when Mawson was caught in possession on the edge of his own penalty area and Étienne Capoue scored the only goal of the game, inflicting a fifth defeat in six matches that deepened relegation fears. Mawson held his hands up afterwards, apologising to the fans via social media, and he accepted Clement’s warning that the same thing could not happen again, yet he also knew he had to keep being brave on the ball, making passes that count.
“It would have been easy to go into my shell and every time I got the ball go back to the keeper, especially where we were in the table, but it wouldn’t have been me to shy away,” Mawson says. “That’s a cop out, goes completely against the way I play and would have given the gaffer a reason to think: ‘He’s gone under here.’”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfie Mawson celebrates after scoring for Swansea against Leicester in February. Photograph: Ashley Crowden/CameraSport via Getty Images
Instead Mawson kicked on, helping Swansea to win four of their last five matches to stay up and finishing the season as the club’s young player of the year and a fans’ favourite. “The supporters have taken to me and I’ve taken to them,” he says. “It’s a great club. When I signed I knew Swansea’s philosophy and I think from the back end of the season we got back to that style. But what I didn’t know when I joined was what the area would be like. But I love it there. I really do. And I don’t see myself being anywhere else for a long time.”
Listening to Mawson talk with such maturity, it is easy to see why he has the potential to be an important player for England over the next couple of weeks. He has racked up more than 150 career appearances – Southampton’s Nathan Redmond is the only outfield player in Boothroyd’s squad to have started more Premier League games than the Swansea defender last season – and that sort of experience could be invaluable as England try to navigate their way out of a group that includes the holders, Sweden, whom they play on Friday, Poland and Slovakia.
“This tournament is massive,” says Mawson, who is 23 but eligible to play for the Under-21s because he was born after 1 January 1994, the cut-off date when qualifying began in 2015. “It’s about doing it for the badge, not for the name on the back of your shirt. And I know there’s going to be pressure on us – this image of England is that everyone builds us up to knock us down. But pressure can be good because that means people know you’ve got it in you to do it.”
For Mawson, it is also a chance to add another chapter to his story as he continues to go quietly about his business, whether playing for his country or working at a car-boot stall. “I don’t want to be in the headlines for certain things,” Mawson says. “I just want to be known for being a good footballer and a nice fella. That’s enough for me.”Federal fishery agents warned nearly 20 First Nations protesters occupying two Norwegian-owned fish farms on northern Vancouver Island this week that they could be charged with obstructing a legal fishery.
Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners ‘Punch to the Gut’ Musical on Residential Schools Returns to Vancouver Children of God has been shaped by intense audience reactions, says director Corey Payette.
But protesters had a quick response. “I’ll see you in court,” said Hereditary Chief Ernest Alfred from the Nagmis, Lawit’sis and Mamalilikala nations.
“Our rights are being violated here and industry have broken the law,” Alfred told The Tyee. “Our customs and laws are older than those of Canada or B.C. and supersede any laws that DFO have put in place.”
On Aug. 24 Indigenous protestors, including Alfred, a local school teacher, peacefully occupied Marine Harvests’ Swanson Island facility 17 kilometres east of Alert Bay.
A week later, members of the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw nation boarded the nearby Midsummer Island salmon feedlot and later blocked a vessel from restocking all the pens.
The protesters, many of whom are women, also documented that schools of herring appeared to be mixed in with the restocked Atlantic salmon. It is illegal to transport wild herring on the coast without a proper licence.
Last summer more than 50 protesters boarded the same facility to highlight the First Nation’s 31-year opposition to fish farms and to highlight the fact Marine Harvest has never negotiated a formal agreement with Musgamagw Dzwada’emnuxw to allow the farms in their traditional territory.
The occupiers, who are building a tiny house on the Midsummer Island fish farm, say they are defending aboriginal rights and title.
“We want the fish farms removed from our territory and the licences of occupation revoked and suspended immediately,” said Alfred.
The province has the authority to issue licences of occupation giving companies the sea floor tenure while Fisheries and Oceans Canada grants operating licences to fish farms.
The occupation of the facilities, supported by many First Nations, has become a test of promises by the federal Liberal and provincial NDP governments to respect aboriginal right and title.
Premier John Horgan is expected to meet with the protesters this weekend. An NDP government initially granted leases for fish farms in the area nearly 30 years ago.
But during the recent election campaign, Claire Trevena, the MLA representing the region and now transportation minister, vowed to evict salmon farms from the region.
“Are they going to force us to have these farms are our territory,” asked Alfred. If the governments fail to respect aboriginal territorial rights, “they will have a grand fight in front of them.”
Michelle Rainer, a communications advisor with DFO, confirmed that conservation and protection officers visited the fish farms on Sept. 18 and “informed protesters that violation of the Fisheries Act could result in investigation and potential charges.”
“A renewed nation-to-nation relationship based on recognition, rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership with Canada’s Indigenous Peoples is a top priority for the government,” she said, but “individuals should not trespass on private property.”
Asked to respond to the allegation of the illegal transport of herring along with restocked Atlantic salmon on a Marine Harvest vessel at the Midsummer Island facility, Rainer said “it’s difficult to comment on a specific incident without seeing photos or video.”
Meanwhile Alfred explained that he invited the DFO to come to the Swanson Island facility this week after he observed a vessel discharge waste water from a load of dead salmon into a nearby bay. He filed a complaint and captured video of the event.
He expected a response to the complaint when fisheries officers arrived at the occupation, Alfred said. Instead protesters were warned they could be charged.
“I was expecting to get a full report on the incident but the DFO didn’t even bring up the subject,” said Alfred. “The DFO are escalating this situation. Things could get very confrontational. Our people are not going to back down.”
Protesters at the Swanson Island facility recently moved to Marine Harvest’s abandoned cabins on shore after the company said it wanted to harvest the fish at the facility today.
Alfred said protesters will allow the company to take its Atlantic salmon out, but not to restock the operation.
Ian Roberts, director of public relations for Marine Harvest, said the company has asked protesters to leave the facilities for safety reasons and can’t speculate about legal action. Last year the company sued protesters and anti-fish farm activist Alex Morton for trespassing.
“The discussion of rights, title, consultation, accommodation, and treaty are important discussions between First Nation governments and Canada,” added Roberts.
“Our two salmon farms have operated for 30 years legally and have continued to receive permits and licences granted by federal and provincial governments,” he said in a statement. “Marine Harvest Canada has, and will continue to seek meaningful engagement and solutions with all First Nations in whose traditional territories we operate.”
Earlier this month Vincent Erenst, managing director of Marine Harvest Canada, met with Namgis First Nation representatives about the Swanson Island occupation but was unable to “find a path toward a resolution.”
Marine Harvest says that it operates within the traditional territories of 24 First Nations and has agreements and “positive relationships” with 15 of them.
Concern about the impacts of fish farms on wild fish populations on B.C.’s coast has been a hot political issue for years because they are located on migration routes for wild salmon and on Indigenous territory.
But this summer the escape of 300,000 Atlantic salmon from a Canadian-owned fish farm in Puget Sound and several videos showing diseased, emaciated or deformed Atlantic Salmon at B.C. fish farms have heightened the debate.
Some of the videos were taken by Hereditary Chief George Quocksister Jr. of the Laich-Kwil-Tach Nation while travelling aboard the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel Martin Sheen this summer. Many of the videos posted by the society also show schools of herring in the fish farms.
The salmon farming industry acknowledges that about 80 per cent of farm salmon in B.C. are infected with the piscine reovirus, which can cause the fish to become lethargic and emaciated. Many fish of this description appear in the videos.
But Roberts says videos showing small or deformed fish don’t reflect reality in fish farms.
“The few images of deformed or small |
10, however, this looks like a great time to look into it if any of the devs are interested in pursuing that work. As always, I appreciate the devs and their time. If it takes a while to get to Cinnamon it's not a big deal, but there are a few of us who would love to try it out as it seems to be getting more proliferated[edit]If any devs are also doing any Gentoo work for Cinnamon in an overlay or are considering an overlay I would be happy to try out any ebuilds there and help with any bugs.
shadywack
Joined: 30 Aug 2012
Posts: 28
n00bJoined: 30 Aug 2012Posts: 28
Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 6:39 pm Post subject:
Sabayon has added Cinnamon 2.2 into their gentoo overlay.
http://gpo.zugaina.org/gnome-extra/cinnamon/ChangeLog FYI for anyone still tracking this,Sabayon has added Cinnamon 2.2 into their gentoo overlay.
shadywack
Joined: 30 Aug 2012
Posts: 28
n00bJoined: 30 Aug 2012Posts: 28
Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 3:37 am Post subject:
https://packages.gentoo.org/category/gnome-extra Thanks Tetromino
tetromino
Joined: 02 Dec 2003
Posts: 215
DeveloperJoined: 02 Dec 2003Posts: 215
Posted: Sat May 10, 2014 8:34 pm Post subject: Cinnamon 2.2 is now in portage and unmasked. Can certainly be installed in parallel with gnome-3.10. Can also work without gnome. I am not quite sure about compatibility with gnome-3.12 (you might run into a few issues with the >=upower-0.99 upgrade). If you find bugs, please report them in bugzilla.
shadywack
Joined: 30 Aug 2012
Posts: 28
n00bJoined: 30 Aug 2012Posts: 28
Posted: Sat May 10, 2014 9:33 pm Post subject: tetromino wrote: Cinnamon 2.2 is now in portage and unmasked. Can certainly be installed in parallel with gnome-3.10. Can also work without gnome. I am not quite sure about compatibility with gnome-3.12 (you might run into a few issues with the >=upower-0.99 upgrade). If you find bugs, please report them in bugzilla.
Thanks again!
I saw that bug update, I want you to know that I appreciate it greatly. Building it out now alongside gnome 3.10. If I run into anything I'll file it in the bug system.
[edit]
Built with no problems. Very nice!
This is my favorite UI thus far. Thanks again!I saw that bug update, I want you to know that I appreciate it greatly. Building it out now alongside gnome 3.10. If I run into anything I'll file it in the bug system.[edit]Built with no problems. Very nice!This is my favorite UI thus far.
wrc1944
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Posts: 3200
Location: Gainesville, Florida AdvocateJoined: 15 Aug 2002Posts: 3200Location: Gainesville, Florida
Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 1:55 pm Post subject: On a 32 bit Gentoo ~x86 non-systemd box, i used to run Gnome and Cinnamon, but had to remove them both when gnome required systemd (too much trouble to mess with the complications of trying to keep Cinnamon without gnome/systemd, as my main DE has always been KDE).
However, I did like to keep Cinnamon, and do have a Mint partition on this box, among several other distros.
Was pleasantly surprised to see Cinnamon reappear in today's emerge -uDN @ world (along with kde-4.13.1).
Code: [ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-desktop-2.2.1:0/4 USE="introspection -debug" 543 kB
Apparently, this means that on Gentoo Cinnamon is basically divorced from both gnome and systemd, and only needs gtk+-3.10.x, as no gnome stuff was being pulled in by Cinnamon.
Correct?
If so, wonderful! Cinnamon is a great DE I always liked to keep around, but didn't want to move all my systems to systemd, plus I'm not currently a big Gnome fan. Many Thanks to the Devs!
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 1700, 3.0GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.28-r5, gcc-8.3.0 kernel-4.20.12-gentoo USE=experimental Apparently, this means that on Gentoo Cinnamon is basically divorced from both gnome and systemd, and only needs gtk+-3.10.x, as no gnome stuff was being pulled in by Cinnamon.Correct?If so, wonderful! Cinnamon is a great DE I always liked to keep around, but didn't want to move all my systems to systemd, plus I'm not currently a big Gnome fan. Many Thanks to the Devs!_________________Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4Ryzen 1700, 3.0GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhzSamsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.28-r5, gcc-8.3.0 kernel-4.20.12-gentoo USE=experimental
wrc1944
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Posts: 3200
Location: Gainesville, Florida AdvocateJoined: 15 Aug 2002Posts: 3200Location: Gainesville, Florida
Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 3:28 pm Post subject: Hmmmm... My emerge -uDN @world didn't work for Cinnamon, so i did it afterwards, and got the following, which obviously is more correct, with few gnome packages.
However, can i get rid of the bluetooth USE flag as I don't use any such devices on this system?
Code: localhost linux-3.14.4-gentoo # emerge cinnamon -pv
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/libdaemon-0.14-r1 USE="-doc -examples -static-libs" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] sys-auth/nss-myhostname-0.3 0 kB
[ebuild N ] net-misc/mobile-broadband-provider-info-20120614 0 kB
[ebuild NS ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-4.1-r3:4.1 [3.0-r3:3.0] 0 kB
[ebuild NS ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-4.0-r3:4.0 [3.0-r3:3.0] 0 kB
[ebuild NS ] app-text/docbook-sgml-dtd-3.1-r3:3.1 [3.0-r3:3.0] 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-perl/SGMLSpm-1.03-r7 0 kB
[ebuild NS ] media-libs/lcms-1.19-r1:0 [2.6:2] USE="jpeg tiff zlib -python -static-libs" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 (-python2_6) -python3_2 -python3_4" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pypam-0.5.0-r2 PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 (-python2_6)" 103 kB
[ebuild NS ] dev-lang/spidermonkey-1.8.5-r4:0/mozjs185 [17.0.0-r3:17] USE="-debug -minimal -static-libs {-test}" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/polib-1.0.4 USE="-doc" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 (-python2_6) -python3_2 -python3_4" 149 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pexpect-3.2 USE="-doc -examples" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 (-python2_6) -python3_2 -python3_4" 128 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pyinotify-0.9.4-r1 USE="-examples" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 -pypy (-python2_6) -python3_2" 59 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pillow-2.4.0 USE="jpeg lcms tiff truetype zlib -doc -examples -jpeg2k -scanner {-test} -tk -webp" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 -pypy -python3_2 -python3_4" 6,368 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/lxml-3.3.5 USE="threads -beautifulsoup3 -doc -examples" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 -python3_2 -python3_4" 3,387 kB
[ebuild N ] virtual/python-imaging-2 USE="jpeg -tk" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 -pypy (-python2_6) -python3_2 -python3_4" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-menus-2.2.0 USE="introspection -debug" 530 kB
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-simple-dtd-1.0-r2:1.0 0 kB
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-simple-dtd-4.1.2.4-r3 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/libgusb-0.1.6 USE="introspection -static-libs -vala" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-sgml-utils-0.6.14-r1 USE="-jadetex" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cjs-2.2.0 USE="-examples {-test}" 348 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/pyatspi-2.10.0 PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7 python3_3 -python3_2" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/gnome-bluetooth-3.10.0:2/12 USE="introspection -debug" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] app-accessibility/caribou-0.4.13 PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/gnome-python-base-2.28.1:2 0 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/nemo-2.2.1 USE="exif introspection xmp (-packagekit) {-test} -tracker" 1,312 kB
[ebuild N ] x11-misc/colord-1.2.0:0/2 USE="gusb introspection udev -examples -extra-print-profiles -scanner -systemd -vala" 1,129 kB
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/accountsservice-0.6.37 USE="introspection -doc (-selinux) -systemd" 355 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-screensaver-2.2.3 USE="pam -debug -doc -systemd" 139 kB
[ebuild N ] net-print/cups-pk-helper-0.2.4-r1 0 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-python/gconf-python-2.28.1:2 USE="-examples" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] x11-libs/colord-gtk-0.1.25:0/1 USE="introspection -doc -vala" 265 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-settings-daemon-2.2.2-r1 USE="colord cups -debug -smartcard -systemd" INPUT_DEVICES="-wacom" 2,924 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-session-2.2.0 USE="-debug -doc -gconf -ipv6 -systemd" 880 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/gnome-color-manager-3.10.1 USE="-clutter (-packagekit) -raw" 2,551 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/nm-applet-0.9.8.8-r2 USE="bluetooth introspection -gconf -modemmanager" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] app-admin/openrc-settingsd-1.0.1 USE="-systemd" 0 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-control-center-2.2.5 USE="colord cups -debug -socialweb" INPUT_DEVICES="-wacom" 4,741 kB
[ebuild N ] net-wireless/cinnamon-bluetooth-3.8.4 USE="-debug" 1,638 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-2.2.6 USE="bluetooth networkmanager" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" 2,593 kB
Total: 41 packages (36 new, 5 in new slots), Size of downloads: 29,590 kB
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 1700, 3.0GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.28-r5, gcc-8.3.0 kernel-4.20.12-gentoo USE=experimental
Yamakuzure
Joined: 21 Jun 2006
Posts: 2273
Location: Bardowick, Germany AdvocateJoined: 21 Jun 2006Posts: 2273Location: Bardowick, Germany
Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 10:28 am Post subject: wrc1944 wrote: However, can i get rid of the bluetooth USE flag as I don't use any such devices on this system? Right at the bottom: Code: gnome-extra/cinnamon-2.2.6 USE="bluetooth networkmanager" So you might add Code: gnome-extra/cinnamon -bluetooth
_________________
Important German: " Aha " - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck. " Tja " - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house. to /etc/portage/package.use, or better add "-bluetooth" to the USE variable in /etc/portage/make.conf if you never use it anyway._________________Important German:
Yamakuzure
Joined: 21 Jun 2006
Posts: 2273
Location: Bardowick, Germany AdvocateJoined: 21 Jun 2006Posts: 2273Location: Bardowick, Germany
Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 10:50 am Post subject: There seems to be something wrong with the ebuilds: Code: emerge --ask --tree gnome-extra/cinnamon
These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:
Calculating dependencies...... done!
[ebuild N ~] gnome-extra/cinnamon-2.2.6 USE="bluetooth -networkmanager" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" 2,728 kB
[ebuild N ~] net-wireless/cinnamon-bluetooth-3.8.4 USE="-debug" 1,638 kB
[ebuild N ~] gnome-extra/cinnamon-control-center-2.2.5 USE="colord cups -debug -socialweb" INPUT_DEVICES="-wacom" 4,741 kB
[ebuild N ] app-admin/openrc-settingsd-1.0.1 USE="-systemd" 238 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/nm-applet-0.9.8.8-r2 USE="bluetooth -gconf -introspection -modemmanager" 1,195 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-extra/nemo-1.8.5 USE="exif -introspection (-packagekit) {-test} -tracker -xmp" 3,717 kB
[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-panel-3.8.0-r1 USE="-eds -introspection -networkmanager" 2,339 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/libgweather-3.10.2:2/3-6 USE="-glade -introspection -vala" 3,878 kB
[nomerge ] gnome-extra/nm-applet-0.9.8.8-r2 USE="bluetooth -gconf -introspection -modemmanager"
[ebuild N ] net-misc/networkmanager-0.9.8.8 USE="-avahi bluetooth -connection-sharing consolekit -dhclient dhcpcd -gnutls -introspection modemma
... So although I actively disable networkmanager USE flag, I do not use it, the (then useless) nm-applet is pulled in, which pulls in networkmanager.
So no Cinnamon for me. That wretched networkmanager installs udev-rules that autostart it on every boot. No, thanks.
And although I have "-pulseaudio" in my make.conf USE flags, and not re-activated in package.use, I see this in the tree: Code: [nomerge ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-2.2.6 USE="bluetooth -networkmanager" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python2_7" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7"
[nomerge ] gnome-extra/cinnamon-settings-daemon-2.2.2-r1 USE="colord cups -debug -smartcard -systemd" INPUT_DEVICES="-wacom"
[nomerge ] media-sound/pulseaudio-5.0-r1 USE="X alsa asyncns -avahi bluetooth caps dbus -doc -equalizer gdbm glib -gnome -gtk -ipv6 -jack -libsamplerate -lirc (-neon) orc (-oss) qt4 -realtime ssl (-system-wide) -systemd tcpd {-test} udev webrtc-aec -xen" ABI_X86="-32 (64) (-x32)"
[ebuild N ] media-plugins/alsa-plugins-1.0.27-r1 USE="-debug -ffmpeg -jack -libsamplerate pulseaudio -speex" 356 kB
[ebuild N ] media-sound/pulseaudio-5.0-r1 USE="X alsa asyncns -avahi bluetooth caps dbus -doc -equalizer gdbm glib -gnome -gtk -ipv6 -jack -libsamplerate -lirc (-neon) orc (-oss) qt4 -realtime ssl (-system-wide) -systemd tcpd {-test} udev webrtc-aec -xen" ABI_X86="-32 (64) (-x32)" 1,422 kB Oh, hell, nope, nope, nope!
I just tried with an explicit Code: USE="-pulseaudio" emerge --ask --tree gnome-extra/cinnamon with the same result. What?
I then added it to package.use: Code: ~ # grep alsa-plugins /etc/portage/package.use
media-plugins/alsa-plugins ffmpeg -jack libsamplerate -pulseaudio -speex
No idea what's going on.
_________________
Important German: " Aha " - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck. " Tja " - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house. Still, something forces USE="pulseaudio" on alsa-plugins.No idea what's going on._________________Important German:
wrc1944
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Posts: 3200
Location: Gainesville, Florida AdvocateJoined: 15 Aug 2002Posts: 3200Location: Gainesville, Florida
Posted: Sat May 17, 2014 1:44 pm Post subject: Yamakuzure,
Thanks for the reply, however I knew how to get rid of the flag, I was asking CAN I get rid of it without other problems creeping in. IIRC, bluetooth was or is a dep of a few other packages.
All the packages I posted above emerged OK, Cinnamon shows up in KDM, but the normal GUI desktop immediately crashes at startup, but I can open a gnome-terminal and issue a halt command to reboot and get back to a KDM login screen. Emerge didn't complain of any missing deps, USE flags, etc.
I haven't investigated much as yet, but it appears Cinnamon might be actually running, but no DE is visible.
I share your feelings about networkmanager (at least on Gentoo). I've used wpa_supplicant GUI for years now with no problems.
Currently I'm installing Cinnamon on another identical Gentoo install on this box, but it uses systemd (wanted to get some systemd experience with gentoo). If my booting to Cinnamon problems don't appear, I'll suspect and look for a difference is this supposedly identical Gentoo system that uses systemd instead of RC. Either way, I'll post back.
Are you by chance on systemd, and does your Cinnamon DE actually boot OK, notwithstanding the audio complications?
UPDATE: OK- It's a little better on the systemd Gentoo partition. Cinnamon crashes when i login, but goes into "fallback mode" if you select "no restart cinnamon" in the dialog box (Black screen, with 7 icons, only one is normal (Chromium, which is functional), the others (generic white icons) all crash on trying to open them, except Leafpad, which works.
The Chromium window works normally, wireless is up, but the browser window is frozen in place on the black desktop. No panel, or menus, but right-click seems to have a few functions like created new doc or folder, but no application menus.
Any clues as to my problems, or what causes cinnamon to only login to fallback mode? I'm obviously not that experienced with Cinnamon.
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 1700, 3.0GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.28-r5, gcc-8.3.0 kernel-4.20.12-gentoo USE=experimental
binbash
Joined: 04 Jul 2002
Posts: 16
n00bJoined: 04 Jul 2002Posts: 16
Posted: Sat May 17, 2014 7:53 pm Post subject: wrc1944 wrote: Yamakuzure,
Any clues as to my problems, or what causes cinnamon to only login to fallback mode? I'm obviously not that experienced with Cinnamon.
I had the same problem. I was running cinnamon-2.2.6 just fine then I upgraded to cinnamon-2.2.9 and it crashed to fallback mode. I think one of the new ebuilds is missing a dependency. "gnome-themes" Probably muffin-2.2.3. Anyway try installing "gnome-themes" and see if it works. It did for me I had the same problem. I was running cinnamon-2.2.6 just fine then I upgraded to cinnamon-2.2.9 and it crashed to fallback mode. I think one of the new ebuilds is missing a dependency. "gnome-themes" Probably muffin-2.2.3. Anyway try installing "gnome-themes" and see if it works. It did for me
wrc1944
Joined: 15 Aug 2002
Posts: 3200
Location: Gainesville, Florida AdvocateJoined: 15 Aug 2002Posts: 3200Location: Gainesville, Florida
Posted: Mon May 19, 2014 12:37 pm Post subject: binbash,
Thanks much for the tip! That points me in the right direction, and I have a partially functioning Cinnamon DE.
However, it still seems to be missing a few things, like still having a black desktop background. Some default themes are installed, but will not display. I now have a menu, and can open most apps, but some Cinnamon related things don't seem to be fully functional. Desktop icons are still generic, and control-center doesn't have full functions. All the kde apps and other non-cinnamon relater stuff open and work normally.
I'm looking at the cinnamon ebuild to see if I'm missing deps, but so far i have the few that I've looked at. Here's a list of my gnome-extra packages: Code: gentoo-audio wrc # qlist -IC gnome-extra/*
gnome-extra/cinnamon
gnome-extra/cinnamon-control-center
gnome-extra/cinnamon-desktop
gnome-extra/cinnamon-menus
gnome-extra/cinnamon-screensaver
gnome-extra/cinnamon-session
gnome-extra/cinnamon-settings-daemon
gnome-extra/cinnamon-translations
gnome-extra/cjs
gnome-extra/gnome-audio
gnome-extra/gnome-color-manager
gnome-extra/gnome-screensaver
gnome-extra/nemo
gnome-extra/nm-applet
gnome-extra/polkit-gnome
gnome-extra/yelp-xsl
gnome-extra/zenity
gentoo-audio wrc #
Any ideas on what I still might be missing? Maybe I should just go ahead and install gnome. Really don't want to, but it might be easier than sorting out one-by-one all the cinnamon ebuild deps listed.
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 1700, 3.0GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.28-r5, gcc-8.3.0 kernel-4.20.12-gentoo USE=experimental
binbash
Joined: 04 Jul 2002
Posts: 16
n00bJoined: 04 Jul 2002Posts: 16
Posted: Mon May 19, 2014 9:19 pm Post subject: wrc1944 wrote: binbash,
Thanks much for the tip! That points me in the right direction, and I have a partially functioning Cinnamon DE.
However, it still seems to be missing a few things, like still having a black desktop background. Some default themes are installed, but will not display. I now have a menu, and can open most apps, but some Cinnamon related things don't seem to be fully functional. Desktop icons are still generic, and control-center doesn't have full functions. All the kde apps and other non-cinnamon relater stuff open and work normally.
I'm looking at the cinnamon ebuild to see if I'm missing deps, but so far i have the few that I've looked at. Here's a list of my gnome-extra packages: Code: gentoo-audio wrc # qlist -IC gnome-extra/*
gnome-extra/cinnamon
gnome-extra/cinnamon-control-center
gnome-extra/cinnamon-desktop
gnome-extra/cinnamon-menus
gnome-extra/cinnamon-screensaver
gnome-extra/cinnamon-session
gnome-extra/cinnamon-settings-daemon
gnome-extra/cinnamon-translations
gnome-extra/cjs
gnome-extra/gnome-audio
gnome-extra/gnome-color-manager
gnome-extra/gnome-screensaver
gnome-extra/nemo
gnome-extra/nm-applet
gnome-extra/polkit-gnome
gnome-extra/yelp-xsl
gnome-extra/zenity
gentoo-audio wrc #
Any ideas on what I still might be missing? Maybe I should just go ahead and install gnome. Really don't want to, but it might be easier than sorting out one-by-one all the cinnamon ebuild deps listed.
That looks ok. I don't have gnome-audio or gnome-screensaver but I have the rest. When I first installed cinnamon on gentoo it wasn't in portage so I had to create a local overlay and hack some ebuild's. cinnamon was designed for linux mint so some things need tweaking or don't work on gentoo. I think it works better if you install a DM and login with that. I use gdm-2.20.11-r1 as I have most of gnome-3.8 masked, I don't use systemd. I use a theme called cinnamon but don't know where I got it. I don't use control-center but if you go into cinnamon-settings you can download themes from there. Also if you open "cinnamon-settings" go to hardware and click "system info" it just open's a blank window.
That's because linux mint puts things in a different place then gentoo but you can edit "/usr/lib/cinnamon-settings/modules/cs_info.py" and change both instances of "lspci"
to "/usr/sbin/lspci" save it and log out of cinnamon and back in then system info will work.
I don't know how much tweaking gnome needs as i haven't used it for a while That looks ok. I don't have gnome-audio or gnome-screensaver but I have the rest. When I first installed cinnamon on gentoo it wasn't in portage so I had to create a local overlay and hack some ebuild's. cinnamon was designed for linux mint so some things need tweaking or don't work on gentoo. I think it works better if you install a DM and login with that. I use gdm-2.20.11-r1 as I have most of gnome-3.8 masked, I don't use systemd. I use a theme called cinnamon but don't know where I got it. I don't use control-center but if you go into cinnamon-settings you can download themes from there. Also if you open "cinnamon-settings" go to hardware and click "system info" it just open's a blank window.That's because linux mint puts things in a different place then gentoo but you can edit "/usr/lib/cinnamon-settings/modules/cs_info.py" and change both instances of "lspci"to "/usr/sbin/lspci" save it and log out of cinnamon and back in then system info will work.I don't know how much tweaking gnome needs as i haven't used it for a whileThe Wall Street Journal in a new editorial calls former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon an "obvious loser" in the controversy surrounding Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.
In the piece published late Tuesday, the Journal's editorial board wrote that Moore's credibility in the face of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct has "fallen below the level of survivability."
It said it would be "sensible" for Moore to step aside in the Alabama Senate race. The editorial board added that if Moore declines to leave the race, it would be better if he loses because "Democrats and the media will make Mr. Moore the running mate of every Republican in 2018."
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"There is one other obvious loser in this debacle: Former White House aide Steve Bannon," the editors wrote.
"Some have argued that the Bannon insurgency against the Republican 'establishment' is in the mode of earlier party challenges led by Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich. This one isn’t close," they continued.
"The populism of Reagan and Mr. Gingrich was always about building the conservative movement into a majority that could govern and change the country."
The editorial said "Bannonites" want to defeat the existing majority to "show that they can depose" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.).
"They have no discernible governing agenda beyond trade protectionism and slashing immigration, and those often appear to be convictions of convenience," the editorial said.
"It is hardly a surprise therefore that instead of recruiting talented candidates, Mr. Bannon is collecting cranks and outliers like Roy Moore who, demonstrably, will take the GOP into the minority."
The Journal said Republicans should learn that they need to nominate candidates who want to "achieve substantive policy goals" instead of "pouring their emotions into a political fringe that will always find a way to lose."MOTORISTS and pedestrians around Wynyard station in the city will face disruption from next month when the state government begins construction of walkways between the station and Barangaroo.
The NSW Minister for Transport, Gladys Berejiklian, said yesterday work would begin on a 110-metre underground pedestrian tunnel and a 100-metre bridge crossing Sussex Street in October. The entire project would cost about $300 million.
NSW Minister for Transport Gladys Berejiklian on the bus from Willoughby to Wynyard. Credit:Dean Sewell
However, she said work would begin next month to widen footpaths along York and Margaret streets in preparation for the closure of the Kent Street tunnel in October. One eastbound traffic lane would also be removed from Margaret Street.
The new infrastructure is designed to let people walk from Wynyard station to Barangaroo in six minutes.Hebgen Lake is just ten miles outside of West Yellowstone in the Gallatin National Forest and covers 12,350 acres. It’s full of heron, cranes, ducks and fishermen on lightweight inflatable pontoons. Highway 20 heads west and just before you hit the KOA campground you need to watch out for the local Fire Dept. on the right and turn up that dirt road. There is no sign or street number but it will lead you to two campgrounds about another ten miles in. The first campground costs and has a host, oh, and water. The second campground is slightly further in to the forest and is free, primitive, and on a first come basis. I was the second there. It’s beautiful. I can breathe again after the claustrophobic Yellowstone National Park.
The campground offers six sites, all with table, fire pit and a level place to call home. The vault toilets are at the turn around and really clean. It was perfect there, the water right outside the van just beyond the tree line. The wildlife floated by. The critters ran free and safe. That first night was cold and wet though, we stayed inside the van and once again I was incredibly happy that I bought Vera for this trip. She’s made life easy on us all.
Back into town, a wondrously tourist focused town outside the park, with everything (almost) named after either moose or grizzlies. Yep, that kind of town. The people in the stores and bakery were super friendly and I spent some time chatting to Mary in the market about the lake and working in town. Short, stocky, and with an open soft face, she grew up there and loved meeting all the visitors. Good for her, it helps when traveling to feel welcome, that’s for sure. Ernie’s bakery up the road had freshly made croissants, and Ernie originally came from France, so yes, the croissant were the best they could be, so that’s where I went in the mornings. Free Internet to send out the articles, reply to email and post a video slideshow. Pretty good starts to my days on the lake.
We had a social night at Cherry Creek campground. One night was just myself and the mystery tenter who didn’t appear till after I’d gone to bed. The next night the place was packed. All sites taken and more people driving in and back out again. Next to me were two young women from New Hampshire. Elizabeth was a thirty-year-old red head with high energy who invited herself to sit at my campfire.
“I’ve talked to no one by Victoria for a week!” and she stood there sipping a can of PBR, restless and moving constantly, she found more wood for the fire.
Victoria joined us, a wholesome blond, clean and conservative who described herself as high maintenance. Her first camping trip apparently and she’d come along because they’d both quit working for an oil company and needed an adventure. She talked of God, of Heaven, and the “super conservative Christian school”, and then offered me a hit of weed.
A.J, the tenter, was about 5’8, thick of body, an outdoorsman with thick red beard and in his early thirties. “Maybe it’s because I’m a dude” was his phrase often used. A couple in a 1980s motorhome and Butter, their corgi, also joined us. (Stevie was hidden in the van during social hour.) More couples chatted briefly, coming and going. Easy company for the most part and I realized I’d been alone for much of the last two weeks but hadn’t noticed!
On Hwy 287 North towards Helena, MT, and along the Madison River the weather dropped back to cold, damp, and with snow in the mountains just above us. The trees dripped and the windshield wipers worked luckily, I’d not tested them beforehand. Over the pass and alongside Quake Lake into a wide lush green valley, and we stop at the riverside for a snack and walk. The rain though sends us all back into the van shortly.
Past Helena, I find the turn off for NF 695, looking for the next free campground in the Beaverhead Deerlodge Forest. Construction stops us, and Janet, the flagger explains that they’ve widened, repacked, and are grading the road for the |
1969, the availability of A-4 Skyhawks in both the Instrument RAGs and Composite Squadrons at the master jet bases presented a ready resource of the nimble Skyhawks that had become the TOPGUN preferred surrogate for the MiG-17. At the time, the F-4 Phantom was just beginning to be exploited to its full potential as a fighter and had not performed as well as expected against the smaller North Vietnamese MiG-17 and MiG-21 opponents. TOPGUN introduced the notion of dissimilar air combat training (DACT) using modified A-4E/Fs. Modified aircraft, called "Mongoose", lost the dorsal hump, the 20 mm cannon with their ammo systems, and the external stores, although sometimes the centerline station was kept. The slats were fixed.[26]
The small size of the Skyhawk and superb low speed handling in the hands of a well trained aviator made it ideal to teach fleet aviators the finer points of DACT. The squadrons eventually began to display vivid threat type paint schemes signifying their transition into the primary role of Adversary training. To better perform the Adversary role, single-seat A-4E and F models were introduced into the role, but the ultimate adversary Skyhawk was the Super Fox, which was equipped with the uprated J52-P-408 engine. This variant had entered service in 1974 with VA-55/VA-164/VA-212 on the final USS Hancock cruise and had been the variant that the Blue Angels had selected in 1973.
The surplus of former USMC Skyhawks resulted in A-4M versions being used by both VF-126 and TOPGUN. Even though the A-4 was augmented by the F-5E, F-21 (Kfir), F-16, and F/A-18 in the adversary role, the A-4 remained a viable threat surrogate until it was retired by VF-43 in 1993 and shortly thereafter by VFC-12. The last A-4 fleet operators were VC-8, which retired its Skyhawks in 2003.
The A-4M was also operated by the Operations Maintenance Detachment (OMD) in an adversary role based at NAS Dallas, Texas for the Naval Air Reserve. Many of the aviators that flew the four jets were attached to NAS Dallas, including the Commanding Officer of the air station. The aircraft were instrumental in training and development of Air Combat Maneuvers(ACM) for Naval Air Reserve fighter squadrons VF-201 and VF-202 flying the F-4 Phantom II and later the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. The unit also completed several missions involving target towing to NAS Key West, Florida; NAS Kingsville, Texas, and deployments to NAS Miramar, California and NAS Fallon, Nevada for adversary support. The detachment was under the operational command of the Commander Fleet Logistics Support Wing (CFLSW), also based at NAS Dallas.
Israel [ edit ]
An IAF A-4N on static display. Note the extended tailpipe.
Israel was the largest export customer for Skyhawks. The Skyhawk was the first U.S. warplane to be offered to the Israeli Air Force, marking the point where the U.S. took over from France as Israel's chief military supplier. Deliveries began after the Six-Day War, and A-4s soon formed the backbone of the IAF's ground-attack force. In IAF Service, the A-4 Skyhawk was named as the Ayit (Hebrew: עיט, for Eagle).[27]
They cost only a quarter of what a Phantom II cost and carried more bombs. Starting in 1966, Israel purchased 217 A-4s, plus another 46 that were transferred from U.S. units in Operation Nickel Grass to compensate for large losses during the Yom Kippur War.[28]
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Israeli Air Force Skyhawks were the primary ground attack aircraft in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. Skyhawks carried out bombing missions in the Yom Kippur War, and a considerable proportion of the tactical sorties. ACIG.org claims that at least 9 A-4 Skyhawks were downed by MiG-21s and MiG-17s during Yom Kippur war.[29][30][31] Formal Israeli sources claim only five Israeli Air Force aircraft, of any type, were shot down in air-to-air duels.[32]
In May 1970, an Israeli Skyhawk piloted by Col. Ezra Dotan shot down two MiG-17s over south Lebanon (one with unguided rockets, the other with 30mm cannon fire) even though the Skyhawk's heads-up display has no "air-to-air mode".[33] However, up to three Skyhawks were downed by Egyptian MiG-21 fighters, plus two were downed by Soviet-piloted MiG-21s during the War of Attrition.[30][34]
A special version of the A-4 was developed for the IAF, the A-4H. This was an A-4E which featured improved avionics and the improved thrust J52-P-8A engine. Armament consisted of twin DEFA 30 mm cannon in place of the Colt Mk.12 20 mm cannons. Later modifications included the avionics hump and an extended tailpipe, implemented in Israel by IAI. The extended tailpipe gave greater protection against heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. A total of 90 A-4Hs were delivered, and were Heyl Ha'avir's (Israels Air Force) primary attack plane in the War of Attrition.[28]
IAF A-4Hs awaiting disposal in 2009 following their retirement
In early 1973, the improved A-4N Skyhawk for Israel entered service, based on the A-4M models used by the U.S. Marine Corps. The different model Skyhawks carried out bombing missions in the Yom Kippur War, and a considerable proportion of the tactical sorties. They also attacked in Operation Peace for the Galilee, and one of them shot down a Syrian MiG-17.
The IAF also operated two-seat models, for operations as well as advanced training and retraining. The first training models arrived in 1967, with the first batch of Skyhawks. During the Yom Kippur war, the Skyhawk order of battle was reinforced with TA-4F and TA-4J models.[28] The IAF selected in 2003 RADA Electronic Industries Ltd. to upgrade its A-4 trainer fleet with weapon delivery, navigation and training systems. Integration of a multifunction and Head-up Display produced an advanced Lead in fighter trainer for the IAF's future fighter pilots.[citation needed]
According to acig.org, two Israeli A-4 Skyhawks were downed by Syrian MiG-23s over northern Lebanon On 26 April 1981.[35] Official Israeli Air Force statistics do not list any downing of Israeli warplanes since the Yom Kippur War.[36]
During the 1982 Lebanon War an Israeli A-4 piloted by Aharon Achiaz was shot down over Lebanon by a SA-7 on 6 June 1982.[37][38][39] Israel claimed this was one of its only two fixed-wing aircraft shot down over the Beqaa Valley during the air battle of 6 June 1982 to 11 June 1982 where 150 aircraft took part.[39]
In October 2008, it was decided due to maintenance issues that the A-4 Skyhawk fleet would be withdrawn and replaced by more modern aircraft, able to perform equally well in the training role and, if required, close support and interdiction missions on the battlefield.[40] Some of Israel's A-4s were later exported to Indonesia. The Skyhawks have been replaced by F-16s in combat roles but are still used for pilot training. All the remaining A-4s aircraft were to be fully phased out beginning by 2014 as the IAF accepts delivery of Alenia Aermacchi M-346 Master jets.[41][42] Skyhawks were used to drop leaflets to Gaza in 2012.[43]
In July 2013, Israel began a program called Teuza (boldness) for the purpose of turning some military bases into sales lots for obsolete IDF equipment. Older models that are not suited for Israel's modern high-tech forces will be sold off, or sold for scrap if there are no buyers. A-4 Skyhawk jets are among those being offered.[44]
On 13 December 2015, all remaining Israeli A-4 Skyhawks were retired from service. The retirement ceremony took place at Hatzerim IDF base.[45]
Argentina [ edit ]
Argentina was the first foreign user of the Skyhawk and had nearly 130 A-4s delivered since 1965. The Argentine Air Force received 25 A-4Bs in 1966 and another 25 in 1970, all refurbished in the United States by Lockheed Service Co. prior to their delivery as A-4P, although they were still locally known as A-4B. They had three weapon pylons and served in the 5th Air Brigade (Spanish: V Brigada Aérea). In 1976, 25 A-4Cs were ordered to replace the F-86 Sabres still in service in the 4th Air Brigade (Spanish: IV Brigada Aérea). They were received as is and refurbished to flight status by Air Force technicians at Río Cuarto, Córdoba. The C model had five weapon pylons and could use AIM-9B Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.[citation needed]
Argentine Navy A-4Q 0655/3-A-202 in 2007
The Argentine Naval Aviation also bought the Skyhawk known as A-4Q in the form of 16 A-4Bs plus two for spare parts, modified with five weapon pylons and to carry AIM-9B Sidewinders. They were received in 1971 to replace Grumman F9F Panther and Grumman F9F Cougar in use from the aircraft carrier ARA Veinticinco de Mayo by the 3rd Fighter/Attack Squadron (Spanish: 3ra Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque).
The U.S. placed an embargo of spare parts in 1977 due to the Dirty War[46] backing the Humphrey-Kennedy amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1976, the Carter administration placed an embargo on the sale of arms and spare parts to Argentina and on the training of its military personnel (which was lifted in the 1990s under Carlos Menem's presidency when Argentina became a major non-NATO ally).[47] Ejection seats did not work and there were many other mechanical faults.[48] In spite of this, A-4s still served well in the 1982 Falklands War.
Falklands War [ edit ]
Argentine Air Force A-4C, May 1982
During the 1982 Falklands War, Argentina deployed 48 Skyhawk warplanes (26 A-4B, 12 A-4C and 10 A-4Q aircraft).[49] Armed with unguided bombs and lacking any electronic or missile self-defense, Argentine Air Force Skyhawks sank the Type 42 destroyer Coventry and the Type 21 frigate Antelope as well as inflicting heavy damage on several others: RFA Sir Galahad (which was subsequently scuttled as a war grave), the Type 42 Glasgow, the Leander-class frigate Argonaut, the Type 22 frigate Broadsword, and RFA Sir Tristram. Argentine Navy A-4Qs, flying from Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego naval air station, also played a role in the bombing attacks against British ships, destroying the Type 21 Ardent.[50]
In all, 22 Skyhawks (10 A-4Bs, nine A-4Cs, and three A-4Qs) were lost to all causes in the six-week-long war.[51] These losses included eight to British Sea Harriers, seven to ship-launched surface-to-air missiles, four to ground-launched surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire (including one to "friendly fire"), and three to crashes.[49]
Postwar [ edit ]
A-4AR Fightinghawk, 2006
After the war, Argentine Air Force A-4Ps and A-4Cs survivors were upgraded under the Halcón (Eng: Falcon) program with 30 mm (1.2 in) DEFA cannons, air-to-air missiles, and other minor details, and merged into the 5th Air Brigade. All of these were withdrawn from service in 1999, and they were replaced with 36 of the much-improved OA/A-4AR Fightinghawk. Several TA-4J and A-4E airframes were also delivered under the A-4AR program, mainly for spare parts use. The A-4AR was in service between the late 1990s and 2016 when the majority of the fleet was grounded for serviceability and age. A small number of airframes remained in service for limited roles. Three aircraft were lost to accidents. [52]
In 1983, the United States vetoed the delivery by Israel of 24 A-4Hs for the Argentine Navy as the A-4Q replacement. The A-4Qs were finally retired in 1988.[53]
Kuwait [ edit ]
Kuwaiti A-4KUs on the flight line in 1991
Kuwaiti Air Force Skyhawks fought in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the available Skyhawks flew attack missions against the advancing Iraqi forces from deserted roads after their bases were overrun. A total of 24 of the 29 A-4KUs that remained in service with Kuwait (from 36 delivered in the 1970s) escaped to Saudi Arabia. The escaped Skyhawks (along with escaped Dassault Mirage F1s) operated as the Free Kuwait Air Force, flying 1,361 sorties during the liberation of Kuwait.[54] Twenty-three A-4s survived the conflict and the Iraqi invasion,[55] with only one A-4KU (KAF-828, BuNo. 160207) shot down by Iraqi radar-guided SAM on 17 January 1991.[56][57] The pilot, Mohammed Mubarak, ejected and was taken prisoner.[58] The remaining Kuwaiti Skyhawks were later sold to Brazil, where they served aboard the aircraft carrier NAe São Paulo[59] until prior to its decommissioning in February 2017.[citation needed]
Australia [ edit ]
Twenty A-4G skyhawks were operated by the Royal Australian Navy for operation from HMAS Melbourne. These aircraft were acquired in two batches of 10 Skyhawks in 1967 and 1971, and were primarily used to provide air defence for the fleet. Ten of the A-4Gs were destroyed in accidents, and all of the survivors were sold to the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1984.
New Zealand [ edit ]
A RNZAF A-4K in 1982
In 1970, 14 A-4K aircraft were delivered to the Royal New Zealand Air Force. These were later joined by 10 A-4G Skyhawks from the Royal Australian Navy in 1984; all 10 ex-RAN and the 12 surviving original RNZAF aircraft were converted to the A-4K Kahu standard.[citation needed]
In 2001 the three Air Combat Force squadrons (Nos 2, 14, and 75) were disbanded and the Skyhawks put into storage awaiting sale.[60][61] They were maintained, with occasional servicing flights, and then moved to RNZAF Base Woodbourne, where they were preserved in protective latex.[62][63] Draken International signed an agreement with the New Zealand government in 2012 to purchase eight A-4Ks and associated equipment for its adversary training services. Six were former RAN A-4G airframes [64] which as carrier aircraft had logged significantly fewer flying hours.[65] These were subsequently relocated to the U.S. at Draken's Lakeland Linder International Airport facility in Lakeland, Florida.[66] The other A-4K aircraft were given to museums in New Zealand and Australia.[67]
Indonesia [ edit ]
Due to the declining relationship between Indonesia and the Soviet Union, there was a lack of spare parts for military hardware supplied by the Communist Bloc. Soon, most of them were scrapped. The Indonesian Air Force (TNI-AU) acquired A-4 Skyhawks to replace its Il-28 Beagles and Tu-16 Badgers in a covert operation with Israel, since both countries did not maintain diplomatic relationships. These A-4s were chosen because the IDF planned to retire its A-4 squadrons. The A-4 served the Indonesian Air Force from 1982 until 2003.[68][69][70]
Malaysia [ edit ]
In 1982, Malaysia purchased 80 refurbished A-4C and A-4L under a modernization program called PERISTA. Forty of the airframes were upgraded with the Hughes AN/ASB-19 Angle Rate Bombing System, air refueling capability, and increased payload, while the rest were kept in the United States as a reserve and for spare parts. This modified version was redesignated as A-4PTM (peculiar to Malaysia).
The aircraft were delivered to the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF) in December 1984 where they served in the No.6 and No.9 RMAF Squadrons at Kuantan air base. While in service, they suffered from frequent maintenance issues and a high accident rate. In 1995, they were finally retired and replaced with BAE Systems Hawks.
Brazil [ edit ]
Brazilian Navy A-4 taking off from aircraft carrier São Paulo
As of 2014, Brazil was the latest Skyhawk customer. In 1997 Brazil negotiated a $70 million contract for purchase of 20 A-4KU and three TA-4KU Skyhawks from Kuwait. The Kuwaiti Skyhawks, modified A-4Ms and TA-4Js delivered in 1977, were among the last of those models built by Douglas. The Kuwaiti Skyhawks were selected by Brazil because of low flight time, excellent physical condition, and a favorable price tag. The Brazilian Navy re-designated AF-1 and AF-1A Falcões (Hawks), the ex-Kuwaiti Skyhawks arrived in Arraial do Cabo on 5 September 1998.[71][72]
On 18 January 2001, an AF-1 trapped aboard the Brazilian aircraft carrier Minas Gerais was later successfully catapulted, making Brazil's fixed-wing carrier force operational again after nearly two decades.[73] To replace the aging Minas Gerais, Brazil purchased the surplus French aircraft carrier Foch on 15 November 2001. Renamed São Paulo, the "new" carrier received extensive refitting before becoming operational in 2003. Minas Gerais was decommissioned and retired that year.[74]
On 14 April 2009, Embraer signed a contract to modernize 12 Brazilian Navy aircraft, nine AF-1s (single-seat) and three AF-1As (two-seat). This upgrade will restore the operating capacity of the Navy 1st Intercept and Attack Plane Squadron. The program includes restoring the aircraft and their current systems, as well as implementing new avionics, radar, power production, and autonomous oxygen generating systems.[75] The first of the 12 modified Skyhawks was delivered on 27 May 2015. Embraer stated the modifications will allow the aircraft to remain operational until 2025.[76]
In 2017, the Brazilian Navy indicated that it was reconsidering the total number of aircraft to be modernized to AF-1B/C standard due to budget constraints and the decommissioning of the São Paulo. Two AF-1B were delivered in 2015 and a further two of undisclosed type are to be delivered in 2017. It is believed that despite the loss of its only carrier, the Navy wants to retain the experience of carrier-based operations, and thus will not rescind the contract outright.[77]
Others [ edit ]
DA Defence German A4
Top Aces, formerly Discovery Air Defense Services, a private Canadian company contracted by the Canadian Forces, Australian Defence Forces, and Bundeswehr to provide air combat training, ground force and Naval support training, and fighter transition training, imported and registered 10 McDonnell Douglas A-4N and TA-4J aircraft. Discovery upgraded and modified the jets to be capable of Electronic Warfare Training for both Naval & Fighter Forces. The aircraft are also used in Adversary Support and Anti-Shipping Attack training.[78] From review of individual aircraft registration histories, at least seven A-4Ns were transferred to Top Aces in March 2017. In early 2019, seven A-4N aircraft were registered on Transport Canada's Canadian Civil Aircraft Register as owned by "Top Aces", among other types.[79] Top Aces also operates A-4Ns under contract to provide airborne training services for the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr). Using a fleet of seven A-4 aircraft, the company will provide both combat training and fighter transition training.[80]
Variants [ edit ]
Kitty Hawk in 1966. A-4C landing on USSin 1966.
RNZAF A-4K
TA-4F Skyhawk of VA-164 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hancock in the early 1970s
A-4G of VF-805 takes a wire aboard HMAS Melbourne in 1980
Brazilian Navy AF-1 (A-4KU)
Naval Reserve A-4L of VA-203
Original production variants [ edit ]
XA4D-1 Prototype (pre-1962 designation) YA4D-1 (YA-4A, later A-4A): Flight test prototypes and pre-production aircraft (pre-1962 designation). A4D-1 See A-4A (pre 1962 designation) A4D-2 See A-4B (pre 1962 designation) A4D-2N See A-4C (pre 1962 designation) A4D-3 Proposed advanced avionics version, none built (pre-1962 designation). A4D-4 Long-range version with new wings; cancelled. A4D-6 Proposed version, none built. (pre-1962 designation)
Upgraded, modified and export variants [ edit ]
Operators [ edit ]
Argentine Air Force[91] – use the modernized version A-4AR as fighter and fighter trainer.
Draken International – owns and operates 7 former New Zealand A/TA-4K, and 6 former IDF A-6N. [92]
AeroGroup, a private American commercial company, previously owned A-4 aircraft. [93]
A-4L, LLC - Owns seven and currently operates three A-4L (A4D-2N) Skyhawks based at KGYI North Texas Regional Airport/Perrin Field in Denison Texas.[94]
Former operators [ edit ]
Royal Australian Navy – sold to RNZAF
Indonesian Air Force (TNI-AU) – retired in 2003
Israeli Air Force – retired from frontline duty in 2008, retired from training flights in December 2015.[95]
Kuwait Air Force – sold to Brazilian Navy
Royal New Zealand Air Force – retired without replacement in 2001
Republic of Singapore Air Force retired from frontline service in 2005, and were transferred to France (Cazaux Air Base) as advanced jet trainers. The Skyhawks were retired from training flights from 2013 and replaced by the Alenia Aermacchi M-346. 1 RSAF A-4SU was donated to the Institute of Technical Education (ITE College Central) for vocational and training purposes.
Aircraft on display [ edit ]
Given the number of air forces that operated the Skyhawk, a significant number has been preserved, either airworthy or on display.
Preserved A-4s can be found in the following countries:
Argentina
Australia
France
Indonesia
Israel
Japan
Malaysia
Kuwait
Netherlands
New Zealand
Singapore
United States
Specifications (A-4F Skyhawk) [ edit ]
A-4 Skyhawk A/B/C color scheme
A-4 Skyhawk E/F/M color scheme
Data from globalsecurity.org[96]
General characteristics
Performance
Armament
Avionics
Bendix AN/APN-141 Low altitude radar altimeter (refitted to C and E, standard in the F) [98]
Stewart-Warner AN/APQ-145 Mapping & Ranging radar (mounted on A-4F, also found on A-4E/N/S/SU)[99]
Notable appearances in media [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Related development
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration and era
Related lists
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Boris is a Mayor who likes to be liked, and it was when his questioners probed for admissions of failure, arrogance or regret that you could see and hear them get under his skin. The press conference just ended at City Hall is one of the bare handful he's submitted himself to in his place of work, preferring themed location settings where he can more easily joke, duck and dive. It started smoothly enough, but the hard pressure started taking its toll when the London specialists in the room at long last had a chance to pin him down for longer than the length of a cheery soundbite.
There was, then, no sign of the usual cakes and ale. He was on the back foot, and he could be there for quite a while. People wanted to know what Boris had actually been doing all this time. What assurances had he and his deputy Kit Malthouse extracted from John Yates, the officer who's just resigned over the hacking affair, that he was exploring the hacking allegations seriously as they increased in gravity and number? As a hacking victim himself, what assurances had he obtained from Yates, when chairing the Metropolitan Police Authority, that he had looked very carefully at the number of other people who might have been hacked? Had he been "asleep on this one?"
Boris stuck to his familiar line, that he'd simply taken on trust what he'd been told. He replied that Yates had been "very clear to me" that there had been "nothing new" coming up. Malthouse backed him up. Clearly, if someone else had made mistakes it wasn't their fault. But then Boris was asked if he, like Sir Paul Stephenson, should take responsibility for his failures and resign. Did he regret calling phone hacking allegations "codswallop"? Wasn't his judgement in question here? Did he regret recently praising Rupert Murdoch for his "very considerable contribution" to journalism? Would he apologise for having mocked the people who, unlike him, had stuck at the hacking story? How about for not bothering to make sure Yates took a good, long look at those 11,000 pages of evidence on his watch?
The gathering insinuation was that Boris had just been playing at being responsible for policing; playing, maybe, at being Mayor. It's the charge his political enemies long to stick to him. The more he offered the excuse that it wasn't his fault, guv, the less his audience was satisfied. You could sense the temperature rise. Then Jon Snow from Channel 4 News took him through the long history of Met-News International links and personnel crossovers, going right back to John Stevens's time. Surely it had been clear for years that something wasn't right?" And that's why we're having this investigation!" was the Mayor's angry bark of a reply. Patience snapped. Bonhomie gone. Boris, behind the mask.Hindustan Times via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA - SEPTEMBER 21: A National Samata Party ticket aspirant Ashok Gupta reacts as he demands for ticket for assembly elections during the press conference to announce the list of candidates for the Bihar elections on September 21, 2015 in New Delhi, India. RLSP released its first list of 17 candidates for the coming Bihar assembly polls. Bihar will hold five-phase elections between October 12 and November 5 to elect the 243-member assembly. Counting of votes will take place on November 8. (Photo by Ravi Choudhary/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
A total of 130 candidates with serious criminal cases against them including related to murder will contest in the first phase of Bihar Assembly polls on October 12.
Polling will be held in 49 out of 243 seats in this phase with 583 candidates in the fray.
The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which has prepared a report through the candidates' affidavits obtained from Election Commission (ECI) website, said 170 candidates have criminal cases against them while 130 of them contesting from 37 seats have been booked for serious non-bailable offences.
There are 16 candidates with cases related to murder, including Pradeep Kumar of JD(U) from Warsaliganj constituency who has declared four cases related to murder. Seven independent candidates too have cases of murder against them, the report said
A total of 37 candidates face cases of attempt to murder.
Ramswarup Yadav, an Independent from Hisua constituency, faces five charges related to attempt to murder, while one each from BSP, BJP and Jan Adhikar Party (Loktantrik) and three candidates from JD(U) have declared attempt to murder cases.
The 37 constituencies with three or more candidates with criminal cases contesting the elections have been declared 'Red Alert Constituencies' by the ADR.
The number of crorepatis contesting the first phase poll is 146 which is 25 per cent of the total number of 583 candidates. Party wise, the largest number of crorepati candidates, 19, belong to the JD(U) closely followed by BJP with 18 candidates, and RJD which has 11 candidates, it said.
The average assets of candidates contesting the polls in first phase is Rs 1.44 crore, added the report.FILE PHOTO: South Africa's Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane looks on during the reopening of the Highveld Steel heavy structural mill at Emalahleni in Mpumalanga province
Mineral Resources Minister, Mosebenzi Zwane, on Friday instructed the Minerals and Petroleum Board to verify whether the information provided by AngloGold Ashanti that it plans to retrench more than 8000 workers took into consideration industry commitments to save jobs. This comes after AngloGold Ashanti said recently that it had started a consultation process with employees to retrench 8500 workers at its South African operations. AngloGold Ashanti employs about 28000 people, including contractors.
Zwane said the instruction to verify this information was to ensure that the proposed actions by Anglo Gold Ashanti took into account the commitments made in the Stakeholder Declaration signed by industry stakeholders to save jobs.
Zwane met with the chief executive of AngloGold Ashanti, Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan, and his executives on Friday.
“We continue to appeal to companies to act responsibly and with sensitivity. These are not just numbers to be thrown around, but people’s livelihoods and future job prospects, and we should not take this matter lightly,” Zwane said.
More information on the latest round of retrenchments is expected to be made available after the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration appoints a facilitator for the process in terms of the Labour Relations Act (LRA).
ALSO READ: AngloGold to cut 8500 jobs
Zwane also reminded companies that the Section 52 process in terms of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA), and Section 189 process of the LRA should be adhered to, in order to avoid the creation of uncertainty in the industry.
Section 52 of the MPRDA states that the holder of a mining right remains responsible for the implementation of the processes provided in the LRA pertaining to the management of downscaling and retrenchment, until the Minister of Mineral Resources has issued a closure certificate to the holder concerned.
Anglo Gold Ashanti wants to place on care and maintenance the Kopanang mine in the Vaal River region, and the Savuka section of the TauTona mine, in the West Wits Region. Savuka has been in operation for 59 years, and has already been extended 10 years beyond its natural life. Kopanang Mine produced its first gold in 1981.
ANABuilding Liquid: Next Steps
For a young company, nothing is more exciting and vital than announcing the first product. That’s why it was so rewarding for us to be able to include some of our initial customers in the Liquid announcement, which helped us add a real-world dimension to our work. We also greatly appreciated the discussion that followed. We all benefit from and share in the learning process as we advance the state of Bitcoin.
As you can imagine, there are many technical details involved in the construction and operation of Liquid. We plan to release these processes and procedures in an upcoming white paper, which will also include insight into how we apply the technology included in the Elements Alpha open-source release.
Of the many questions posted online regarding what Liquid does and how it works, there were a few particular ones that caught our eye. We provide here a summary of answers to these.
Should you have further questions, we invite you to join the discussion by subscribing to the sidechains mailing list.
Liquid sounds promising, but how does it work?
Liquid is a federated sidechain. This means keys are utilized by a set of functionaries, that the companies who have subscribed to and make use of the network run, for at least two purposes: 1) to sign blocks after incoming bitcoin and other internal transactions are verified, and 2) to sign outgoing transactions back to Bitcoin.
The functionaries extend the Liquid blockchain, as well as authorize fund transfers out of the Liquid network. They perform this function autonomously and without human intervention. The rules they enforce are written in code, just like Bitcoin’s validation rules. To ensure that the rules are followed as written, these functionaries are hosted by multiple independent companies in a K-of-N signature scheme and are hardened against tampering as an additional protective measure.
The K-of-N signature scheme is a security method to make the system “ byzantine secure, ” and the tamper-proofing of the boxes is designed to help ensure that they continue processing transactions as expected (it protects against functionaries conspiring to double-spend Liquid coins and from inappropriately signing out bitcoin). But ultimately the diversity of functionaries is the primary way security is achieved.
Why a Federated Sidechain?
A distributed, federated sidechain makes perfect sense for rapid interchange settlement between Bitcoin companies. Exchanges, brokerages, payment processors, and other power users of the Bitcoin network already use and interact with Bitcoin everyday. These companies, however, are encumbered by the specific need to wait for multiple confirmations on the Bitcoin network when doing business amongst themselves. Liquid alleviates these constraints by providing these companies the ability to rapidly confirm between each other.
The security model of Liquid is indeed different from Bitcoin’s. Control is still decentralized, but in a different way. It’s distributed to a relatively small number of entities who are Liquid functionaries rather than a large number of miners. This is a tradeoff with both advantages and disadvantages. Rather than trusting miners not to burn some massive amount of resources to rewrite history, Liquid trusts a majority of a small group of known blocksigners who rely on the system functioning. These companies have shared incentives to not go rogue on each other.
Why tamper-resistant hardware?
For this type of federation to be secured, it’s important that the private keys necessary for the multisig to be independently controlled by different entities and also difficult for those entities to make any consensus-related changes. If those entities are different leading companies who each host their own functionary, and a supermajority of functionaries are necessary in a multisig for a block to be considered valid, then this arrangement can be very difficult to compromise. If the keys are generated in a hardened HSM and very difficult to copy without destroying the hardware, this arrangement should be even more difficult to break.
For the system to be undermined, it would require compromise of K of the functionaries, including breaks of the tamper-resistant nodes. Unless all K were compromised simultaneously, there would be a significant time window for the remaining functionaries to act in case of a breach. The system has fail-safes available to them in such an event, up to and including options that would involve halting Liquid and recovering the locked bitcoin that are in it.
There is nothing secret running on this system. Blockstream does not control the functionary hardware, although we do run a single functionary. Everything running on them will be (ideally) auditable, although that is challenging to implement. But the companies hosting the functionaries absolutely have the ability to review and audit what is running inside the node, and verify that it is identical and built exactly from the source code which is also provided in a deterministic fashion. Once the boxes are supplied to the functionaries, we give up any direct control over them, very much by design, to enable distributed operation of Liquid.
Isn’t Liquid just a Multisignature Green-Address Semi-Permissioned Private Chain?
In the original sidechains whitepaper, a sidechain is defined as “a blockchain that validates data from other blockchains.” Liquid is a pegged sidechain. More specifically, it is a federated sidechain, as described in Appendix A of that paper. Many of the design decisions made in Liquid’s creation were prefigured by that appendix (e.g., mutually distrusting, geographically-diverse functionaries, tamper-resistant hardware). As a result of this configuration, bitcoin can be transferred in and out of Liquid via federated consensus without reliance on Blockstream or any central authority.
The use of a multi-sig federat ion of blocksigners is an implementation choice in how Liquid is deployed and secured. It’s not a Dynamic Membership Multiparty Signature (DMMS) merged mined sidechain which would require a soft-fork to Bitcoin. That security configuration is not needed here as the parties involved in the federation are known to each other and act as the multisigners to operate the two-way peg.
This architecture ends up working quite well for Liquid since the parties involved are all known but want to have a distributed trust model that doesn’t require Blockstream or others to have custodianship |
but he was put out there to deflect it. This was not what he signed up for, not what a former attorney general wants to do.”
Bentley was named Energy Minister after the last election in 2011, and the power plant cancellation occurred before the election.
As Energy Minister, he also led the contentious push for wind turbine development in rural Ontario.
Bentley had announced he would not run for re-election but decided to leave office now as the election of a new leader and premier made this “a time of renewal,” he said.
“I am prepared to write the next chapter and it will have more time for (his wife) Wendy and our daughters. I have always been driven by my desire to make a difference... We accomplished a lot.”
It’s expected the premier-elect will call a byelection in the riding, but it’s not known when.
— — —
CHRIS BENTLEY
Elected: Oct. 2, 2003 as London West MPP
Resigning: Feb. 14
Cabinet posts: labour, attorney general, aboriginal affairs and energy
Family: Wife Wendy; daughters Jocelyn, 25, and Julia, 28
— — —
What They Said
“Public life is never easy and Mr. Bentley deserves our thanks for his service to his London constituents and the people of Ontario — as does his family.”
Andrea Horwath, Ontario NDP leader
“He has served extraordinarily well. He is brilliant, he is hard working, passionate and focused. We have been extremely well served by Chris. I will miss him a lot.”
Deb Matthews, Liberal MPP London North Centre and Health Minister
— — —
Q&A with Chris Bentley
Q: Are there plans for after you leave office? Anything lined up?
Nothing specific. I have had a number of thoughts and discussions and interesting opportunities. One thing I want to do, and I want to be clear on this, is find a day and take it off.
Q: Are you leaning toward public or private life, or a return to law?
I will take some time and look around. I have always been active, always busy. I am sure I will be in the future.
Q: Why are you resigning now and not waiting until the end of your term in office?
I intended to do that, but this is time for renewal and that implies change. We have a premier-designate, a great caucus, a fabulous combination of the experienced like Deb (Matthews) with new ones not yet in cabinet. It is the right time for a lot of reasons.
Q: Are you concerned about premier-elect Kathleen Wynne’s election and leaving as a result of that?
No, she is strong, capable, determined but very open, kind and collegial. She brings people together. Even when she feels passionately about an issue, she understands the other side.
Q: Would you consider running for mayor?
I have said no to that many times. But I won’t speculate on anything else.
Q: Why choose the former Monsignor Feeney Centre, or Normal School, for your announcement?
It is a rather special place, the heart of the community I live in. I have been involved with it since the beginning, and wanted to protect it. It is a magnificent building. I am delighted the city of London has taken a good look at it.
norman.debono@sunmedia.caReince Priebus is out as White House chief of staff. President Trump announced on Twitter Friday Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly will be his replacement.
I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017
...and a Great Leader. John has also done a spectacular job at Homeland Security. He has been a true star of my Administration — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017
I would like to thank Reince Priebus for his service and dedication to his country. We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017
Kelly begins Monday. Priebus released a brief statement shortly after the announcement.
"It has been one of the greatest honors of my life to serve this president and our country," Priebus said. "I want to thank the president for giving me this very special opportunity. I will continue to serve as a strong supporter of the president's agenda and policies. I can't think of a better person than General John Kelly to succeed me and I wish him God's blessings and great success."
The Friday afternoon announcement comes after a week of turmoil in the White House, in which the president's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, assailed Priebus in a profanity-laced interview with the New Yorker. Mr. Trump posted the tweets from Air Force One on his way back to the White House from New York. Both Priebus and Scaramucci accompanied him on the trip.
Asked by reporters if Priebus was fired, incoming White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "We all serve at the pleasure of the president."
Mr. Trump briefly addressed reporters as he departed Air Force One.
"Reince is a good man. John Kelly will do a fantastic job," Mr. Trump said. "General Kelly has been a star. Done an incredible job thus far. Respected by everybody. Great, great American."
Trump selects John Kelly as new chief of staff
Priebus' departure, coming exactly one week after White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced his, is not necessarily a surprise. Priebus has had a diminished profile in the White House for weeks, and the president hasn't exactly expressed support for him. On Thursday, Sanders declined to tell reporters whether the president still had confidence in his chief of staff.
Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was brought on in an effort to provide Washington know-how to a president with no experience holding public office. Other RNC allies brought aboard included Spicer and Kate Walsh, who became deputy White House chief of staff. Walsh is now gone, and Spicer is on his way out.
Priebus and Scaramucci have long been at odds. Scaramucci was reportedly angling for the chief of staff position before Mr. Trump took office, but Priebus was named instead. When Scaramucci joined the White House staff last week, it became clear that he would have some of the responsibilities and access normally designated only to the chief of staff. Scaramucci, in his first White House press briefing, said he would report to the president directly, rather than to Priebus, and said he had the authority to fire people.
Tensions between the two escalated in the last 48 hours, as Scaramucci all but accused Priebus of leaking his financial disclosure information to the press, then launched into the tirade against Priebus to the New Yorker reporter.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) released this statement after the announcement that Priebus is out:
"Reince Priebus has left it all out on the field, for our party and our country," the statement said. "Here is a guy from Kenosha, Wisconsin who revitalized the Republican National Committee and became White House chief of staff. He has served the president and the American people capably and passionately. He has achieved so much, and he has done it all with class. I could not be more proud to call Reince a dear friend."
"I congratulate Secretary Kelly on his appointment, and look forward to working with him to advance our agenda," Ryan added.
It's unclear who will replace Kelly as DHS secretary. That concerns House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who told CBS News the president's decision was "rushed" and "not well thought out."
"Unfortunately, It is clear that this decision was rushed and not well thought out," Thompson said. "The president and Republicans insisted the DHS Secretary be confirmed on day one but now the President leaves this critical national security cabinet post vacant. He must now quickly replace Secretary Kelly with someone experienced and measured who understands that homeland security is not a partisan issue."
This is a developing story.Giving Away the Farm
President Barack Obama’s administration recently threatened to veto the defense budget, citing "serious concerns" over provisions that limit the U.S. missile defense know-how that the White House is permitted to share with Moscow. This is the sort of information that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in his earlier days, would have assigned his spies to steal. Through its single-minded pursuit of "resetting" relations with Russia, the Obama administration may simply be willing to hand over this information and, in doing so, weaken U.S. national security.
Only two days after issuing the veto threat — and as Obama tried to warm Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to U.S. missile defense plans at the G-8 Summit in Deauville, France — the House of Representatives passed the defense bill. It included the provision that the president’s team finds so offensive: Section 1228 requires that no funds can be used to provide the Russian Federation with sensitive U.S. missile defense technology.
This act of congressional prudence did not come out of nowhere. The Senate debate over New START raised questions about what the Obama administration may have promised Moscow regarding U.S. missile defense plans. The debate stemmed from the treaty’s preamble, which linked offensive and defensive weapons, and a Russian unilateral statement that stated ratification of the treaty was conditional on whether the United States made improvements to its missile defense systems. In a treaty about reducing offensive weapons, it was clear the Russians required the Obama administration to include U.S. defenses in the bargain.
With that issue still unresolved, Congress discovered that the administration has been working on a missile defense agreement with the Russians and that Moscow had requested that the United States share with it loads of sensitive U.S. missile defense technology and operational authority as part of that deal. In the administration’s eagerness to please the Kremlin, it may just oblige.
The House of Representatives has given a firm "no" to that prospect through its decision to ignore Obama’s veto threat and approve the defense appropriations bill by a veto-proof vote of 322 to 96. The Senate may act similarly. On April 14, 39 Republican senators sent a letter to the president expressing their concern over the administration’s consideration of granting to the Russians sensitive U.S. technology and "red button" authority to prevent the interception of incoming missiles headed for U.S. troops or allies. This would allow Russia to deny the United States the ability to intercept a missile Washington had determined to be a threat.
The letter, spearheaded by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), requested the administration provide the Senate with assurances that it will not share sensitive information with Moscow. The senators cited the problem that sharing this information with Russia poses in light of its history of espionage and technological cooperation with Iran and Syria.
They’re right to be concerned. Tehran is thumbing its nose at Washington and doubling down on its missile program. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a congressional panel in March that Iran "would likely choose missile delivery as its preferred method of delivering a nuclear weapon" and that the Islamic Republic "continues to expand the scale, reach and sophistication of its ballistic missile forces, many of which are inherently capable of carrying a nuclear payload."
Russian assistance has contributed to the progress made by Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Should the United States share critical information about its missile defenses with the Russians, a Russian entity — official or otherwise — could pass that information along to Tehran, enabling the Iranians to capitalize on the weaknesses in the U.S. system.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration continues to demonstrate its penchant for bargaining away missile defense, and the United States is not currently developing and deploying missile defense technology at the rate and quantity the threat demands.
The proliferation of missiles, especially short-range devices, continues to accelerate. As a result, the United States has a greater need than ever for short-range defensive systems like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Patriot air and missile defense system. The United States, its forces abroad, and its allies are also vulnerable to short-range missiles fired from ships at sea and long-range missiles fired in large quantities. The only system the United States currently has to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) is the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system, which is limited in its ability. The sea-based Aegis system is supposed to complement the GMD system in defending the homeland against long-range missiles by 2020, but the intelligence community continues to estimate that Iran will have an ICBM by 2015.
Leaders in the House, and particularly the Armed Services Committee, deserve commendation for trying to address these weaknesses. The House defense bill added funds for short-range defenses, the GMD system, and Aegis; and perhaps most strikingly, it mandated the administration to conduct a study on the technical and operational feasibility of space-based interceptors — the ideal type of system to intercept missiles at the optimal point, during their boost phase.
But as the administration’s veto threat demonstrates, the future of U.S. missile defense requires more than Congress alone can provide. Here’s hoping that the White House comes to its senses and stops trying to use a degradation in U.S. national security to purchase a Russian "reset."In the current debate over how the U.S. should oversee the internet, the worst case scenario for many is the web reinvented as cable TV: a service where subscribers pay a lot of money for a limited number of channels, and in which the distributor chooses which shows can even appear on the platform.
Rivals of the telco giant [company]Comcast[/company] fear this is exactly what the company is trying cook up through acquiring its next largest competitor, [company]Time Warner Cable[/company]. The proposed merger is already unpopular with consumer groups, and now industry opponents are going into high gear to try a stop it.
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On Monday, a consortium of smaller phone and broadband companies launched a campaign called “Don’t Comcast The Internet” to draw attention to a parade of potential horribles that could arise if regulators allow the merger.
At an event in Washington to kick off the campaign, the group presented antitrust authorities who predicted that a combined Comcast-TWC would stifle would-be competitors. One way it could allegedly do so is by using its market power to pressure content partners to keep their content — which is the lifeblood of both TV and broadband — away from new entrants.
The group also warned of danger to another part of the internet, predicting that younger internet and content companies would struggle to obtain permission from Comcast-TWC to appear before subscribers in the first place.
Nick Grossman of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures said he worried that start-ups could find themselves asking “Will Comcast greenlight it?” as a pre-condition to launching their business on the internet.
Others worried that the Comcast would exploit its set-top box to control the user experience and business ecosystem, much as Microsoft exploited its operating system monopoly in the 1990s.
It’s too soon of course to say if all — or any — of these dire predictions might come to pass. The FCC and the Justice Department still appear to be months away from finishing a review of the merger, a process that Comcast VP David Cohen had earlier predicted would be finished by the end of 2014.
In recent months, however, Comcast critics appear to have gained momentum as approval for the merger, which once seemed a near-sure thing, has come under growing doubt.
Comcast, meanwhile, appeared unfazed by the appearance of the coalition, offering the following statement:
“There’s no real news here — just another group of existing opponents making the same arguments they have already made at the FCC for months, many of which weren’t found to be credible in our past transaction reviews, and all of which we’ve refuted directly with evidence in the FCC record. The real facts remain the same: consumers don’t lose choice in the broadband or video markets. Consumers will see real benefits in faster broadband speeds and better video products, and a host of other benefits. And there are no transaction-specific harms to this merger.”
The “Don’t Comcast the Internet” crowd consists of industry umbrella groups Comptel, ITTA (The Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance) and NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association. It’s not the first anti-Comcast posse to spring up of late: content providers like Netflix and Dish launched an initiative late last year called “Stop Mega Comcast” to point out the alleged downsides of the deal.
This story was updated on Tuesday at 12:30pm ET to include Comcast’s statement.FILE - This April 13, 2016, file photo shows the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. An alleged CIA surveillance program disclosed by WikiLeaks on Tuesday, March 7, 2017, purportedly targeted security weaknesses in smart TVs, smartphones, personal computers and even cars, and enabled snooping that could circumvent encryption on communications apps such as Facebook’s WhatsApp. WikiLeaks is, for now, withholding details on the specific hacks used. But WikiLeaks claims that the data and documents it obtained reveal a broad program to bypass security measures on everyday products. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks raised the prospect Wednesday of sharing sensitive details it uncovered about CIA hacking tools with leading technology companies whose flagship products and services were targeted by the government’s hacker-spies.
If that sharing should take place, the unusual cooperation would give companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and others an opportunity to identify and repair any flaws in their software and devices that were being exploited by U.S. spy agencies and some foreign allies, as described in nearly 9,000 pages of secret CIA files WikiLeaks published on Tuesday.
The documents, which the White House declined anew Wednesday to confirm as authentic, describe clandestine methods for bypassing or defeating encryption, antivirus tools and other protective security features for computers, mobile phones and even smart TVs. They include the world’s most popular technology platforms, including Apple’s iPhones and iPads, Google’s Android phones and the Microsoft Windows operating system for desktop computers and laptops.
“This is the kind of disclosure that undermines our security, our country and our well-being,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said. “This alleged leak should concern every single American.”
Spicer defended then-candidate Donald Trump’s comment in October 2016 — “I love WikiLeaks!” — after it published during the presidential campaign private, politically damaging emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. Spicer said there was a “massive, massive difference” between WikiLeaks publishing stolen, personal emails of a political figure and files about national security tools used by the CIA.
The CIA has declined to confirm that the documents are authentic. But on Wednesday, the agency said Americans should be “deeply troubled” by the disclosures.
WikiLeaks has not released the actual hacking tools themselves, some of which were developed by government hackers while others were purchased from outsiders. The group indicated it was still considering its options but said in a statement Wednesday: “Tech companies are saying they need more details of CIA attack techniques to fix them faster. Should WikiLeaks work directly with them?” It wasn’t clear whether WikiLeaks — a strident critic of Google and Facebook, among others — was serious about such action.
A message seeking additional details from WikiLeaks was not immediately returned, and an attempt to speak to founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Tuesday was rebuffed.
Security experts said WikiLeaks was obligated to work privately with technology companies to disclose previously unknown software flaws, known as zero-day vulnerabilities because consumers would have no time to discover how to defend themselves against their use, and with companies that design protection software. WikiLeaks has said the latest files apparently have been circulating among former U.S. government hackers and contractors.
“The clear move is to notify vendors,” said Chris Wysopal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Veracode Inc. “If WikiLeaks has this data then it’s likely others have this data, too. The binaries and source code that contain zero days should be shared with people who build detection and signatures for a living.”
The political fallout and damage to U.S. intelligence operations was still being assessed. The former head of the CIA and National Security Agency, Michael Hayden, sought to assure people the U.S. would use such cyber weapons only against foreign targets.
“I can tell you that these tools would not be used against an American,” Hayden said Tuesday night on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“But there are people out there that you want us to spy on. You want us to have the ability to actually turn on that listening device inside the TV, to learn that person’s intentions.”
One clear risk is that WikiLeaks revealed enough details to give foreign governments better opportunities to trace any of the sophisticated hacking tools they might discover back to the CIA, damaging the ability to disguise a U.S. government hacker’s involvement. “That’s a huge problem,” said Adriel T. Desautels, the chief executive at Netragard LLC, which formerly sold zero-day exploits to governments and companies. “Our capabilities are now diminished.”
Some vendors were already sifting through the disclosures to fix flaws in their software. The first confirmed patch came from Avira Operations GmbH & Co., a German antivirus vendor, which told The Associated Press it fixed what it described as “a minor vulnerability” within a few hours of the WikiLeaks release.
Apple said many of its security vulnerabilities disclosed by WikiLeaks were already fixed. In a statement late Tuesday, it said its initial analysis showed that the latest version of the iOS system software for iPhones and iPads fixed many of those flaws. Apple said it will “continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities.”
Google hasn’t commented yet.
The WikiLeaks disclosures were an extraordinary coup for a group that has already rocked American diplomacy with the release of 250,000 State Department cables, embarrassed the U.S. military with hundreds of thousands of logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and upended the U.S. presidential election by publishing Democratic Party emails.
The new releases are all the more remarkable given that WikiLeaks’ founder Assange is midway through his fifth year at the Ecuadorean Embassy. He received political asylum after skipping bail to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for an allegation of rape. Last year, a United Nations panel declared that the U.K. and Sweden were detaining him arbitrarily, but there’s no suggestion that Swedish or British authorities will budge on their desire to detain and extradite him.
Meanwhile, the upcoming second round of Ecuador’s presidential contest may mean Assange’s welcome at the embassy is wearing thin. The front-runner in the race, Guillermo Lasso, has said he would evict Assange, an action Assange says could eventually lead to his extradition to the United States.
___
Satter reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Ken Thomas and Deb Riechmann in Washington and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed.Paul is striking a responsive chord among many unlikely voters. His integrity is unquestioned and seems to over shadow some of his more extreme views.
Soldiers’ Choice
TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times, 22 December 2011
So this is Christmas, season of peace, time to reflect on the people coming home from a war that most Americans say was not worth it, and those still fighting in another war that raises new doubts by the day.
Many of the service members returning from Iraq — where nearly 4,500 American lives were lost, 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed and about 600,000 Christians were forced to flee the country with other refugees — are paying close attention to the campaign to decide who will be commander in chief.
What would they think of a candidate who says:
“Far from defeating the enemy, our current polices provide incentive for more people to take up arms against us.”
And, “We have an empire. We can’t afford it.”
And, “Acting as the world’s policeman and nation-building weakens our country, puts our troops in harm’s way, and sends precious resources to other nations in the midst of an historic economic crisis.”
The men and women in uniform probably wouldn’t support this proponent of limited engagement. So goes the conventional wisdom, which holds that those in the military support a leader itching for a fight.
But in fact, Representative Ron Paul, the congressman who favors the most minimalist American combat role of any major presidential candidate and who said all of the above quotes, has more financial support from active duty members of the service than any other politician.
As of the last reporting date, at the end of September, Paul leads all candidates by far in donations from service members. This trend has been in place since 2008, when Paul ran for president with a similar stance: calling nonsense at hawk squawk from both parties.
This year, Paul has 10 times the individual donations — totaling $113,739 — from the military as does Mitt Romney. And he has a hundred times more than Newt Gingrich, who sat out the Vietnam War with college deferments and now promises he would strike foes at the slightest provocation.
What seems, at first blush, counterintuitive makes more sense upon further review. There’s a long tradition of military people being attracted to politicians with Paul’s strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Not even a full 1 percent of Americans are active-duty military. The troops have become props for politicians who shower them with fulsome praise, while dreaming up schemes to send them into harm’s way.
Yet, these soldiers, sailors, air men and women, and assorted boots on the ground know the cost — in trauma, in lives ruined, in friends lost, in good intentions gone bad — of going to war far more than the 99 percent not currently serving. Where they put their money in a campaign, paltry though it may be in comparison to the corporate lords who control a majority of our politicians, says a great deal.
And if the overwhelming service support for Ron Paul is any indication, the grunts of American foreign policy are gun-shy about further engagement in “useless wars,” to use Dr. Paul’s term.
“It’s not a good sign when the people doing the fighting are saying, ‘Why are we here?’” said Glen Massie, a Marine Corps veteran who lives in Des Moines, Iowa, and is supporting Paul for president. “They realize they’re being utilized for other purposes — nation building and being world’s policeman — and it’s not what they signed up for.”
With his mumbled, avuncular asides and aversion to snappy sound bites, the 76-year-old congressman from Texas is now the unlikely frontrunner in some polls in Iowa. He will not be the nominee; powerful Republicans have pledged to destroy him should he gain strength beyond the cornfields of Sioux City. His libertarian positions — on marriage, drug laws and monetary policy — are poison for too many GOP stalwarts.
He has other problems, as well. His position on health care for the elderly and working poor — basically, to let people fend for themselves, at the mercy of charity and the free enterprise system — is chilling and unrealistic. And in recent days, he’s had trouble explaining some deplorable racist statements that went out under the name of his newsletter 20 years ago. (He has disavowed them.)
But, strictly considered, as the iconoclast among the toy warriors seeking to be the next president, Paul has performed an admirable service. His jabbing at Gingrich, now trying to get traction with an unconstitutional plan to arrest judges whose rulings he disagrees with, has been particularly productive. In Gingrich, we have the perfect combination of a blowhard who wants to play with real weapons, a chicken hawk and a politician who wears a rental sign to cover the empty space where principles should be.
Gingrich and other Republicans sound eager to rush into combat with Iran, should that theocratic nightmare of a country develop a nuclear weapon. Paul shrugs at the thought. And he’s consistently called the Iraq war an unnecessary disaster.
Romney claimed, in November, that President Obama’s decision to bring home all American troops from Iraq was premature and represented “an astonishing failure.” True to his trademark elasticity, Romney has now changed his mind and is fine with bringing the troops home. Perhaps he’s been reading the polls that show that nearly two-thirds of all Americans think the Iraq war was not worth the loss of lives and treasury.
The young people who actually fought in Iraq know better. They can tell a phony warrior from a real one. And in Ron Paul, the veteran who served as a flight surgeon for the Air Force, the man some call crazy, they hear a voice of sanity — at least in the realm of war and peace.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added. There are only three people running for President that actually have a grip on reality. Ron Paul is one of them.It’s impossible to glean the breadth, and depth, of the Woodson Research Center Special Collections & Archives without visiting it — and that’s exactly what we did! At the heart of Fondren Libray, the archives are a treasure trove of artifacts, including rare photos, documents and memorabilia ranging from the quirky and fun to the somber and informative. We toured Woodson with Rice Historian Melissa Kean '96 from whom we learned that things have been pouring in every week since the Centennial. We dug deep into the history of Rice as preserved at Woodson to present to you some objects that tie in beautifully with the history of our beloved university.
LOVETT’S SPECTACLES
At the far end of the archives is a box containing objects that were on the desk of Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, at the time of his death in 1957. The box includes an address book filled with pages of his tiny, neat handwriting. There are documents, books, a pen and a paperweight among other things. But what may really impress the history buff is his pair of foldable, round spectacles, still intact. Lovett continued to have an office on campus as president emeritus years after he stepped down as president.
HAND-CARVED RICE OWL TOILET SEAT
Now who could have come up with the idea of a Rice Owl on a toilet seat? You’re right — we don’t know either, but we can thank Jeff E. Ross ’75 who, at the suggestion of his wife, donated the toilet seat that had been gathering dust in his garage. He had apparently bought it at a garage sale about four decades ago. We’re wonderstruck, but grateful that it has a new home at Woodson.
MEGAPHONE
Kean was at the home of trustee emeritus Albert Kidd ’64 about six years ago when she spied something in his garage: a blue, waist-height megaphone used by Kidd during his time as a cheerleader in 1962–63. Prominently painted on the megaphone is “BEST O’ LUCK LOEW'S.” The well-wisher, we later found out, was Loew's State Theatre, a popular movie theater located in downtown Houston that was in business from 1927 to 1972.
COMPUTER PANEL
At one corner of the archives stands a large glass panel. A complicated web of cables runs within. The panel is one of 20 that had been constructed for a computer built by Rice students between 1958 and 1961 to support research that, as the story goes, would have been impossible to carry out without it. The computer itself remained in operation through the late ‘60s as a model of how they should be built. Kean discovered the panel in a storage closet in Abercrombie Hall and had it delivered to Woodson.
OWL-OPOLY
Rice students never cease to surprise us, do they? In this version of Monopoly, you can buy Lovett College, Baker College, Fondren Library or even Willy’s Statue for up to $4,000 “Owl-opoly” bucks. You can also play as President David W. Leebron, William Marsh Rice or your favorite mascot, Sammy! We can’t help but wonder who came up with this ingenious idea!
KEN SIMMONS '63 SUGAR ART
We have no idea how this sugar portrait reached Woodson or who made it. Was it a Ken Simmons ’63 fan? Or a secret admirer? Or maybe just someone who needed a muse? If you have an inkling of who the artist might be, we would love to hear from you. Email woodson@rice.edu with your ideas.
RICE SOAPS
And where did these owl soaps come from? Were they gifted to attendees of a special Rice event? Were they placed beside the sinks in campus bathrooms? Who made them? The only thing we can be sure of is they have kept their soapy fragrance.
VICTORY PENNANT
In 1923, Rice defeated Texas A&M on the gridiron. To celebrate this victory, pennants were made to decorate various parts of campus. Kean found this particular pennant sometime around 2004 when she was inspecting items stored in Autry Court as it was being cleaned out for a major renovation. Sure enough, the pennant was pinned up on a door just as it likely had been in the days following the 1923 victory.
If you have a Rice-related item that you think might be a good fit for the archives, and you would like to donate it, please write to woodson@rice.edu. Kean and her fellow archivists are always happy to hear from alumni and learn about the history behind your Rice memorabilia.'I treated people who had their skin melted' BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/i-treated-people-who-had-their-skin-melted-28462148.html
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Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting.
"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns".
As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who had their skin melted".
He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he said.
Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."
Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.
Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.
Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were."
He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.
The author is an unembedded journalist reporting from Fallujah
Belfast TelegraphATLANTA—In an unprompted act of generosity from one coworker to another, Spryte Logistics employee Ben Graham reportedly took the initiative to share one of Emily Fehrman’s ideas with their boss on Friday, saving her the time and effort of doing it herself. “When I offhandedly mentioned to Ben a new way the company might save on shipping, I in no way expected him to shoulder the burden of telling it to our supervisor—but that’s just the helpful kind of guy he is, stepping up to take all the credit without me even having to lift a finger,” said Fehrman, 34, adding she was beyond grateful to have been spared the 10-foot trip to her boss’s office to explain the idea and receive praise in person. “Thanks to Ben, I won’t have to worry about any performance bonus that might result from my creative thinking, and I can just continue to focus on the same day-to-day work.” Fehrman, who has not been promoted in eight years, went on to say that she was particularly fortunate that her department was staffed with plenty of men just as helpful as Graham.
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So these were some of the brilliant looking birds photography! Grab your favorite photo right now and we are sure that you will going to fall in deep love with the birdsJoe Staley is glad he can laugh about it now.
The 49ers left tackle scared everyone at the end of Thursday night’s 35-11 win over the St. Louis Rams with what seemed like a season-ending injury.
Staley went down with a leg injury and his loud agonizing screams could be heard on the television broadcast. Shortly after Staley's painful moment, a training cart was wheeled on to the field to take the Pro Bowl tackle to the locker room.
It wasn’t needed.
Staley limped off the field and avoided a major injury.
“We dodged a bullet there,” Jim |
of destiny to cut the boy from his fate and take him from Belle.
Flashback now to Rumple’s castle in the Enchanted Forest, where he drops a baby unceremoniously on the table in front of Belle.
He’s stolen the child from its parents for nefarious reasons, much to Belle’s dismay. She asks him if he even bothered to get the child’s name, and Rumple replies that a names a specialty. “You don’t waste it on something you don’t plan on becoming attached to,” he informs her, in a curiously shaky voice. He warns her not to try and hide the child – and he will be back for it at sundown. We later see Belle reading to the baby from Her Handsome Hero, a book that her mother once read to her.
Forward now to Storybrooke’s library, where Belle conveniently finds a manual for defeating the Dark One – a book she’s never seen before.There’s a strand in the book that appears on the floor and Belle picks it up and follows it like a lunatic. What the hell, Belle – you’re the smart one! Whew. She’s only dreaming.
She soon realizes she’s entered the dreamworld when she sees her son. The thread is the strand of his fate, and according to him, the answer to saving him is right in front of her and she needs to act on it quickly before his fate is cut short. She wakes face-down on a book.
Belle enlists the help of Emma and Killian – who, being a pirate, recognizes that the book in front of Belle was written in squid ink. Emma’s going to extract it with magic and use it to stun Rumple. Killian advises Belle to stay safe and let him and Emma take it from there.
I need to pause a moment and call something out, here. I love that Belle and Killian are friends, but he’s very... I don’t know...sort of intimate with her. He calls her “love” too often and I swear every word out of his mouth to her sounds like a caress. More so than usual, I mean. The man could talk a nun out of her drawers, for creep’s sake, but with Emma being so distant and shell-shocked this season, he’s got much more warm familiarity and gentle affection with Belle and it’s nagging at me to the point where I’m starting to wonder how they’d be together. And I am a die-hard Captain Swan shipper (see my fanfics for confirmation on that)! It’s just kind of insidious, what’s between Belle and Killian now – and I’m not sure if it’s intentional by the writers or not.
Over at Zelena’s, the Evil Queen shows up and lets her know that Gold sent her. Zelena immediately puts the whole thing together. She lays the baby down with a kiss and an I love you before cautioning her evil sis that Rumple is playing her. They head outside, where the mother of all witch fights occurs, fireballs and green lightning bolts shatter the sky and scorch the earth as these two powerful, magical, vindictive women battle it out – Zelena is especially fantastical as her motherly instincts kick in – refusing to back down now that she’s got baby Robin to protect.
Just kidding. The Evil Queen hits her with one measly fireball and Zelena’s crunched up against the shed door without raising a freaking finger. Right. Just as the Evil Queen prepares to deliver the killing blow, Regina shows up, and she’s holding her own heart. She threatens to crush it to save Zelena and gives it a good squeeze, showing that she means business.
“You still have a hole in your heart,” she tells her evil self. “That’s why you fell for Rumplestiltskin.” The Evil Queen poofs away, bested for now.
Regina heals Zelena up, and they share a conversation about redemption and forgiveness, as Zelena tries to apologize for once again taking the evil road and not renewing the tentative family ties they’d developed at the end of Season 5. That’s when Regina lets her know that she saved her not out of any familial love – but because that’s what heroes do. Furthermore, she blames Zelena for Robin’s death and she’ll never forgive her. Zelena begs for a second chance, but it falls on deaf ears as Regina strides away. Damn, Zelena. Maybe you need an umbrella after Regina threw all that shade.
Over at Gold’s, Killian strides in, arrogant as you please and Rumple takes the bait, attacking him. This leaves him open to Emma throwing the squid ink, which stuns him. He vows that Killian will pay for that and all I can think is – dude! He saved the life of your wife and unborn child just a couple of episodes ago. Talk about an unpaid debt! I would think by magical law, Rumple can’t put a finger on him.
Anyway, they start looking for the shears, but Emma sees her vision again. This time she sees a glowing red gem in the hilt of the sword that kills her.
Rumple steps away, because they used like, a teaspoon of squid ink, and he heads straight for Belle in the library. She staggers to the elevator in slow motion and of course, Rumple stops her easily.
“I once told you I was a difficult man to love,” he tells her. “I think I’m a man no one can love.” It’s a sorrowful confession, and he admits that he wants to start over with a new son. “Maybe he can love me,” Rumple says pitifully.
“You know this price,” Belle reminds him. “You’ll lose me forever.”
Rumple steps back, and doesn’t use the magic.
Across town at Granny’s, Snow is thrilled to see that her kids have great scores on their latest quiz, even though her husband is trapped in a catatonic state somewhere nearby. Then again, he’s been trapped in a catatonic state for a lot of this show after season one, so I guess it’s no big deal. Jasmine is with her, and she lets Snow know that Aladdin found the genie lamp, but she’s defeated by the fact that there’s no genie in it. Snow gives her the standard hero pep talk, which they should now just print up give to her in brochure form for these occasions.
Flashback to Belle at Rumple’s castle, taking the baby to the library as she tries to figure out what he plans for the child. She finds Rumple’s scroll, which is an incantation in fairy language to call the Black Fairy. Belle falls into his trap – translating it for him (why would she write down the incantation? Oh yeah, plot convenience), and he swoops in to take the scroll and her translation, along with the baby.
Forward to the Charming residence now. Jasmine and Aladdin have the lamp and Jasmine gives it a rub. Two gold genie cuffs appear, but alas, no genie. And once again, they remind us that the genie is free. Just like they told us last episode. And two scenes ago. We get it. Aladdin slaps the cuffs on, turning himself into a genie so that he can grant Jasmine’s wish to return to Agrabah. Sadly, we do not get to see Aladdin’s shirtless, well-oiled genie chest. I am hopeful for next week.
Across town at Gold’s, the Evil Queen gets pissy because he didn’t use the aging magic on Belle. She reminds him that he never stays good because that’s not who he really is. “You want to know what failure looks like?” he sneers at her. “Take a look in the mirror.”
She’s none to happy to realize that Zelena and Regina were right. Gold has been playing her.
Over at Granny’s, Belle enjoys a cup of tea (which Killian encourages her to drink with a twinkle in his eyes and the endearment of ‘love’ again) as Emma tells him about her latest vision and the glowing red jewel in sword that brings on her death. Suddenly, Belle drops the cup as it’s been laced with the magical powder, and her belly starts growing exponentially.
Flashback to Belle locked in Rumple’s library in the Enchanted Forest. In flies the Blue Fairy, to give us the backstory on the Black fairy – who used to be one of them. Somewhere along the way, her heart blackened and she started stealing children instead of protecting them. Blue agrees to free Belle so that she can save the child.
She rushes to the forest where she finds Rumple summoning the fairy, and hides herself to observe as Rumple stuns the fairy with squid ink. Holy cow, does the Black Fairy look amazing.
That costume is so much better than Blue’s. Blue always looks like one of those crappy doll cakes your mom’s friend made for your eleventh birthday. This costume is smoking hot, and so is the fairy, for that matter. Rumple asks her one important question: After stealing so many children, why did she abandon the one child that was actually hers? The fairy’s eyes widen as she realizes Rumple is her child. A child, he points out, that she didn’t even bother to name.
Well, who the hell gave him that clunker of a name, then? Must’ve been dear old Dad. And how the hell did dear old Dad nail a hot fairy? I mean, Rumple’s father was no GQ model, here. Or even particularly charismatic. What the hell? Was she drunk on fairy dust or what?
“Sometimes you have to chose power over love,” the fairy tells him. She takes off, laughing in his face as Belle grabs the baby. Belle offers her sympathy for having a really shitty parent, but she also chides Rumple for nearly sacrificing the child. We later see Belle returning the baby to its parents.
Forward to Storybrooke now, and Belle has been taken to the convent to give birth, with a fairy acting as midwife and Emma being labor coach.
Rumple shows up but the fairies have put up a powerful protection spell. As Emma helps Belle through her labor, she slips into the dreamworld again. Her son tells her to do what she must do now that time is running out. She balks desperately, telling him there has to be another way.
“Don’t forget the book,” he cautions her as she returns to consciousness.
After the birth, Belle asks Blue to be the baby’s fairy godmother. Then she asks her to take the baby somewhere safe, somewhere far away from all this. Heartbroken, she hands the baby over, along with her copy of Her Handsome Hero. She names him Gideon, after the hero in the book. Blue takes the baby and flies away, just as Rumple breaks through the protection spell.
Rumple demands to know the baby’s name, but Belle refuses to tell him, knowing that he can use that name if he ever gets it. He swears he will find the baby.
Back at his shop, the Evil Queen is gloating. “Did someone lose another son?” she coos. She admits she’s the one that dosed Belle’s tea with the magic and Rumple vows to have his revenge on her. “I play a very long game,” he reminds her coldly. “And you’re nothing more than one of my pawns.”
“I hear fairies make wonderful mothers,” she shoots back in parting. And we watch as Rumple trashes his shop.
Emma and Killian share a moment of mumbling at Granny’s. Seriously, I re-watched the scene four times and only caught half the lines while watching in a house that was silent as a tomb. I give up – it’s something about her always being a savior and they need to find that sword.
They break into Gold’s shop and of course, the sword is the first thing Emma finds.The minute she puts her hand on it, it triggers the vision again. Emma and Killian hope that finding the sword can lead them to whoever it is that’s going to kill her.
I’m giving this one four storybooks out of five. There was some good backstory here, but also a lot of things that raised questions. For instance:
What’s the significance of Her Handsome Hero? We know that there’s a mystery with Belle’s mother’s death (or just disappearance), and that her mother read her this book. She also mentioned the book to Gaston last season. Here we see it again, and her son urges her to send the book with him when she sends him away. This is smart, as Rumple can’t use it to deduce the child’s name, but I think there’s more going on here. I’m half-wondering if Blue didn’t take the baby to be raised by grandma. How the hell did the Black Fairy and Rumple’s Dad end up together? And how did she lose her wand? Since Blue’s the one who had it (before Rumple stole it), I’m guessing there was some kind of fairy civil war. I’d love to see that play out in flashbacks. Going out on a short, easily traversed limb here to say that clearly, Regina needs to learn that heroes forgive, too. And she will. The glowing red jewel on the sword looks a lot like the glowing red eyes of Jafar’s snake staff, don’t you think? Correlation? Only time will tell. It’s clear from the promo for the mid-season finale that the Evil Queen gets ahold of the lamp, and therefore commands Aladdin. I can’t wait to see what happens when the original curse is undone! Bring it!
What did you think of the Black Fairy? And where do you think they’ll leave us hanging next week?
AdvertisementsActor and civil servant Kal Penn has signed a book/audiobook deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt & Audible. The book will be a collection of essays set to be published in 2019.
The book will include his unique 21st-century American success story as he writes about ambition, the challenges of navigating Hollywood, and his unusual sabbatical from actor to White House staffer. From the sound of it, his role in the cult Harold and Kumar franchise, experiences with stereotypical auditions and his work with the Obama administration will give Penn plenty of material to sculpt a good read. Senior editor Kate Napolitano acquired the book in her first official deal since joining the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last month.
Told with his signature wit and charm, the collection will be a humorous and inspiring take on what it means to take the path less traveled and how life can have more than one story. Audible will simultaneously release the audio version of the book, with Penn narrating.
In addition to his role in Harold and Kumar, Penn has an extensive list of film and TV credits. He plays POTUS speechwriter Seth Wright in Designated Survivor, which was renewed for a second season earlier this year and is the host of the unscripted competition series Superhuman.In the world of illicit virtual marketplaces, there is one clear leader: Silk Road, which has been in business since February of 2011. However, a few competitors have recently sprung up. The most visible is Atlantis, which has completely discarded the paranoia and caution that usually accompanies the online drug-dealing industry. Today, the site announced it is planning a "big social media campaign," which kicked off with a video ad done in the style of a cutesy Silicon Valley startup.
The video opens with a cheery tune and a cartoon man in stunner shades and a tie. "Meet Charlie," reads the narration. "He's a stoner, and recently his job made him move cities, and he can't find any dank buds." The movie ends with Charlie getting "high as a kite" after using Atlantis, which the video is sure to note offers "no fees for purchases" and "next day delivery."
Atlantis has also been pitching journalists and offering discounts to top Silk Road sellers.
Isn't it a bit indiscreet for Atlantis to advertise its illegal service so brazenly (and flout YouTube's user guidelines in the process)? Silk Road, by contrast, does not even advertise its address; it must be shared person-to-person or found by following links from deep-web sites such as The Hidden Wiki or other guides to the digital underground.
It's very difficult for the police to crack down on either the operators or users of virtual marketplaces, however, so operating in the open may be the same as operating in the shadows. Owners can station themselves anywhere in the world, taking precautions to protect their identities. Atlantis and sites like it also operate completely under the table using virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. These "cryptocurrencies" also offer users ways to protect their identities. Atlantis and sites like it are only accessible through Tor, the distributed network that anonymizes traffic by bouncing it between nodes around the world.
Isn't it a bit indiscreet for Atlantis to advertise so brazenly?
"We want to bring attention to the site and bring our vendors more buyers," a user purporting to be the CEO of Atlantis said on Reddit. "Law enforcement is going to be aware of us (and probably already is) regardless of the way we choose to put our product out there."
Atlantis says it has processed more than half a million dollars in sales since it opened in March, so the aggressive advertising strategy may be working. The company is also hiring an online marketer — to be paid in Bitcoin, of course.S. Africa may re-consider regulated rhino horn trade in future
South Africa does not rule out a future call for regulated international trade in rhino horn trade, despite its decision not to push for legalisation at an upcoming CITES conference, a cabinet minister said Sunday.
South Africa has "no immediate intention to trade in rhino horn," but is "maintaining the option to reconsider regulated legal international trade in rhino horn" when key requirements are met, Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa told reporters.
Some campaigners are calling for the lifting of the ban and had hoped South Africa would make a proposal to that effect at the upcoming Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) conference in Johannesburg in September.
Rhino horn is composed mainly of keratin, the same component as in human nails, but it is sold in powdered form as a supposed cure for cancer and other diseases in Vietnam and China ©Tony Karumba (AFP/File)
But South Africa says it will only make such a call when its key conditions -- including clear trading models with targeted markets - have been met.
"One thing we are very careful about is that we need to have a successful proposition for South Africa that goes through, that's not hampered by any doubt... but now there are a lot of uncertainties," Molewa said.
The minister also revealed that the numbers of South African rhino slaughtered by poachers so far this year has dropped to 363 compared with 404 for the same period last year.
The killing of rhinos is driven by demand for their horns in countries such as China and Vietnam where they are prized for their purported medicinal purposes.
South African which is home to some 20,000 rhino, or 80 percent of the global population, has suffered the brunt of poaching.Justice has to be certain and swift in order to tackle crime against women, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Tuesday, deploring “tendencies to shield” sons of politicians involved in such cases.
Kejriwal said governments should ensure freedom for women instead of imposing restrictions on them. A politician’s son, guilty of such crimes, should be awarded double the punishment as stipulated in statute books, he said.
“Son of a very influential leader was recently caught for crime against women. Another leader commented that women should not move out during the night. I wish to slap that leader,” Kejriwal said, adding that such politicians should instead keep their sons indoors if they cant keep them under ‘control’.
The comments, made by Kejriwal in a televised Independence Day speech, came against the backdrop of the Chandigarh stalking case involving the son of Haryana BJP chief Subhash Barala.
“The most important thing in such cases is deterrence. There should be certainty and swiftness when it comes to punishment. Now when a politician’s son commits any such crime, the entire system comes together to shield him,” he said.
Contractual system
In his 14-minute-long address, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal described the system of contractual employment as ‘exploitative’ said that he would strive to abolish it in regular employment.
“There are two kinds of contractual labour. One who are engaged for few days in sectors like construction. And the second lot, who are hired in regular jobs and employed for 365 days. We will strive to do away with the contractual system in regular employment,” said Kejriwal while delivering his Independence Day speech at Chhatrasal Stadium.
“The contractual system is exploitative. Be it by private contractors or in government, whoever does it, its a crime... We will take steps abolish it,” he said, adding that despite the AAP government revising minimum wages by about 37 per cent last year, the contractual employee are yet to receive any benefits.
Regularisation of contractual employees has been one of the major pre-poll electoral promises of the Aam Aadmi Party government.
Besides appealing the opposition political parties to support the move, the chief minister also urged the lieutenant governor to “not create hurdle” in implementing the new system.
Drive against Dengue, Chikungunya
Speaking about the perennial problems of vector-borne diseases in the city post monsoon, the chief minister said that the Delhi government would come out with a detailed plan to check their spread.
Kejriwal also sought cooperation from the people in the campaign as they did in implementation of the odd-even scheme.
“In the next 10 days, we will come out with a detailed plan to tackle dengue and chikungunya in Delhi. There is a need to act on a war-footing against these diseases,” he said.
First Published: Aug 15, 2017 13:27 ISTJohn McKerley John McKerley is the Oral Historian at the University of Iowa Labor Center and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa. His work has focused on the rise of public-sector unions, deindustrialization, and the growing diversity of the workforce and labor movement. View all posts by John McKerley »
April 16, 2016, was a day for celebration. It marked the twentieth anniversary of the union certification election that transformed a home-grown organizing campaign among graduate employees at the University of Iowa (UI)—the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS)—into Local 896 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE).
The anniversary was celebrated with three days of events hosted by COGS and co-sponsored by the national UE. It brought back to campus a host of COGS alumni like myself, revealing the degree to which the experience of being union members — and UE members in particular — continued to be a source of pride and inspiration. These alumni included scholars, teachers, and activists at a variety of institutions, including Alverno College and the University of Alabama; university-based labor educators in Missouri and Iowa; union staff members with the UE and SEIU; and the executive director of the American Association of University Professors.
These alumni were joined by current COGS officers and members; supportive faculty, staff, and community members; and fellow graduate employee activists from the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Conference events included sessions regarding efforts to win adequate parental leave and childcare policies, discussion of union representation among graduate employees across the nation, the release of a COGS-authored white paper detailing the concentration of money and influence within the UI’s top administration, and a rally to draw attention to COGS’ crucial role in current struggles at the university.
The celebration (and COGS’ past, present, and future) is worthy of wider consideration for several reasons. First, COGS’ origins are themselves historic. The 1996 election was the largest union victory in more than a decade in right-to-work Iowa and one of the largest nationwide that year. Next, COGS’ early history embodied innovative and instructive experiments in union organization and significant tensions between “social movement” and “bread-and-butter” unionism (while at once demonstrating the limits of counterposing the two in explaining internal union politics).
Most famously, COGS members tried to insert a “no-discrimination” clause into the union’s first contract. The clause was rejected by the university, however, in accordance with Iowa public employment relations law, which provides for the employer or union to refuse to bargain over anything outside of a narrow set of “mandatory” topics. At that point, a group of COGS officers and members staged a dramatic protest at a lecture given by civil rights historian Taylor Branch. That confrontation was described, from the perspective of a subset of pro-clause activists, in Robin D. G. Kelley’s 1997 Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!.
Although the protest was controversial within the local—with some officers and members fearing that it would compromise bargaining—pro-clause activists’ efforts to press members to reject any contract that did not contain the clause was far more so. These efforts split COGS, with many members in favor of the clause but with few willing to risk the contract as a whole to save it, especially because the contract provided a new, expansive, COGS-designed health insurance plan, UIGRADCare. The controversy also caused a rift between the pro-clause activists and the UE staff. While the pro-clause activists regarded staff members as focused on bread-and-butter issues to the exclusion of broader social and political goals, the staff feared that the activists represented a self-defeating form of ultra-leftwing orthodoxy.
Ultimately, COGS members voted to approve the contract without the clause, but pro-clause activists succeeded in creating a permanent “Unity” committee charged with promoting broad-based solidarity and anti-discrimination. This committee was to be chaired, whenever possible, by someone from a historically disempowered group, with the chair having membership on the local’s coordinating committee–its version of an executive board. The Unity committee was a self-conscious effort to build anti-discrimination and “minority” empowerment into the structure of the local. In the second contract negotiations, COGS members (with the support of UE staff) took up the issue again, winning a memorandum of understanding from the university and Board of Regents regarding discrimination that included a grievance procedure. Although this procedure fell short of the pro-clause activists’ original demand to integrate discrimination claims into the work-related grievance procedure, it proved to be a significant and winnable goal. Damage had been done, however, with pro-clause activists, including figures who had been important during the organizing campaign (and, indeed, in the choice to affiliate with UE), moving away from active participation in the local.
Despite such early controversies, since 1996, COGS members have increased graduate employee compensation from the bottom to the top of the Big Ten and expanded UIGRADCare into arguably the best and most comprehensive health insurance plan at the UI. Over time, they also leveraged the university’s self-interest in tuition waivers into a plan that achieved 100 percent remission without bargaining unit members suffering a reduction in take home pay. By contrast, the university’s initial proposal sought a substantial pay cut from post-comps students and others not paying tuition, presumably in an effort to divide the bargaining unit.
Most recently, COGS pursued and won a ruling from the Iowa Public Employment Relations Board that recognized student fees as supplemental pay. Previously this had been a sticking point because fees had been a permissive topic of bargaining and an area in which the university continued to take from employee paychecks. Although substantial challenges remain—including political attacks on public employee bargaining, a new university president with troubling ties to a nationwide anti-worker agenda, cuts to the bargaining unit, and the university’s use of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to limit the local’s access to data critical to organizing and contract enforcement—COGS members seem poised to continue building on their past successes.
What, then, are the lessons, if any, to be drawn from this particular example of successful graduate employee unionism? First, COGS serves as an instructive case study in the tensions that can result as an organizing campaign transitions from social movement to local union. The COGS story is of particular relevance to newer organizations of graduate employees like the Coalition of Graduate Workers at the University of Missouri as they fight for union recognition. Next, COGS is a study in a local making the best of its particular legal and organizational context. As a graduate employee union in a right-to-work state, COGS has always depended on retaining a permanent campaign footing. Although Iowa public employment relations law is structured to allow steady, if limited, gains by unions that pursue a strategy of being the “least unreasonable” party in negotiations, COGS would not have been nearly as successful without its aggressive efforts at organizing and member education, as illustrated by the university’s failed effort to divide graduate employees over tuition remission.
Overall, the twenty-year history of COGS serves as a powerful reminder of the long battle over the corporatization of the university as well as the potential for academic workers to use collective action and the law to defend their interests and those of people engaged in similar struggles.Nocturnal urinators don’t just leave the unpleasant stench of pee in our streets. They also damage public infrastructure and leave behind a mess that’s surprisingly costly and labor intensive to clean up. Cities are working hard to find a fix: Amsterdam has retractable toilets that rise from the ground. San Francisco deployed paint that splashes it right back at you. Meanwhile, Paris is looking for its own alternative to scrubbing 1,800 square miles of pavement every day.
The City of Light’s latest innovation is called the Uritrottoir, which translates to “pavement urinal.” Created by the industrial design studio Faltazi, the Uritrottoir is a two-layer box: The top is fitted with a urinal trough, and loaded with flowers growing within rich compost. The compost is started in the bottom box, which has a little portal that leads to straw–straw that you pee on.
“There are several toilet models with different capacities of 80 to 500 pipis,” writes designer Laurent Lebot. That’s right, even the way that Parisians spell “pipi” is classier than how we do it in America.
Lebot was inspired during a visit to CAT–a sustainable architecture school–when the men were invited to urinate on hay because the nitrogen from urine combines with the carbon from straw to create a rich fertilizer, all while mitigating the smell.
Of course, hay can splash back. Hay can splash back like a demon. So from that initial experience, Lebot’s studio developed the urine composter, a purpose-built, four-sided hay barrel urinal, which they sold to festivals, sporting events, and campsites. After that, they began working on the sequel–the flower box now on trial in Paris–which is designed to combat the “foul-smelling urban nuisances associated with nocturnal wild pees in the city centers,” as Lebot puts it. In all, it took the studio two years to develop the solution.
Two of the new boxes have been purchased by Paris-Gare de Lyon, a station from the state-owned railway, at a cost of $9,730 for the pair, according to the New York Times. Inside each box, an internet-connected sensor measures pee levels, and when the box needs its straw swapped out, an attendant is dispatched to pick up the waste and take it to a composting facility outside the city. (In theory, that compost is later used to feed the flowers up top.)
As funny as it all sounds, public urination and defecation is a real problem for cities. Nobody really wants to undergo the indignity of using public space as a restroom, but many simply have no better option. Take N.Y.C.: There are 600 public bathrooms in city parks, but they all close by 8 p.m. It’s a small data point indicative of a much larger problem. The UN counts 2.5 billion people globally who don’t have access to hygienic toilets worldwide, 700 million of whom live in urban areas.Fairy Fencer F Will Be Localized By NIS America
By Spencer. February 13, 2014. 6:46pm
Fairy Fencer F will be released in the West. NIS America announced at their press event that they will localize Compile Heart’s RPG and plan to release it this fall with Japanese and English voiceovers. Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano created concept art for the game and Neptunia artist Tsunako designed the characters. The game’s music is from iconic RPG composer Nobuo Uematsu.
Fairy Fencer F takes place many years after a war between a Goddess and a Vile God. This war was fought with Furies, magical weapons imbued with a fairy’s life force. When the deities sealed each other away Furies were scattered around the world and warriors called Fencers wield them. Fang, the protagonist in Fairy Fencer F, hears that whoever finds a Fury will be granted a wish and pulls it from a stone when the game begins.The Pretty Little Liars summer premiere is quickly approaching and with season 6 already being dubbed the "season of answers," we're on the edge of our seats counting down to June 2. While we were chatting with Lucy Hale about spreading the word about the meningitis vaccine and her involvement with Boost The Volume, we took some time to get to the bottom of some of our most burning PLL questions for the upcoming season.
17: So for a long time a lot of fans thought that you were A. Now that your name is clear how does it feel to be able to go and tell fans that you're completely innocent?
Lucy Hale: Well, the fun thing about our show is that no one is ever in the clear. You know there are always twists and turns. It's so hard for me to keep up with the show — what's aired, what I can't talk about, what I can talk about. I always get myself into a little bit of trouble for talking too much. But yeah, the season 5 finale introduced a new character, Charles, and now the whole question is, who's Charles? I was asking the same thing, like who is who this dude that I have never heard about? But yeah, no one's ever safe on the show.
abc family
17: So if no one is safe, is it possible that Aria has been working with Charles?
LH: (Shrugs) I don't know!
17: In the finale, Spencer seemed to have an idea who Charles was. Do the other Liars know who he is, or are they going to be completely shocked when his identity is revealed?
LH: Spencer is always sort of the first one to know everything, or to figure out everything. But you know, the girls are a unit — that's what I love about them. Nothing is kept from each other, so the girls are really let in on what's going on.
ABC Family
17: For the upcoming season, what has been your favorite scene to film so far? What can fans look forward to?
LH: I cant talk about the storyline, but it's sort of a big reveal dealing with an A storyline. It's actually a joke with the fans and Aria, because Aria's usually not involved in the forefront with A — she's sort of just missing in action. But Aria finally gets to do something courageous, which was really fun. We were up all night shooting it, but it's a pretty big reveal — it's one of those bombshells.
17: There are so many of those!
LH: (Laughs) Yeah, it's not like we ever had any of those before.
17: Whats the deal with Ezria?
LH: I don't even know! That's a constant roller coaster. I'm hoping that they will be end game. I ship them. Right? It took me a while to know what that is.
17: Will Toby rescue the Liars?
LH: I hope so. I want Toby... I want Keegan to be shirtless and rescue all of the Liars — carry us away into the sunset.
abc family
17: Will we get answers to any of our most burning questions during the season 6 premiere, or are we going to have to wait a little longer in the season?
LH: You will get some answers. You get more insight into who this Charles person is. But you know, it's the nature of the show that once we answer some questions, there are a million more. So it's like a continuous thing. We still have a year and a half of the show left, so you guys have got to hang in there to the end.
17: One word to describe season 6 so far?
LH: Ohhh, overwhelming, I guess. That's a horrible answer but that's what I'm going with.Democrats are looking a little like they’re rooting for bad news. | AP Photos Democratic theory of the sequester
The public has largely tuned out the Democrats’ repeated warnings about mid-air plane crashes, troop deaths and mass illness from tainted meat if the sequester cuts stay in place.
But Democrats aren’t dropping the threat of disaster, seizing now on the line they think can beat the Republicans: law and order.
Story Continued Below
Prison riots, cocaine flooding the streets, terrorists on board airplanes — even hurricanes and tornadoes left undetected by budget-slashed agencies — have moved front and center as Democrats try to get the public behind blaming the Republicans.
( PHOTOS: How sequestration could affect you)
Spending cuts undermine the ability to “catch the bad guys, whether it’s white-collar crime, like mortgage fraud, or street crime, or despicable things like trafficking women and children,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski said in a recent floor speech.
The Maryland Democrat noted that the spending cuts hurt local law enforcement officials who rely on federal grants to help in staffing and equipment purchases. “It’s not the biggest thing in the federal budget but it’s the biggest thing to cops,” she said. “Why? Because it buys bullet-proof vests.”
The whole thing leaves Democrats looking a little like they’re rooting for bad news— though they insist that they’re only saying what is likely to happen if the money isn’t replenished.
“A significant event would certainly alter the mindset,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), of the public attitude toward sequester.
( Also on POLITICO: Cuts threaten House seats)
So to make their case, many of the warnings have taken on the air of emergency, particularly when it comes to public safety. Politically, it could be just as tough a sell as the tainted meat: There have been no reports of anyone |
the next sentence constitutes a fourth proposition, “Since FLiar just is the sentence ‘FLiar is false’,” as:
4. Since FLiar just is the sentence ‘FLiar is false’.
Next clause: “we have it that FLiar is false if and only if FLiar is true.”
5. we have it that FLiar is false if and only if FLiar is true.
Next clause: “if every sentence is true or false, FLiar itself is either true or false.”
6. if every sentence is true or false, FLiar itself is either true or false.
Next: “in which case—given our reasoning above—it is both true and false”
7. in which case—given our reasoning above—it is both true and false.
Next: “This is a contradiction.”
8. This is a contradiction.
This is sufficient for the argument. I now present the unaltered clauses in the order as presented:
1. FLair is “FLair is false.”
2. If the sentence ‘FLiar is false’ is true, then FLiar is false.
3. But if FLiar is false, then the sentence ‘FLiar is false’ is true.
4. Since FLiar just is the sentence ‘FLiar is false’.
5. we have it that FLiar is false if and only if FLiar is true.
6. if every sentence is true or false, FLiar itself is either true or false.
7. in which case—given our reasoning above—it is both true and false.
8. This is a contradiction.
Now I will simplify the sentences to get rid of superfluous words reducing them to their logical form. I will specifically enumerate all the alterations made.
(1) This was already put in subject predicate form.
(2) I will erase “then” since its unneeded. I will do this for all the propositions alike in this manner. I will also remove the qualifier “the sentence” because it contributes nothing to the intention of “FLiar is false.” Its already known to be a sentence due to it having quotes.
(3) “But” adds no additional intention. It will be removed from all.
(4) “Since” and “just” similarly add nothing and are removed from all.
(5) “we have it that” is extraneous.
(6) “Itself” is unneeded.
(7) “in which case—given our reasoning above” is superfluous. “It” is FLair.
(8) “This” is in reference to the proposition (7). It is replaced by (7).
Simplified propositions:
1. FLair is “FLair is false.”
2. If “FLiar is false” is true, FLiar is false.
3. If FLiar is false, “FLiar is false” is true.
4. FLiar is “FLiar is false.”
5. FLiar is false if and only if FLiar is true.
6. If every sentence is true or false, FLiar is either true or false.
7. FLiar is both true and false.
8. “FLiar is both true and false” is a contradiction.
We now have our the simplified propositions in the order of presentation. All these contain the full intention of the words used in the original paragraph. If there are disputable alterations, you can let me know. All changes were transparently demonstrated without exception. We may make the following observations:
(1) is the exact same as (4), this redundancy serves no purpose and one may be neglected.
(1), (2), and (3) may all be potential premisses. However, (1) has no terms in common with (2) and (3), and therefore cannot be syllogistically combined.
(5) must be derived from at least two of these premises and the only premisses left to combine are (2) and (3).
The only syllogistic form that admits a conclusion from two hypothetical propositions is the pure hypothetical proposition. (See https://faculty.unlv.edu/beisecker/Courses/Phi-102/HypotheticalSyllogisms.htm) The sole and only form for this syllogism is:
1. If C is D, E is F.
2. If A is B, C is D.
3. If A is B, E is F.
Now to employ this form, we use propositions (2) and (3):
2. If “FLiar is false” is true, FLiar is false.
3. If FLiar is false, “FLiar is false” is true.
Giving us:
If “FLiar is false” is true, “FLiar is false” is true.
We may also switch the order of the premisses and get:
If FLiar is false, FLiar is false.
These are clearly not the same as either (5):
5. FLiar is false if and only if FLiar is true.
Therefore, plato.stanford.edu is guilty of processing conclusions which do not follow from their premisses. It may be possible that the rest of their examples may commit these logical errors. This oversight is astonishing to me.
AdvertisementsOne person was injured in the multi-vehicle collision on Constitution Road.
It is understood six vehicles were involved in the accident, which occurred on one of the steepest streets in Dundee.
Emergency services were called to the scene just before 9am.
One of the cars skidded off the road and then fell into the space between the pavement and block of flats, striking the window frame of the basement flat.
https://twitter.com/STVLauren/status/554952223818792960
The stricken vehicle was removed from the scene around 10.45am.
https://twitter.com/STVLauren/status/554952670981918721
STV’s Lauren Witherspoon also took this photograph of damage to the basement property.
https://twitter.com/STVLauren/status/554954091546546176
There were major delays on all the main roads into Dundee this morning because of the heavy snowfall while there were a series of minor collisions around the city.
Many bus services were also cancelled.
Traffic heading onto the Tay Road Bridge was backed up as far as the Forgan roundabout.
Remarkably, the Constitution Road incident was not the only six-vehicle collision to occur this morning.
Six vehicles were involved in a collision on the A92 from Glenrothes to Kirkcaldy.
Although there were no serious injuries, the road between the Preston and Bankhead roundabouts was closed for two hours.Detroit City Football Club LLC has hired Ypsilanti-based Pakmode Media + Marketing to create a corporate sponsorship program for the semi-pro soccer team.
Pakmode Media unveiled the soccer team as a client on its website, pakmode.com, on Monday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Pakmode in the past has done sports corporate sponsorship marketing work for Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University, Concordia University and the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl.
Detroit City, part of the National Premier Soccer League, finished its second season 12-0 and ranked No. 1 in the league before losing in the playoffs to the Erie Admirals.
It plays home games at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and averaged 1,200 to 1,300 fans per game this past season.
The club's annual operating budget is between $100,000 and $200,000, team co-owner and director of operations Todd Kropp told Crain's in July.
Ticket sales account for about 40 percent of the team's yearly budget, Kropp said, while corporate sponsorship makes up 15 percent to 20 percent, and merchandise sales are the remainder.
The team’s five owners all have full-time careers outside of the soccer team, so they hired the outside firm to handle corporate sponsorship work.
“After the end of our tremendous 2013 season we sat down and created a slate of sponsorship opportunities that would help us grow our brand, match-day experience for our supporters, and, most importantly, achieve greater long-term sustainability as an organization,” said Detroit City co-owner Sean Mann.
The first major investor in the team was Detroit's Slows To Go. Kropp said a major new corporate sponsor this year is Chicago-based Fair Oaks Farms Brands LLC's protein drink Core Power, but he did not disclose financial details.
Others spending on Detroit City include restaurant Green Dot Stables, bicycle maker Detroit Bikes, bike shop Wheelhouse Detroit and El Guapo Grill food truck.
Another sponsor, MillKing It Productions brewery in Royal Oak, did a small-batch India pale ale called "City" in honor of the team.
Core Power and MillKing It are the team's jersey sponsors.
Detroit City charged $35 for an eight-game season ticket package (up $5 from 2012), and had a $50 deal that also included a team scarf and hat.
Individual game tickets were $5.
The team, nicknamed "Le Rouge," plays in the NPSL's Midwest Division. The NPSL is a fourth-tier amateur league within the Chicago-based United States Soccer Federation's organizational pyramid, which is topped by Major League Soccer and its 19 professional teams.
The federation is the U.S. soccer system's governing body, for both amateur and pro soccer.
The NPSL has 57 teams spread across 10 divisions.
Bill Shea: (313) 446-1626, [email protected]. Twitter: @bill_shea19Zverotic Signs
Monday 2 September 2013 23:06
The Club is delighted to announce the signing of Elsad Zverotić from BSC Young Boys for an undisclosed fee on a two-year deal with an option.
The 26-year-old had been at the club since 2011 when he joined from fellow Swiss side FC Luzern and is a versatile defensive player who can operate in midfield and along the back line.
Zverotić is a Montenegro international who made his debut for his country in 2008 and scored the winning goal against Bulgaria in a UEFA Euro 2012 qualifier, while he played against England in the recent 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifying campaign.
The Club would like to welcome Elsad to the Barclays Premier League and wish him well as he looks to provide competition for the First Team squad.A central objective of evolutionary ecology is to understand the mechanisms that allow species to coexist. One such mechanism is ecological differentiation. By occupying different niches, species in overlapping ranges are able to reduce direct competition10. While there are numerous examples of closely related species occupying different ecological niches, many recently diverged and coexisting taxa are known to differ most markedly in their secondary sexual characters, showing few, if any, ecological differences1,2,3,4. It therefore seems that sexual selection is an important mechanism for maintaining coexistence. Indeed, models of sexual selection have shown that populations of choosy females and their preferred males can arise and, under various conditions, form reproductively isolated mating groups11,12,13,14,15. However, because sexual selection does not lead to ecological differentiation, species differing only in their mating preferences compete for the same ecological niche. This has traditionally led to the conclusion that, if their ranges overlap, one of these species will eventually displace the other5,6,7,8,9.
Coexistence is facilitated by mechanisms that reduce range overlap between species. Sexual selection provides one such mechanism. Any process that creates spatial variation in female preferences indirectly also creates selection on male display traits, locally favouring those males that are most preferred by the local females. As a consequence, spatially segregated mating domains, characterized by the co-occurrence of matching display and preference traits, can emerge from populations with an initially random spatial distribution. Once segregated, interactions between different mating types are limited to individuals at the peripheries of these domains. In finite populations, however, the mating domains may shrink or grow, and the interface between them may drift randomly in space. Such fluctuations eventually lead to one mating domain replacing all others (Fig. 1a, c). In a pioneering study16, it was argued that lower dispersal in males with better mating prospects facilitates spatial segregation and maintains coexistence. In finite populations, however, such mating-dependent dispersal fails to stabilize long-term coexistence (Supplementary Fig. 3). Given these difficulties associated with sexual selection, a recent review concluded that sexually divergent, but ecologically equivalent, species cannot coexist for significant lengths of time9.
Figure 1: Sexual selection enables long-term coexistence of ecologically equivalent species. We consider a population distributed across a continuous habitat in one dimension (a, b) or two dimensions (c, d) with a local carrying capacity that is either spatially uniform (top panels in a and c) or that has two peaks (top panels in b and d). Each peak is of Gaussian shape with standard deviation σ k. The level v of spatial variation may be altered by changing the height of these peaks relative to the troughs between them. A value of v = 0.25, as in b and d, means that local carrying capacity at the peaks is elevated by 25%. The three lower rows show model runs through time. In each generation, individuals survive after a round of local competition and reproduce after a round of local mating, followed by offspring movement and the death of all parents. Competition between individuals decreases with their distance according to a Gaussian function with standard deviation σ s. Coloured curves in a and b show the effective local density of competitors of each type (weighted by their competitive effect; Supplementary Information, equation (4)), and dots in c and d show surviving adults. Individuals are coloured according to their display locus genotype (similar patterns are observed at the preference locus; Supplementary Fig. 2). Females are α times more likely to mate with a preferred male, when encountered. Males are encountered with a probability that decreases with the distance between them and the female according to a Gaussian function with standard deviation σ f. Female fecundity declines with the strength of mate-search costs m. Movement distances are drawn from a Gaussian function with standard deviation σ m, centred at 0, with wrap-around boundaries. The total carrying capacity is K = 500, supporting the survival of approximately half of the N = 1,000 offspring produced each generation; other parameters: σ k = 0.1, σ s = 0.05, α = 5, σ f = 0.05, σ m = 0.05, and m/K = 1 (roughly halving fecundity, Supplementary Fig. 1). Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Here we report model results that suggest the contrary and demonstrate that sexual selection can promote long-term coexistence, even without any ecological differentiation. Building on a standard model of sexual selection14, we develop an individual-based model to examine the long-term fate of species differing only in their secondary sexual characters in an ecologically neutral context with finite population sizes (details are given in Supplementary Information). Except where noted, we assume a simple genetic structure with two unlinked haploid loci: the first locus (with alleles Q and q) governs a display trait that is expressed only in males, and the second (with alleles P and p) governs a preference trait that is expressed only in females (below we allow for more than two alleles; quantitative mating traits are investigated in the Supplementary Information). Because we are interested in coexistence rather than speciation, we assume that the genetic variation at both loci is already present, for example as a result of recent migration from allopatric ranges. All else being equal, females bearing a P (p) allele prefer14,15,16 to mate with males carrying a Q (q) allele by a factor α, and a female’s preference for a given male attenuates with increasing distance between them. Similarly, competition decreases as the spatial distance between individuals increases. Competition is assumed to reduce an individual’s probability of surviving until reproductive maturity (similar results are obtained if competition reduces fecundity; Supplementary Fig. 4). Other than potentially carrying mismatched preference and trait alleles, hybrids suffer no intrinsic fitness costs.
Mating domains can be lost either through movement of the interface between them or when individuals of one mating type colonize the domain of another mating type. In particular, because selection at the preference locus disappears when there is no variation at the display locus, foreign preference alleles may drift into regions with low variation in male display alleles, eventually causing displacement. Loss of mating domains can, however, be prevented by including two features ubiquitous in populations experiencing sexual selection: spatial variation in local carrying capacity and mate-search costs in females. Spatial variation in carrying capacity is present in most, if not all, biological systems (see Fig. 1 and Supplementary Information for model details). Mate-search costs occur if a female spends time and energy looking for a suitable mate and rejecting non-preferred males, thereby reducing her ability to invest in offspring. To account for such costs we assume that the fecundity of a particular female increases from 0 to a maximum level with the local density of available males, weighted according to her preference (Supplementary Information).
Our model confirms the long-standing view that sexual selection in homogeneous spatial models, without mate-search costs, does not facilitate coexistence and can, in fact, hasten the loss of diversity (compare Fig. 2a with Fig. 2b). Spatial variation in local carrying capacity, on its own, also has little, if any, effect in stabilizing populations (compare Fig. 2b with Fig. 2c). Sexual selection with mate-search costs slightly prolongs coexistence in a spatially uniform environment by helping to prevent mixing of the mating domains, but this effect is weak (compare Fig. 2b with Fig. 2d). However, in an environment with spatial variation in local carrying capacity, sexual selection with mate-search costs dramatically increases coexistence times (compare Fig. 2b with Fig. 2e and also Fig. 1a, c with Fig. 1b, d). In this case, mate-search costs curb the neutral drift of preference alleles, thus preventing the dilution of mating domains, and areas of high local carrying capacity provide spatial ‘anchors’, stabilizing the location and size of these domains (Fig. 1b, d).
Figure 2: Loss and maintenance of coexistence. Panels show distributions of allele frequencies at the display locus through time across 1,000 model runs in a two-dimensional landscape; coexistence occurs only while these frequencies remain intermediate. Inset panels depict the spatial variation in local carrying capacity as viewed along transects at y = 0.25. a, Homogeneous environment with no sexual selection (α = 1). b, As in a, except that females are choosy (α = 5). c, As in b, except with variation in local carrying capacity (v = 0.25). d, As in b, except with mate-search costs in females (m/K = 1). e, As in b, except with spatial variation in local carrying capacity (v = 0.25) and mate-search costs in females (m/K = 1); only when both features are combined is long-term coexistence observed. To focus on the maintenance of coexistence, we begin with two equally sized and spatially segregated populations of PQ and pq genotypes (all individuals on the left half of the arena initially have the PQ genotype, whereas all individuals on the right initially have the pq genotype). This mimics a situation in which types that previously arose in allopatry come back into contact, revealing the conditions under which they can persist in sympatry. All other parameters are as in Fig. 1. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Although neither spatial variation in local carrying capacity nor mate-search costs suffice on their own to stabilize populations, surprisingly little of both can be enough to ensure the long-term persistence of divergent mating types (Fig. 3). When mate-search costs in females are high, long-term coexistence can be maintained with less than 20% spatial variation in local carrying capacity. When mate-search costs are low, 50% spatial variation in local carrying capacity is sufficient to stabilize mating domains. Throughout this study, we have kept population sizes relatively small, to exacerbate the challenge of coexistence in finite populations. When population sizes are larger, we find that as little as 10% variation in local carrying capacity suffices to stabilize mating domains (Supplementary Fig. 5d). Levels of variation in this range may be difficult to detect in nature, especially if they are to be inferred from observing the stochastic spatial distribution of individuals.
Figure 3: Conditions for long-term coexistence. Shading indicates the number of generations that polymorphism at the display locus persists when females are choosy (α = 5) in a two-dimensional landscape (darker = longer). Each cell represents the mean time to loss of polymorphism for 10 replicate model runs. Letters indicate parameter combinations used to generate the corresponding panels in Fig. 2. Inset panels illustrate the extent of spatial variation in local carrying capacity for the three parameter values shown along the vertical axis. Model runs are initialized as in Fig. 2. All other parameters are as in Fig. 1. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
The stabilizing effect of spatial variation in local carrying capacity and mate-search costs readily extends to more realistic and natural landscapes (Fig. 4) and also to three or more genotypes (Fig. 4c–d). As long as spatial variation in local carrying capacity does not become so insignificant that it hardly affects the landscape, or so asymmetric that a single local population dominates, different mating domains can be maintained in mosaic sympatry17,18 (Supplementary Fig. 7). Our findings are also robust to changes in female-preference strength, mate-search distance, movement distance and competition distance (Supplementary Figs 5a and 6), to changes in the relative importance of ecological competition versus sexual selection (Supplementary Fig. 5b, c), to changes in the genetic architecture of the display and preference traits (Supplementary Fig. 8), and to the inclusion of selective differences between male display traits (Supplementary Fig. 9). Generally, long-term coexistence occurs if female preferences are sufficiently strong to prevent extensive interbreeding, and if individuals move and interact on a spatial scale such that they are affected by spatial variation in local carrying capacity. This phenomenon can be interpreted more generally: whenever positive frequency dependence creates multiple stable states, global coexistence of these states becomes possible in a spatially structured environment if this structure allows the domains in which those states are realized to become anchored in space. In this vein, our results in Fig. 4 extend a previous finding from theoretical work on hybrid zones, predicting that the spatial interface between species moves in space until settling in a region of low population density19,20. Similarly, previous theoretical work21 using habitat boundaries for anchoring mating domains has shown that ecologically equivalent types can coexist when fecundity decreases, or mortality or mobility increase, in the company of heterospecifics.
Figure 4: Mosaic sympatry. Four representative model runs in a patchy two-dimensional landscape with random variation in local carrying capacity. a, Underlying spatial variation in local carrying capacity. b–d, Results from independent model runs after 10,000 generations overlaid on the local carrying capacity; b is initialized with two types, whereas c and d are initialized with ten display alleles and ten corresponding preference alleles, all at equal frequencies and distributed randomly across the arena (Supplementary Information). Some of these alleles are then lost during the colonization phase. As in Fig. 1, individuals are coloured according to their genotype at the display locus. The spatial arena is eight times larger than in Fig. 1 and the total carrying capacity is K = 4,000, supporting the survival of approximately half of the N = 8,000 offspring produced each generation. All other parameters are as in Fig. 1 (except v, which is defined specifically for bimodal landscapes); for comparison, the coefficient of variation in local carrying capacity is 0.125 here and 0.066 in Fig. 1d. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Because both spatial variation in local carrying capacity and costs associated with mate search are ubiquitous in nature, our model may provide an explanation for the coexistence of many species whose reproductive barriers primarily involve mating preferences. For example, local habitat availability and quality vary around the shoreline of Lake Victoria22. The mechanism reported here could help explain how ecologically similar cichlid species can coexist in such vast diversity. That sexual differences have been a primary force maintaining cichlid species’ boundaries is supported by the increasing frequency of hybridization that is occurring as a consequence of high turbidity levels, which reduce a female’s ability to discern male phenotypes22. Similar explanations could plausibly be applied to other species that seem to be largely maintained by sexual selection (for example, species of fruitflies23, weakly electric fish24, frogs25, crickets3 and grasshoppers26). To test this hypothesis, one could analyse spatial associations between mating domains and local carrying capacity: Fig. 4 suggests that boundaries of mating domains often align with troughs of low local carrying capacity.
Our work demonstrates that, with variation in local carrying capacity over space and costs to females that encounter few preferred mates, sexual selection can maintain species that are not ecologically differentiated. This is in stark contrast to the widespread opinion that sexual selection, on its own, is unable to maintain ecologically equivalent species that overlap in space. Throughout this study, we have deliberately avoided making any claims about the emergence of diversity or speciation, choosing instead to focus on the coexistence of mating types. Further theoretical work is therefore needed to determine which conditions are most conducive to the initial appearance of multiple mating types, and further empirical work is needed to show how the mechanism presented here helps to explain natural patterns of coexistence and diversity.Lehigh Valley lost 7-6 to Buffalo. Both teams had double-digit hits. But, IronPigs’ pitchers handed out 9 free passes while striking out seven. Bisons’ pitchers walked 1 while striking out nine. Every “Pig got at least one base hit. Maikel Franco went 1 for 5.
Reading won 7-4. Jesse Biddle picked up the win. Art Charles had a big night. He went 4 for 4 with 2 doubles, 2 triples, and 5 RBIs.
Clearwater beat Lakeland, 8-4. Colin Kleven went 6.0 innings allowing 3 runs (2 ER). He gave up 8 hits and a walk and left with a 5-run lead. Lino Martinez left the game with an arm injury after walking the lead off hitter in the eighth inning. Cody Forsyhte ame in to finish the frame and allowed the inherited runner to score, but struck out three in the inning. The Threshers amassed 15 hits, and every player had at least one. Aaron Brown went 2-4 with a double. triple, and 2 RBIs. Devin Lohman went 3-4 with a double and 2 RBIs. Zach Green, Andrew Knapp, and Brodie Greene added 2-hit games. Dylan Cozens picked up an outfield assist.
Lakewood beat Hagerstown, 2-1. Ranfi Casimiro allowed one run and 7 hits over 7.0 innings while walking none and striking out six. Joey Denato got a hold, and Matt Hockenberry picked up his third save. Tocci went 1 for 3 and lowered his batting average. Canelo picked up 2 more hits.
Here’s the affiliate scoreboard from MiLB.
Bonus coverage – well, maybe not. Watched Jeff Hoffman pitch against the “Williamsport” group at XST today. Hoffman was projected to be one of the top five prospects going into the 2014 Amateur Draft when he had TJ surgery about a month before the draft. He dropped to ninth where the Blue Jays selected him. Before the surgery, he had a mid-90s FB that could hit 98, an equally good curve, and an above-average change. Today was his third “start” and his first time going three innings. He overpowered our kids with a 94-95 mph FB and a nice curve. However, all of our batters were considerably younger than the 22-year old right-hander out of ECU. He faced four 20-year olds, two 18-year olds, three 17-year olds, and a 16-year old. Only Jan Hernandez reached base when he was hit on the hand with a pitch. Bryan Martelo was the only batter to get the ball out of the infield on a fly ball to shallow right.Photo: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Two months after making history by becoming the only Puerto Rican fighter to win titles in four different weight classes, Miguel Cotto announced that he will return to the ring on December 13 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Cotto, 39-4 with 32 knockouts, is looking to defend the middleweight championship he won by demolishing Sergio Martinez in 10 one-sided rounds. Although an opponent has not been selected, there are plenty of pros whose names have been thrown into the mix recently. Here is a quick odds chart on some of the fighters eyeing Cotto—and the enormous payday he represents.
GENADDY GOLOVKIN
After obliterating Daniel Geale in Madison Square Garden on July 26, Golovkin, with a smile, called out Cotto from center ring. He might as well have been shouting from aboard the International Space Station. When Sergio Martinez was middleweight champion—and making regal speeches every chance he got—he wanted nothing to do with Golovkin. It looks like Cotto may also keep “GGG” at a safe distance. At 33, Cotto is not looking to face a man who should bring a dustpan into the ring with him every time he fights: to sweep up the remnants of his opponents. Indeed, Golovkin looked like he was at his destructive zenith against Geale, a competent professional with wins over Roman Karmazin, Felix Sturm, and Anthony Mundine. Although Golovkin, 30-0 with 27 knockouts, has raised his profile exponentially over the last two years, ratings for his fight against Geale on HBO were disappointing. In the end, this lack of star power is what Cotto will likely use as a barrier against facing Golovkin. In fact, less than two weeks ago, Gabriel Peñagarícano, who advises Cotto, said this to El Vocero: “Although he is a great champion, Golovkin is not a pay-per-view figure at the moment.” Translation: without the financial stakes necessary to take such an enormous risk, Cotto will look elsewhere for a playdate. ODDS: 25-1
TIMOTHY BRADLEY
Not long after Cotto annihilated Martinez, promoter Bob Arum mentioned former 2-division champion Tim Bradley as a possible opponent for the Puerto Rican superstar in a catchweight bout. Most likely Arum was using Bradley as a bait-and-switch special: by publically dangling a middling name, it makes anybody else sound good by comparison. Last April, Bradley, 30-1 with 12 knockouts and one No Contest, dropped a ragged decision to Manny Pacquiao in a bout most considered a pay-per-view washout. Not only is Bradley coming off of a loss, but, as a feather-fisted welterweight, he would suffer a complete power outage anywhere above 150 pounds. Never particularly popular with the aficion—except in the immediate aftermath of his rousing brawl against Ruslan Provodnikov—Bradley would guarantee serious backlash, especially considereing the difference in weight. ODDS: 12-1
SAUL ALVAREZ
Barring any significant misfortune, a fight between “Canelo” and Cotto is as close to a lock as anything is in boxing. Unique fight-racket politics would have kept this fight from happening only a few months ago, but the possibility of Cotto and Alvarez clashing is now a near-reality. December, however, may be unworkable for all parties involved here. Alvarez, coming off a narrow points win over Erislandy Lara last June, also announced plans to fight in December, possibly against James Kirkland. If that scenario takes place, then a Canelo-Cotto showdown will likely happen next spring. As two of the biggest box office draws in North America, Alvarez and Cotto are natural adversaries, and when they meet, cash registers will be overheating … along with the emotions of millions of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. ODDS: 8-1
MARCO ANTONIO RUBIO
The veteran powerpuncher from Durango, Mexico, has been biding his time for another crack at a big payday. On a six-fight winning streak since dropping a fairly competitive decision to Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr., in 2012, Rubio has already made some noise about fighting Cotto. As the WBC “Interim” middleweight champion (log on to MUFON for a definition), Rubio is supposedly the mandatory challenger to Cotto. You can forgive Rubio if he seems a little skeptical about that designation. In boxing, rules and regulations are often set aside in favor of dollar signs, and being a “mandatory challenger” is worth about as much as a promise from a used car salesman. But a fight with Rubio, 59-6-1 with 51 knockouts, would bring the Mexican market into the mix and would allow Cotto to clear his slate of an obligatory albeit flexible title defense. ODDS: 4-1
ANDY LEE
Given the fact that he is Irish, has fought in New York City four times (on the Cotto-Martinez undercard at Madison Square Garden, no less), and has been on HBO before, it looks like Lee is the perfect victim, err, candidate, to face Cotto in December. Except for a few wins over fringe types (Brian Vera, Craig McEwan), Lee has a resume as bare as a cupboard in Bodie, California. Lee bottomed out in 2012 when Julio Cesar Chavez. Jr., ran through him like Grand Torino crashing into a lemonade stand at full throttle. Since losing to Chavez in San Antonio, Lee has rebuilt himself fighting an array of scarecrows and piñatas. A 6 ‘2” southpaw with good power, Lee, 33-2 with 23 knockouts, is a full cut below Cotto in class. Even so, Lee will have significant physical advantages against Cotto, who is fighting above his best weight. At least, that will be the sales pitch for months of prefight hype if Lee gets the fight. ODDS: 2-1
Carlos Acevedo is the editor of The Cruelest Sport and a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His work has appeared in Boxing Digest Magazine, Maxboxing, Boxing World Magazine, and Esquina Boxeo.“Irving Janis’ Groupthink and the Sanhedrin of Ancient Israel” by Eliezer Schnall, a psychologist at Yeshiva University, and his student, Michael Greenberg. Presented at the American Psychological Association’s Annual Convention in Washington on Aug. 7.
The Argument: One of the most influential theories in the behavioral sciences in recent decades is “groupthink.” Developed by the psychologist Irving Janis in the early 1970s, the groupthink theory describes how a tight-knit, smart and well-informed group can suppress dissent and make disastrous decisions because of the pressure to agree. As examples, Janis used the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the decision to invade Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, and the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-60s. Mr. Schnall argues that decision-making entities in the ancient world may have been aware of the danger of conformist thinking because they developed customs that are remarkably similar to Janis’s recommended preventatives. He examines, in particular, the practices of the Sanhedrin, the judicial and legislative body of ancient Israel.
The Evidence: To prevent leaders from favoring their own ideas and discouraging dissent leadership in the Sanhedrin was shared, ensuring that different viewpoints were heard. Junior members always spoke before senior ones to prevent them from tailoring their opinions to suit their superiors. Mr. Schnall notes that the Sanhedrin also adopted specific guidelines that mandated a review of all the evidence and information, as Janis suggested. To ensure that the group did not become too insular, members were required to consult outside experts. “Any scholar who heard of a Sanhedrin ruling that he believed erroneous was required to travel to Jerusalem and present his argument to the court,” Mr. Schnall writes, and “disciples watched court proceedings and were generally allowed to volunteer their opinions.” Just as Janis recommended postponing a final decision to allow for “second-chance meetings” outside of the normal venue, the Sanhedrin required that in certain instances, a final verdict be postponed a day after agreement was reached. In capital cases, the Sandehrin went so far as to acquit a defendant if there was a unanimous guilty verdict from its 70 members. The absence of dissension was perceived as evidence that group conformity was operating. Mr. Schnall writes that the Sanhedrin’s procedures highlight “practical ways that Janis’s ideas and prescriptions may be implemented by modern day managers and organizational bodies.”
What do you think? Is a unanimous decision a sign of a slam dunk or overwhelming groupthink?
Post a comment below or e-mail me at pcohen@nytimes.com; follow me on Twitter at PatcohenNYTCitizen tips have helped Waynesboro police make two arrests in an accident that killed a pedestrian.
The hit-and-run on April 7 killed Betty Marcelle Wheeler, as she walked along Rosser Avenue. The impact of the crash broke off a section of the vehicle - later found to be a 2000 Ford pickup.
An anonymous tip led the investigation to Rockingham County.
Wednesday night police announced the arrests of the driver, 21-year-old Victor Espinoza, and a passenger, 27-year-old Juan Gonzalez-Vasquez. Both are being held without bond.
Waynesboro Police Department
Press Release Update
On 04/16/12, Detectives from the Waynesboro Police Department received an anonymous tip pertaining to the fatal hit and run traffic crash that occurred on 04/07/12. Based on the anonymous tip and other information developed during the course of the investigation, Waynesboro Detectives were able to determine that the suspect vehicle was a 2000 Ford F-150 pickup truck.
On 04/17/12 Waynesboro Detectives contacted the Rockingham County Sheriff's Office and requested assistance with pursuing additional leads in Rockingham County. A 2000 Ford F-150 matching the description provided by the anonymous tipster was subsequently located in the 2200 block of Tan Bark Drive in Rockingham County. Probable cause was presented to the Magistrate, and a search warrant was obtained |
community" to connect exploit developers with "discerning government and corporate buyers."
As the zero day market has come to light over the last several years, freelance hackers' sale of potential surveillance tools to government agencies has become a hotly debated ethical quandary in the security community. The notion of Kevin Mitnick selling those tools could be particularly eyebrow-raising; After all, Mitnick became a symbol of government oppression in the late 1990s, when he spent four and a half years in prison and eight months in solitary confinement before his trial on hacking charges. The outcry generated a miniature industry in "Free Kevin" T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Enabling targeted surveillance also clashes with Mitnick's new image as a privacy advocate; His forthcoming book titled "The Art of Invisibility" promises to teach readers "cloaking and countermeasures" against "Big Brother and big data."
>"It's like an Amazon wish list of exploits."
He says his intended customers aren't necessarily governments. Instead, he points to penetration testers and antivirus firms as potential exploit buyers, and even suggests that companies might pay him for vulnerabilities in their own products. "I’m not interested in helping government agencies spy on people," he says. "I have a unique history with the government. These are the same people who locked me in solitary because they thought I could whistle nuclear launch codes."
Still, the six-figure fees Mitnick names on his site are far more than most buyers would pay for mere defensive purposes. (Though his website names a minimum price of $200,000, Mitnick says that's an error, and that he's willing to deal in exploits worth half that much.) Companies like Facebook and Paypal generally pay tens of thousands of dollars at most for information about bugs in their products, though Google occasionally pays as much as $150,000 in hacking contest prizes.
Mitnick's exploit exchange seems designed to cater particularly to high-end buyers. It lists two options: Absolute X, which lets clients pay for exclusive use of whatever hacking exploits Mitnick's researchers dig up, and Absolute Z, a more premium service that seeks to find new zero-days that target whatever software the client chooses. "We have some clients that give us a menu of what they’re looking for, like 'We’re looking for an exploit in this version of Chrome,'" he says. "It's like an Amazon wish list of exploits."
Mitnick is far from the only hacker to see an opportunity in the growing grey market for zero days. Other firms like Vupen, Netragard, Exodus Intelligence, and Endgame Systems have all sold or brokered secret hacking techniques. While the trade is legal, critics have argued that the services' lax customer policies make it possible for repressive regimes or even criminals to gain access to dangerous hacking tools.
But Mitnick counters that he'll carefully screen his buyers. "I would’t consider in a million years selling to a government like Syria or to a criminal organization," he says. "Customers want to buy this information, and they’ll pay a certain price. If they pass our screening process, we’ll work with them."
As an ex-convict, Mitnick's entrance into the zero-day market may mean he'll face extra scrutiny himself. From his teens to his early 30s, after all, Mitnick went on an epic intrusion spree through the networks of practically every major tech firm of the day, including Digital Equipment, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and many more. For two and a half years, he led the FBI on a manhunt that made him the most wanted hacker in the world at the time of his arrest in 1995.
ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian, a vocal critic of the zero-day exploit business, used that criminal past to take a jab at Mitnick on Twitter following his announcement of the bug-selling brokerage.
Mitnick shot back: "My clients may use them to monitor your activities? How do you like them apples, Chris?"Analog For Astronauts: An Ambient Classic Reimagined
(Classical Detours meanders through stylistic byways, exploring new recordings from the fringes of classical music.)
Enlarge this image toggle caption Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When producer, composer and multimedia artist Brian Eno began his series of ambient music projects in the late 1970s, something about those serene, spacious soundscapes resonated deeply with me. I nearly wore out my vinyl copies of Music for Airports, The Plateaux of Mirror and Music for Films.
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, from 1983, is another such masterwork of evocative tranquility. Eno, joined by his brother Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois, created a soundtrack for the film For All Mankind, which documented the Apollo space missions.
Now that gently buoyant, primarily synthesizer-based music lives on in an arrangement for more traditional instruments by Woojun Lee. Apollo, released on June 26, is performed by Icebreaker, the 12-member UK ensemble.
The album, recorded live, grew out of a series of performances the group gave accompanying NASA footage at London's Science Museum in 2009, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the lunar landings.
It seems the Apollo astronauts were fond of country music, and on the original album, Lanois' pedal steel guitar rings out on a few tracks. Eno joked that they were making "zero gravity country and western." On the new recording, it's BJ Cole's pedal steel that soars with melody on "Deep Blue Day," and floats like so much crystalline space dust on "Weightless."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hear The Music An Ending (Ascent) II from Apollo
Apollo by Icebreaker close overlay Buy Featured Music Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
The new album can't quite match Eno's depth of field — the vastness of space on the original is palpable — or his otherworldly intonations, from whizzing gizmos to odd grunting that sounds like some giant space creature's anguished mating call.
But Lee and Icebreaker's new instrument choices are creative. The insistent three-note descending theme in "The Secret Place," originally a reverberant synth tone, is replaced by breathy panpipes. And in the excellent "An Ending (Ascent) II," (heard above) the simple repeated melody, so infused with yearning, is beautifully rendered with a blend of flutes, accordion and Cole's searching pedal steel.
This isn't the first time Eno's electronic ambient music has been beefed up with traditional instruments. The new music collective Bang on a Can (on whose label, Cantaloupe Music, this new album is released) recorded a successful conventional-instruments arrangement of Eno's first ambient record, Music for Airports, in 1998. And similarly, Maxim Moston recently created a gorgeous orchestral arrangement of William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops for the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.
Eno said his ambient music should be as ignorable as it is listenable. This new version of Apollo leans heavily toward the listenable, with more than enough to delight the ears many times over.Even in Zuccotti Park, greed is good.
Occupy Wall Street’s Finance Committee has nearly $500,000 in the bank, and donations continue to pour in — but its reluctance to share the wealth with other protesters is fraying tempers.
Some drummers — incensed they got no money to replace or safeguard their drums after a midnight vandal destroyed their instruments Wednesday — are threatening to splinter off.
“F–k Finance. I hope Mayor Bloomberg gets an injunction and demands to see the movement’s books. We need to know how much money we really have and where it’s going,” said a frustrated Bryan Smith, 45, who joined OWS in Lower Manhattan nearly three weeks ago from Los Angeles, where he works in TV production.
Smith is a member of the Comfort Working Group — one of about 30 small collectives that have sprung up within OWS. The Comfort group is charged with finding out what basic necessities campers need, like thermal underwear, and then raising money by soliciting donations on the street.
“The other day, I took in $2,000. I kept $650 for my group, and gave the rest to Finance. Then I went to them with a request — so many people need things, and they should not be going without basic comfort items — and I was told to fill out paperwork. Paperwork! Are they the government now?” Smith fumed, even as he cajoled the passing crowd for more cash.
The Finance Committee dives on whatever dollars are raised by all the OWS working groups, said Smith, and doesn’t give it back.
The Comfort group has an allowance of $150 a day, while larger working groups, like the Kitchen group, get up to $2,000.
“What can I do with $150?” said Smith. “We have three tons of wet laundry here from the rainstorm — how do I get that done? We need winter gear, shoes, socks. I could spend $10,000 alone for backpacks people need. We raise all this money. Where is it?”
Pete Dutro, 36, a Brooklyn tattoo artist who is getting a master’s in finance and sits on the Finance Committee, said big purchases like Smith’s can’t get immediate approval.
“We don’t have the power for that. They have to go to the General Assembly. If it’s approved, we pay out that amount and make sure everything is accounted for,” he said.
Within the next few days, the Financial Committee will release a detailed report, he said.
Yesterday, a huge flat-screen TV went up in Zuccotti Park for a movie night and pajama party with popcorn. Organizers hoped it would attract new recruits — even as some long-timers complained that the movement was getting too diffuse after yesterday’s lackluster showing at a police-brutality event in Union Square that barely attracted 50 participants.
“I think it’s getting too spread out,” said John Glowa, 57. “My sense from where I live is that it’s losing steam. We gotta plug the holes.”
Some activists, like those in Pulse, the committee that represents Zuccotti Park drummers, are a bit worn out by all the collective activity.
Last week, on a rainy night, someone stabbed holes in many of the protesters’ drums with a knife, said Elijah Moses, 19, of Queens, a founder of the Pulse Working Group. Moses asked the General Assembly — the nightly meeting where protesters collectively vote on OWS decisions — for $8,000 to replace the drums, and build a small shed to lock them up.
“They said no — they turned us down. I’m really frustrated,” said Moses.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The eyes of the financial world are on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus today. The government of Cyprus has brokered a last-ditch $13 billion bailout deal with European officials to stave off the collapse of its banking sector. Under the deal, all bank deposits above approximately $130,000 will be frozen and used to help pay off the banking sector’s debts. This will result in especially heavy losses for foreign depositors at the Mediterranean island’s banks, many of which are Russian. In addition, Cyprus’s second-largest bank will be shut down.
Protesters have described the deal as an economic World War III. Some economists say Cyprus is a harbinger of things to come in Europe and possibly even the United States. Cyprus’s president described the deal as a painful one, but Eurogroup chair Jeroen Dijsselbloem praised the deal.
JEROEN DIJSSELBLOEM: The program will be based on ambitious measures in areas of fiscal consolidation, structural reforms and privatization. The authorities will also take decisive action to safeguard the stability of the financial sector, including bank resolution and deep restructuring measures concerning the two largest banks. A levy on deposits across the whole banking sector can and will therefore be avoided.
AMY GOODMAN: An earlier version of the deal collapsed last week when Cypriots took to the streets to protest paying a tax of up to 10 percent on their life savings. The package called on Cyprus to impose a one-time tax on bank deposits as a condition for $13 billion in rescue money. The plan led to mass demonstrations as well as panicked bank withdrawals as Cypriots rushed to protect their savings. On Sunday, the island’s central bank imposed a 100-euros-per-day withdrawal limit on bank accounts, which led to a fresh round of protests.
PROTESTER: If we can take 100 euros today with what the Eurogroup has decided for the Cyprus nation, we will not have nothing in the coming months and years, and that will be the same for many years. The only solution is to find a solution outside from troika and the IMF and stand on our feet on our own, because it looks like our friends in Europe are not supporting us at all.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined right now by Richard Wolff. He’s professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting professor at New School University here in New York, and hosts a weekly program on WBAI 99.5 in New York City called Economic Update every Saturday at noon. He’s the author of a number of books, including, most recently, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.
Richard Wolff, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why is Cyprus so significant?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, Cyprus is significant for several reasons. First, it marks an escalation in what we call austerity economics. It is an effort to pay for the cost of this now six-year-old global crisis in a new way. It is an effort to fund the bailouts of banks in a new way. And the new way was agreed last week by the European forces that control this—the central bank, the European Union and the IMF—and to impose on Cyprus this new step, which is literally to go into the bank accounts of the citizens of Cyprus, roughly a million people on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, and snatch money out of their accounts. See, unlike other austerity, where you levy a tax and you cut back social programs, like we’re doing here in the United States, that money dribbles in over a year or longer period. This way, the government can get the money to bail out the banks quickly and cleanly and neatly. Friday night, the people of Cyprus went to bed with a certain amount of money in their accounts—they thought—and Monday morning, last Monday, they were supposed to awake with X percent less money because the government had taken it. So, that’s an amazing new step of austerity. It suggests that this crisis is far from over and that the authorities are desperate to find the money, other than by taxing corporations, other than by taxing the wealthy, in order to solve their problems.
The second reason it’s important—and you stressed that—is that the people of Cyprus woke up, took one look at this, and said no—and did it dramatically. And in a matter of hours, they undid everything that the European governments and their own government had agreed to a few nights earlier. So it’s a demonstration of people power in this little corner of the world that’s very impressive, and the basis, I think, for some optimism about opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: How did they say no?
RICHARD WOLFF: Basically, by saying, “We’re going to disrupt everything. We’re not going to go to work. We’re not going to consume. We’re just—we’re going to call on our fellow citizens across Europe to recognize that if they can come into our bank account and take our money, then what is exactly going happen in places like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Britain, where very similar situations are playing themselves out?” So this call for solidarity around this issue terrified all the other governments of Europe. And suddenly, the firmly committed deal unraveled in the face of popular resentment and opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: How did Cyprus get to this point?
RICHARD WOLFF: Cyprus is a small country. Its economy is based on three things: tourism—it’s a very pleasant place for northern Europeans to go; shipping, as befits an island; but above all, what is euphemistically called “finance.” In the go-go years of the 1990s and early in this century, what the banks in Cyprus did is offer themselves around the world as a wonderful place to come and make a deposit. “We will convert whatever currency you have into euros,” which is a very good currency to have. “We will pay you an unusually high interest rate. We will ask no questions.” This is often called “good banking.” So they got a lot of deposits. To give you an idea, depending on the estimates you believe, the total deposits in the banks of Cyprus were five to eight times larger than the total GDP, the total output per year, of that economy, which is an absurd situation.
And those banks in Cyprus took all those deposits, and then they did what banks are supposed to do: find prudent, safe, non-risky investments. And like all big banks in the last 20 years, they failed. They found bad investments. They didn’t do it prudently. They misassessed the risk. And then the banks fell apart. Since that’s an outsized part of the Cyprus economy, the whole Cyprus economy, already impacted by this crisis with less tourism and less shipping, now saw its banks defunct—bankrupt, basically—and appealed to Europe to bail them out, which is the standard procedure now in Europe as these economies have such trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite widespread opposition to the deal by the residents of Cyprus, Cyprus’s parliament will not need to approve today’s deal with international lenders. That’s because the parliament passed the necessary legislation to implement the bailout last week. On Friday, the governor of the Cyprus Central Bank warned political leaders that the country would face a disorderly bankruptcy unless they approved the bailout.
PANICOS DEMETRIADES: [translated] All of the elements that the Central Bank of Cyprus contributed must be voted for immediately and as they are, for two basic reasons: first, so that a very positive message is sent abroad, which will help in an agreement soon with the troika, and secondly, it is absolutely necessary that the Central Bank of Cyprus has the right legal tools to allow it to handle the crisis which the Cypriot economy is facing.
AMY GOODMAN: Richard Wolff, can you respond?
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes. This is blackmail. This is basically the officials of the banks and the political leaders going to be mass of people and saying to them, “This awful deal that makes you, who have nothing to do with the crisis and didn’t get any bailout, pay the costs of the crisis and the bailout. You must do this, because if you don’t, we will do even more damage to you and your economy. So give us your deposits, give us your money, pay more taxes, suffer fewer social programs, because if you don’t, we will impose even worse on you.” It’s the basic idea of austerity across the board and in our country, too. And I think it’s the confrontation of a system that does not work with the mass of the people, saying, “We will go down and take you with us, unless you bail us out.”
AMY GOODMAN: Explain whose money it is.
RICHARD WOLFF: It’s amazing, you know? The way this works, the plan, which is still on the board, is to go into the accounts of depositors. Remember, a depositor puts his or her money, whether they’re a business or an individual, in a bank under the notion that it’s guaranteed, it’s insured, and it’s safe. Otherwise, you wouldn’t put your money there. It takes these people’s money, thereby destroying all confidence and feelings of insurance or security, and the government will take that money, and the government will then, in the language of these politicians, “recapitalize our banks and restructure them.” Translated into simple English, they’re going to take the depositors’ money and bail out the banks. In other words, the money leaves the account of the depositor—you and me—and goes into the account of the bank itself. It is the banks, through the government, stealing from their own depositors. It is stunning, as an economist, to watch it. It’s the opposite of a bank guaranteeing your deposit. It’s a bank looting your deposit in their own bank. It’s an extraordinary study in how extreme this crisis is, that they would have to go to such an extent and risk the blowback that you already see in Cyprus and that is building in other countries as they confront similar measures.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the second-largest bank being closed?
RICHARD WOLFF: That’s simply an attempt to save private banking. What they’re going to do is move much of that closed bank into the other non-closed bank and have the government absorb the losses that are not transferred, so that you can save private banking by reducing three or four large banks to one fewer by taking the one in the worst condition and basically bailing it out for its mistakes and putting what’s valuable in it into the other private banks. It’s a refusal to confront that private banking, not just in Cyprus, not just in Greece, but across the world, has driven us into a catastrophe of global proportions, and we’re doing everything in our governments to fix this situation without imposing on them, without questioning their failed performance. It’s an amazing study in how to solve a problem by refusing to confront its cause.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Professor Richard Wolff, professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, now at New School University in New York, has written a number of books. His latest is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. We’ll go from Cyprus to the economy in Europe and the economy right here in the United States. And what exactly does he mean, “a cure for capitalism”? stay with us.I wrote about the latest jobs numbers this morning in Jobs Contract 11th Straight Month; Unemployment Rate Hits 6.7%.
Let's look at some more details starting with this report: Half-million jobs vanish as economy deteriorates.
An alarming half-million American jobs vanished virtually in a flash last month, the worst mass layoffs in over a third of a century, as economic carnage spread ever faster and the nation hurtled toward what could be the hardest hard times since the Great Depression.
Staring at 533,000 lost jobs, economists were anything but hopeful. Since the start of the recession last December, the economy has shed 1.9 million jobs, and the number of unemployed people has increased by 2.7 million -- to 10.3 million now out of work.
Some analysts predict 3 million more jobs will be lost between now and the spring of 2010 -- and that the once-humming U.S. economy could stagger backward at a shocking 6 percent rate for the current three-month quarter.
The jobless rate would have bolted to 7 percent for the month if not for the exodus of 422,000 people from the work force for any number of reasons -- going back to school, retiring or simply abandoning job searches out of sheer frustration. When people stop looking, they're no longer counted in the unemployment rate.
The United States -- already in recession for a year, may not be out of it until the spring of 2010 -- making for the longest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, economists are now saying. Recessions in the mid-1970s and early 1980s last 16 months.
Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent in 1982, terrible but still a far cry from the Depression, when roughly one in four Americans were out of work.
Depressionomics
Deflation has already set in and it's now realistic to start talking about another "D" word, this one being depression. Before we can use a word, we must define it. For the sake of argument, let's define depression as unemployment of 10% or greater.
Now that the "R" word is officially out of the closet, can the "D" word be far behind?
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the august body that serves as a thermometer for the U.S. economy, confirmed Monday what many already suspected: We're in a recession and have been for a year.
But as the economic crisis has deepened this fall, analysts and business executives increasingly have raised the prospect that we're headed for a depression. The most recent example came Wednesday, when a top Chrysler executive told Congress that the failure of a major U.S. automaker could "trigger a depression."
If so, don't expect the National Bureau of Economic Research to give us a head's up when it happens.
"It's just not a part of the business-cycle-dating process that the NBER has been involved in," a spokeswoman for the bureau said.
According to the bureau's website, "The NBER does not separately identify depressions. The NBER business cycle chronology identifies the dates of peaks and troughs in economic activity. We refer to the period between a peak and a trough as a contraction or a recession, and the period between the trough and the peak as an expansion."
Table A-12
Other Factors
Unprecedented numbers of foreclosures and bankruptcies.
Home prices have declined the most in history.
The S&P 500 was down 49% at one point this year. That exceeded any yearly loss during the great depression.In R.C. v. District School Board of Niagara, 2013 HRTO 1382, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (the “HRTO”) was asked to determine if a policy of the District School Board of Niagara (the “Board”) discriminated against R.C. and S.C., the Applicants, on the basis of creed. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ontario Human Rights Commission were both granted intervenor status in this case. In the decision, which was released on August 13, 2013, the HRTO granted the Application, finding that the Board’s policy, as drafted at the time, allowing the distribution of religious materials in the school after school hours, was discriminatory.
FACTUAL BACKGROUND
There were two versions of one Board policy at issue in this case. The first version of the policy was adopted from the Board’s predecessor and permitted only the Gideons International In Canada to distribute their version of the New Testament to Grade 5 students in Board schools, if the principal - in consultation with the school council - agreed, and if parental consent forms were signed. The Gideons would also make a presentation to the students whose parents signed the consent forms.
When the Applicant S.C., a Board student, was in Grade 5, she brought home a consent form pursuant to the Board’s policy. Her family identifies as atheist.
After receiving the Board’s consent form, and following his attendance at the Gideons’ presentation, S.C.’s father, R.C., contacted the school’s principal and asked to distribute a book entitled “Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children”, which promotes atheism. R.C. explained to the HRTO that his intentions were not to promote atheism in the school, but to make the point that asking parents to consent to the distribution of his materials or the Gideons’ materials might be upsetting, and to encourage a change in the Board’s policy. As a result of R.C.’s actions, S.C.’s school decided it would not allow the distribution of any materials under the policy that year.
Following the school’s decision not to allow distribution of Just Pretend or the Gideons’ materials, R.C. continued to advocate for a change in the Board’s policy. The Application was filed in January 2010, and delivered to the Board in March 2010. Before it received the Application, the Board changed its policy in February, in an attempt to make it more inclusive. The new policy did not restrict the distribution of materials to any specific religion and simply stated that any requests for the distribution of religious publications must be approved by the school, in consultation with the school council and with pre- approved parental consent.
After the policy was amended, R.C. made a second request to distribute Just Pretend. The Board refused his request, taking the position that atheism was not a religion and that Just Pretend was a secondary publication and not a recognized sacred text or authoritative source of any religion. Thus, the Board contended, his materials could not be distributed under the policy.
THE DECISION
In its decision, the HRTO undertook an analysis of whether atheism falls under the protected ground of creed in the Ontario Human Rights Code (the “Code”). The HRTO noted that the rights provided for in the Code are to be interpreted broadly and exceptions to those rights interpreted narrowly. With respect to whether atheism is included within the definition of creed, the HRTO stated the following:
In my view, a purposive interpretation of the prohibition on discrimination because of “creed” in the Code includes a prohibition on discrimination because a person is atheist. To accept the respondent’s submissions would be to find that the Code only protects core beliefs about oneself, humankind and nature linked to one’s self-definition when they accept the existence of a deity or have particular practices. The purpose of prohibiting discrimination because of creed includes ensuring that individuals do not experience discrimination in employment, services and the other social areas in the Code because one rejects one, many or all religions’ beliefs and practices or believes there is no deity.
The HRTO also noted that it is well-established that “creed” encompasses discrimination because of religion. The HRTO found that the protection against discrimination because of religion must include protection of the belief that there is no deity. These beliefs relate to religion, and they engage the Code’s purpose of ensuring equal treatment regardless of one’s views on religious matters. The HRTO further stated that the exclusion of atheism from “creed” would “allow discrimination against persons because they do not accept a particular religion, so long as they are not adherents of another set of beliefs and practices.”
Relying, in part, on Supreme Court of Canada decisions addressing freedom of religion, statutory interpretation principles, and a dictionary definition of “creed”, the HRTO concluded that “a liberal and purposive interpretation of the prohibition on discrimination because of ‘creed’ includes atheism and that discrimination because a person is atheist is prohibited by the Code.”
In the end, the HRTO found that both versions of the Board’s policy were discriminatory. The first policy was discriminatory in permitting students to receive literature in public schools from the Gideons only, and not others. The second version of the policy was discriminatory because: it was inconsistently applied in a discriminatory manner; it did not provide clear guidance on decisions regarding which materials may be distributed; and it permitted judgment on a case-by-case basis of the validity of particular religions and religious texts.
REMEDY
The Board’s policy was declared invalid and the Board was ordered not to allow distribution of religious materials unless it developed a policy that was compliant with the Code. The HRTO further ordered that the Board provide any new policy to the intervenors and the Applicants, at which time they may write to the HRTO if they see any Code compliance issues with the draft policy.
TAKE-AWAY
Public school boards that presently have in place, or are considering drafting, a policy allowing the distribution of religious materials in their schools after school hours should be mindful of the following in reviewing, updating or drafting such policies:
The HRTO commented in this case that when a public school is not neutral with respect to creed, it discriminates against parents and children accessing the school’s services and marginalizes their creed.
Boards that have similar policies in place should make some effort to encourage a diversity of literature and awareness of the policy. There should be a clear statement in communication with parents confirming that all creeds are permitted to distribute materials with parental consent.
Make efforts to publicize the policy and make all students and parents aware of its contents.
The policy should be consistently applied and should not restrict the manner in which a creed must convey core beliefs. Creeds convey their messages in different ways.
While this decision does not prohibit optional religious activities in public schools outside the instructional day, all creeds must be treated equally in any optional religious activity. There must be no subtle or formal coercion to participate in such activities and schools must make clear that they are not favouring any creed. As noted by the HRTO in this decision, under a carefully developed policy that ensures equality between all creeds, public schools can permit distribution of religious literature outside the school day with parents’ consent.There are many good reasons to want to know who someone is, but the underlying motive is probably fear over content theft, which sometimes gives way to paranoia and makes us forget what makes SL identity valuable in the first place. Though this is a very real threat, identities are not information that designers owe their clientele, and here's why:
Recently a group of experienced SL designers got together to start a new menswear-focused superbrand, Entente, opening this month. Of course, they've become a hot topic as a result, both because of their teaser images ( which are gorgeous ) and their choice to release under alts rather than their main accounts. Of course they aren't the first designers to reinvent themselves through anonymity or to see controversy as a result-- fri.day and Paper Couture are two other well-known examples (who were all eventually outed). For some this is innocent curiosity and speculation, but for others there is a sense of entitlement to knowing the "real" names behind these brands.
The fact is that no one would think to ask for a designer's real life identity. Second Life lets anyone shed any parts of their life that they don't want reinvent themselves, something that has encouraged an undeniably diverse and vibrant creative community. This ability is sometimes abused, but we take the bad with the good anyway because the security of anonymity lets us live our Second Lives more freely than our first lives, without being pigeonholed or judged based on RL factors. For creators, their main account can become a means for that same judgement and pigeonholing. A goth designer who abruptly makes the switch to casual wear would inevitably get static for it, both from old and new customers, so the decision to reinvent themselves as an alt is a very understandable one.
And really the desire to "out" them is just as understandable.
Everyone knows there's a content theft problem in Second Life, and many thieves frequently reinvent themselves to evade punishment or detection. It's not a new tactic, and it's far from being a unique problem in SL. Educated consumers obviously don't want their money supporting thieves. Furthermore, because of the very personal and direct relationship that most vendors in SL have with their customers, we're very inclined to vote with our wallets. The same way someone doesn't want to give their money to a thief, they likewise don't want to give their money to someone who once called them or someone they heard about a bitch. These are both fair reasons to want to know a creator's identity, but it doesn't change the fact that we have no more right to that information than we have to know their RL identities. Someone could be a thief (or a coworker you know and hate) in real life too, couldn't they?
There are always going to be downsides to anonymity, but we don't get to pick and choose who deserves it and who doesn't. On the bright side, thieves and jerks usually can't help but out themselves eventually, right?
Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.Image zoom Will Lester/The Sun/AP
More than 100 people showed up to celebrate at a 7-Eleven in Chino Hills, California, that sold one of three jackpot-winning Powerball tickets on Wednesday night.
The mind-boggling $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot will be split three ways by winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.
The three winners have not yet been identified and a California Lottery spokesperson told PEOPLE that the winners have 180 days to claim the prize.
The information released about the winners will vary by the rules of the states in which the winning tickets were purchased.
The Florida winner must claim their winnings within 60 days to receive the winning in a one-time lump-sum payment, a spokesperson for the Florida Lottery tells PEOPLE.
“It is not uncommon for jackpot winners to take some time before coming forward to get their affairs in order and the Florida Lottery encourage that, as this is certainly a life-changing amount of money,” the spokesperson said.
Shortly after the winning Powerball numbers of 4-8-19-27-34 and Powerball 10 were announced, the California lotto tweeted that a jackpot-winning ticket had been sold in Chino Hills, a suburb about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.
We have a winner in California! A jackpot-winning ticket was sold in Chino Hills. We’re still awaiting results from other states. — California Lottery (@calottery) January 14, 2016
The store will get a $1 million bonus for selling the ticket. Storeowner Bibir Atwal spoke to Good Morning America about his plans for spending the winnings.
Balbir Atwal, a franchisee, and 7-Eleven will share a $1 Million retailer bonus for selling the winning ticket. pic.twitter.com/hLvmaBwICV — California Lottery (@calottery) January 14, 2016
“I’ll be sharing it with my employee and the needy people, but I’m not going to get a million,” Atwal said. Adding that, “it’s way less than that” after taxes.
Atwal said that “everybody” came to the store to celebrate Wednesday night. “I love Chino Hills, my customers. They are so nice and they support us,” he said.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Munford, Tennessee, and Melbourne Beach, Florida. The draw also produced eight $2 million Power Play winners and 73 $1 million winners nationwide, Sally Lunsford of the Kansas Lottery told ABC 23. The California Lottery claimed that there were 12 additional winning tickets with 5 of 6 matching numbers sold across the state.
The nearly $1.6 billion jackpot reached record levels after 20 drawings without a winner. The first Powerball jackpot started at $40 million on Nov. 7, 2015.SOUTH AFRICA’S stockmarket has Naspers largely to thank for its recent record highs. Shares in the media and internet group have soared by 45% this year; even before then it was Africa’s most valuable firm. So recent unrest among shareholders in Naspers might seem unwarranted. But in the days before its annual general meeting in Cape Town on August 25th, noisy debate erupted, chiefly about executive pay. Many investors reckon that Bob van Dijk, its boss, is |
's why today I am able to announce the Scottish Conservatives will pledge an extra 1000 nurses and midwives for Scotland. And, once introduced, we will not let numbers drop below that mark. And we'll pay for it by restoring the prescription charge.
"Not for the young, the pensioner, the pregnant or the poor - they'll stay exempt as they always were.But for people who are earning, who are overwhelmingly happy to make their contribution, they will know that their small sum will make a world of difference in wards across the country."
The Conservatives were yesterday unable to put a cost on administering the new system. Nor could they state the prescription charge they would reintroduce, only saying it would climb gradually to £6.85, the level charged in 2011.
The hiring of the new midwives and nurses would also be phased in over the next parliament. Assuming the policy would release £57m a year, the Tories said up to £36m would be used to meet staff costs.
The SNP has promised to maintain free prescriptions in the event of a Yes vote in September.
Neil pointed out many patients long-term conditions such as Crohn's, asthma, cystic fibrosis and Parkinson's, previously paid prescription charges, and so would presumably pay for them again under Davidson's plan. Research from England suggests one-third of people with long-term conditions miss out on medication due to cost.
Neil said NHS staff numbers had risen by nearly 8000 under the SNP, with the number of nurses and midwives rising by more than 1500.
He said: "This is a ludicrous idea from Ruth Davidson which shows how far out of touch with people in Scotland the Tories still are.
"Thousands are benefiting from the abolition of prescription charges including many with long-term conditions. Charges were a tax on ill health, they prevent people getting the medication they need, damage their ability to work and can lead to an increase in the workload for hospitals, nurses and GPs."The Walking Dead is back in production or Season Six in Atlanta. This got us thinking about what might await AMC's zombie drama when it returns this fall.
SPOILERS AHEAD if you're not up to date on The Walking Dead's TV series and comics.
Join us in the video below for a run down of five things we want to see in season six of The Walking Dead and why we want to see them!
Season five laid the foundation for several plot lines in the coming episodes. We were left wondering who the Wolves are, how the community will react to Reg and Pete's death, and whether or not Rick is fit to lead Alexandria at all.
We all want answers to those questions but in addition there are a lot of other things we hope season six delivers. Be it moments from the comics, relationships, or characters - we've listed the five things we hope to see in the sixth season of The Walking Dead below. More Morgan
The reintroduction of Morgan in the season finale was one of season 5’s highlights. Not only was it exciting because Morgan is one of a small handful of characters still remaining from season one, but he is completely reinvented. Morgan Jones didn’t last long at Alexandria in the comic books. He was bitten after a run-in with the DC Scavengers at the Alexandria gates got loud and attracted an enormous zombie horde. We've heard from folks working on the show that the dynamic between Rick and Morgan will be a focal point. Let's not forget how they were reunited. Morgan took on an enormous journey by himself. The man trekked from Atlanta, Georgia to Alexandria, Virginia (which is all the way north of Virginia!) in hopes of finding Rick Grimes and his hope for civilization. All of that was shattered when Morgan found Rick playing judge, jury, and executioner with Pete Anderson inside the Safe-Zone. The idea of watching these two handle situations together having such different views is dangerously appealing. "No Way Out" Zombie Horde
As mentioned, an enormous zombie horde is drawn to the Alexandria Safe-Zone after a feud with the DC Scavengers. For those who don't read the comics, here's a quick breakdown: The gun shot which executes Peter Anderson is heard by a group of savages and leads them to Alexandria. They try to force their way in but like most who butt heads with Rick Grimes, fail and die. This showdown gets loud, though, and causes a massive herd of the dead to flock to the Safe-Zone. The walls fall and a handful of characters are killed. A reminder of how deadly walkers can be would be nice for the characters and audience every once in a while. We were promised more threats of walkers in season 5 and it lived up to that hype for the most part but it's been a while since our group was really hurled into chaos at the hands of some zombies. Carl Shot In The Eye
Iconic moments from the comic books have often been passed on when the story is adapted to television. A prime example would be the Governor cutting off Rick's hand. However, Carl getting shot in the eye is not only iconic but a plays a huge role in the character of Carl Grimes. Again, let me break it down for those who don't read the comics: When the zombie horde runs over Alexandria, Douglas Monroe (Deanna on TV) gets taken down by walkers while firing a gun chaotically in every direction. One of the bullets strikes Carl through his eye and comes out the side of his head, but he survives. The scar this moment leaves on Carl changes the character forever, obviously physically but also as mentally and how he carries himself. It serves many purposes for Carl as he grows up including how he always wants to feel like the big man who can handle himself. Once Negan comes into play, it also plays a role in Negan's manipulation of Carl. Not to mention the recent issue where Lydia licked his eye socket. Ruthless Rick
Rick being a ruthless leader who does whatever is necessary to survive has more than one purpose. Ruthless Rick is the man carrying the necessary characteristics to lead a group of survivors through a world riddled with undead monsters trying to tear you limb from limb, where the remaining humans only come around to take from you. On top of that and more simply put, Ruthless Rick is more fun for audiences to watch. Maybe that's because it's intense and action packed or maybe ruthless Rick seems to be the sensible leader in this world. We all must agree that the Rick who doesn't hesitate when executing a woman-beater is much more interesting than the Rick who feeds pigs and waters the farm. Ruthless Rick is the Rick this group needs. Maggie, Carol, Carl, Glenn, and the rest of the group look to Rick to guide them whether he wants them to or not. If Rick is weak, the group will be weak. Becoming weak has been an ongoing fear since the group arrived at Alexandria, so Rick better remind them just what they're made of. Negan & The Saviors Negan... The Walking Dead's Winter. We all know it's coming, but when and who will survive? For some reason, Negan's brutal introduction in issue #100 of The Walking Dead's comic series has us all thirsty for his entrance on television. Judging by the pacing of season five in relation to the comic books, there is a chance Negan appears on the series before season six comes to a close. The second half of season five covered from around issue 65, dealing with the Hunters to 79 where Rick executes Peter. Should the series hit 10 issues per half season, we could see Negan no later than the season six finale. A truly menacing human to human conflict can escalate the drama the way the Governor did when he first came around. Unfortunately, that saga got dragged around a bit and the conflict became a bit more annoying than dramatic. If Kirkman can write Negan with the same demeanor but speaking in television appropriate language, we may have our best villain to date. The Walking Dead returns in October but over the summer, The Walking Dead's companion series Fear The Walking Dead will premiere on AMC.
What are you hoping to see in season six of The Walking Dead? Which characters do you hope survive? Better yet, which characters do you want to see meet an awful doom? Let us know in the comments.Xiaomi launched their Mi Note 2 recently, and showcased a phone which stole our hearts: the Mi MIX. The predecessors of the Mi Note 2 – the Mi Note & Mi Note Pro – were one of the first phones to feature a curved glass back. This design trend was also present in the Mi Note 2.
A new device (model number 2015213) is listed on TENAA with similar specifications as the Mi Note 2. Said device sports flat glass on both, the front and back. Alongside the design, the specifications were also listed.
Specifications of the Mi Note 2 with flat glass:
23MP back camera (Sony IMX318 sensor) with PDAF and dual tone LED flash.
8MP front camera with f/2.0 aperture.
5.7″ OLED Full HD (1920×1080) display.
64-bit Snapdragon 821 processor @ 2.35GHz.
Adreno 530 GPU.
6GB of RAM.
Non-expandable 128GB internal storage.
Front-facing fingerprint scanner.
NFC.
Dual-sim 4G VoLTE capabilities.
4070mAh battery.
The device was spotted running MiUI 8 based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. An Android Nougat update is not expected right now, but the device should be getting the update in the future (possibly with MiUI 9).
As far as dimensions are concerned, the flat-glass Mi Note 2 tips the scales at 166g and measures 156.2 x 77.3 x 7.6 mm. The phone will be available in Black, Silver, Blue, Pink, and Gold.
There is no official word yet on price and availability, but a price tag between 3299 Yuan and 3499 Yuan can be expected. An India launched might not be on the cards, but we will only know for sure once the device is officially announced.
SourceGather is a modular home for your essentials, thoughtfully designed to help you cut through the clutter.
Clutter. You don't want to think about it, but it always creeps in over time, making it impossible to find things when you actually need them.
As a designer, I spend most of the day working at my desk and reach for the same things over and over.
I try to stay organized, but by the end of the day my desk is a complete, cluttered mess because there's no central place to put everything.
I searched for a product to solve this problem, but all I found were ugly, cheaply-made organizers.
What I wanted was a beautifully-designed, minimal organizer. Something to gather all of my essentials into one central place.
So I designed Gather.
Gather adapts to your workspace and workflow to make sure the tools you need are always within reach.
Use it your way
Gather can be configured in hundreds of ways to exactly the way you want to use it.
The grid system allows each of the pieces to be rotated or positioned anywhere along the base.
The magnets embedded in the base allow you to attach additional pieces.
The pieces can be attached to either the side or the back of the base.
You can even combine two full sets to create a much larger organizer.
Stay organized without thinking about it.
Gather cuts the clutter of small desk items, acts as a central home base for your most used items, and keeps everything neatly in place.
The phone holder keeps your phone propped up so you don't have to hunch over your desk.
The phone holder is designed to hold any phone with or without a case.
Gather works great for organizing so many other spaces as well.
Spend more time creating
Gather’s minimal form factor eliminates the time you spend digging through a messy drawer for your essentials.
Your tools are always within reach.
Make your workspace beautiful
Gather is made with beautiful solid wood and polished white thermoplastic.
Durable, high-quality materials with precision craftsmanship mean that this organizer complements any space and will stand the test of the time.
Every Detail Considered
Gather may look simple from the outside, but I’ve put a ton of thought and engineering into every little detail. It's the perfect marriage of form and function. Even the packaging has been carefully designed with little details like a magnetic closure on the box.
2 Color Options
Gather is available in 2 colors: Walnut or Maple. Each base is milled from solid wood and then sanded and polished to a super smooth finish.
Details & Specs
Win the never-ending battle against clutter
Even though I like to stay organized, my desk would always end up cluttered by the end of the day because there was no central place to put everything.
I searched for a product that would help me solve this problem, but all I found were ugly, cheaply-made organizers. What I wanted was a beautifully-designed, minimal organizer that could gather all of my essentials into one central place.
Help me make Gather a reality.
Prototype progression
I searched for a well-designed minimalist organizer, but all I found were ugly, cheaply made products that didn’t function the way that I wanted and didn’t match the clean aesthetic of my workspace.
So I decided to design one myself.
For the past 3 years, I’ve worked through dozens of prototypes and sketches to dial in every detail.
I went from chopping up rough foam models with a pocket knife all the way to working with industrial design engineers to produce 3D-models and technical drawings that are ready for mass manufacturing.
Jeff Sheldon is the founder and designer of Ugmonk, a brand focused on creating high quality, well-designed products. What started as a small side project to create and sell simple t-shirts has grown into a full-blown lifestyle brand which Jeff now runs full time.
Ugmonk has shipped tens of thousands of products to over 65 countries around the world and provided over 70,000 meals to children in need through their partnership with Rice Bowls.
Visit Ugmonk.com to learn more.
Jeff Sheldon, Founder and Designer of Ugmonk
Ugmonk.com
My desk is kinda famous too :)
Photos of my workspace have been downloaded over 1.5 million times and featured on sites all over the web. You may have even seen them floating around somewhere.
This photo of my desk has been viewed by millions of people!
My workspace where I spend my days running Ugmonk
We've been featured on:
For any questions or press inquiries feel free to email us at gather@ugmonk.com.
You can view and download high-res photos via the button below.
I've put hundreds of hours into this project and am pumped to finally have it live! But now we need to get it on front of the right people. I'd love your help spreading the word. Thanks!
Special Thanks!
Thanks to each of you who has supported me and provided feedback on Gather over these past few years. There are too many of you to name, but I appreciate every single one of you that has encouraged me and helped me get to this point.
And a HUGE thanks to Jeremiah Warren for his amazing work producing our Kickstarter video :)
This project is promoted by Jellop, a direct response online advertising agency specializing in Kickstarter campaigns on Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.Thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans will be making a whole lot more lemonade this year, and saving money while they’re at it.
On Dec. 23, the Department of Agriculture eliminated a 15-year-old ban on lemon imports from northwest Argentina, the world’s top producer of lemons.
Domestic producers had long argued that Argentine lemons carried pests and diseases that would harm U.S. consumers, but a decade of testing that claim by the Department of Agriculture has now proved otherwise.
While guidelines still remain in place to ensure that lemons imported from Argentina are not harmful to consumers, the lifting of the ban is predicted to lower the price of lemons in the U.S. by about 2 percent.
Currently, the value of U.S. lemon imports is greater during the summer months than the winter.
For example, last year, lemon imports in July were valued at approximately $2.5 million, exceeding January imports by more than $1.7 million. This is because the primary harvest season for domestic lemon producers is winter, creating a demand for lemons from foreign producers who harvest during the offseason.
Similar to other countries that export lemons to the United States, Argentina’s harvest season is in the summer—counter to that of the U.S. The Department of Agriculture estimates that “imports from Argentina would help meet the demand for fresh lemons especially during the summer when demand peaks.”
Lemons from Argentina are expected to compete with and potentially replace some current U.S. imports, but the rule change is not expected to have a significant economic impact on small businesses domestically.
Trade freedom in the U.S. is held back by high tariffs and non-tariff barriers for some products, despite an average tariff rate of only 1.5 percent, according to the Index of Economic Freedom.
Bryan Riley, senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, states that “the simplest way to achieve trade freedom is to unilaterally reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers.”
The Department of Agriculture has done just that by unilaterally changing this rule and allowing Argentine lemons to be imported into the United States, increasing American’s freedom to turn lemons into lemonade.DETROIT -- Maybe it was a good thing that the Verizon IndyCar Series was in Belle Isle last weekend for the Chevrolet Dual in Detroit, because a little history lesson might be in order right about now.
The 2001 Detroit Grand Prix sanctioned by CART was the flashpoint for a political battle between the era's competing engine manufacturers that resulted in Honda announcing its withdrawal from the CART FedEx Championship Series just four months later.
Honda finished out its contract with CART in 2002 and subsequently joined the IRL-sanctioned IndyCar Series in 2003. It has raced there ever since, even supplying the full field with engines from 2006-11. But following the events that transpired prior to qualifying for this year's Indianapolis 500, Honda once again finds itself in the position of having trust issues with an Indy car sanctioning body.
Honda Performance Development is also currently evaluating whether it will extend its contract to continue participation in the IndyCar Series as an engine and aero kit supplier. Which is why this might be a good time to briefly revisit the events of 2001, to provide context for the company's current dilemma.
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Oreovicz: Good for Munoz, but... What was great luck for winner Carlos Munoz and team owner Michael Andretti was just another wet blanket thrown over the IndyCar Series in the rain-shortened doubleheader opener at Detroit. 1 Related
Engine development was much more open at the time, and Honda found a big increase in horsepower by refining the design of its plenum chamber. Every change Honda made to its plenum was approved in advance by CART. Sometime in early 2001, Toyota learned about this path of development when a Honda engineer switched camps, which happens quite often in the racing industry.
What happened next caused the problem. Toyota informed CART about what Honda was doing, and brought to the table a solution: a 3/4-inch spacer, fitted at the base of the series-issued popoff valve used to regulate turbocharger boost. The spacer negated what was reported as a 40 to 75 horsepower bump from Honda's legally modified plenum.
Couching it as a change made due to concerns about elevated speeds for an upcoming race at Michigan International Speedway, CART introduced the popoff valve spacer without any warning at the Detroit Grand Prix. Honda and Ford/Cosworth teams protested and boycotted a practice session but eventually relented and ran. A 1-2-4 finish in the race led by Team Penske's Helio Castroneves was sweet vindication for Honda, but the damage was done. Honda execs were livid.
From the perspective of Ford/Cosworth and Honda in their protest, it wasn't so much that a new component was mandated. It was the way it was conceived and implemented.
"In the eight years we've been in CART, I've never seen anything handled as poorly, and to do it in collusion with one of the engine suppliers causes us great concern," said American Honda vice president Tom Elliott. "It really does make us question why we're here. I seriously question the value of our long-term interest in CART."
Sure enough, in October at Laguna Seca Raceway, Elliott announced Honda's exit from the CART series at the end of 2002.
"We have lost our confidence and trust in CART," he said. "That is something that takes a long time to develop that can be erased very quickly."
Prior to 2001, Honda had no interest in participating in the IRL-sanctioned IndyCar Series. But the future of HPD was secured when Honda teamed with Ilmor Engineering to produce an IndyCar Series engine for 2003. By the end of 2005, Honda dominated the IndyCar Series to the extent that rivals Toyota, which also switched from CART to IRL in 2003, and Chevrolet withdrew.
If Honda needed IndyCar in 2003, just three years later, IndyCar needed Honda. And Honda came through in the clutch, supplying engines to the entire IndyCar Series field for six seasons from 2006-11.
Without competition, however, there is little satisfaction for a manufacturer, even if it can lay claim to powering the Indianapolis 500 winner and the series champion every year. When IndyCar changed to a new turbocharged V-6 formula in 2012, back came Chevrolet -- ironically, as Ilmor's corporate partner this time around.
For the last three years, using a common Dallara chassis, engine competition in the series has been fierce but fair. Chevrolet won the bulk of the races, but Honda powered two of three Indy 500 winners and earned one driver's championship.
That brings us to the current issue. For 2015, the engine manufacturers' domain expanded to include aero kits for the basic Dallara safety cell. And the gap between the manufacturers started to widen. Chevrolet's cars, whether through superior engines or aerodynamics or just plain better teams and drivers, dominated the first part of the season.
Honda had to make changes for the Indianapolis 500 after three Chevrolets -- including that of Helio Castroneves -- went airborne in practice. Joe Watts/AP Images
Honda focused heavily on Indianapolis when it designed its aero kit and hoped to fight back during the month of May at the Speedway. But it never really got a fair chance. Three Chevrolet cars got upside down after crashing during practice, prompting IndyCar to mandate some minor changes to the Chevrolet aero kit and requiring all cars to qualify in race trim.
Honda agreed to the changes on safety grounds, but once again, the perception exists that the sanctioning body (IndyCar) worked in collusion with a competing manufacturer (Chevrolet) to fix a problem not of Honda's making.
It wasn't so much that a new specification was mandated. It was the way it was conceived and implemented.
"We think as much as technologically possible, we developed a vehicle that was better in just about every aspect from a stability standpoint than the DW12 that it replaced," said HPD president Art St. Cyr. "We put a lot of effort into making sure that our cars were as safe as possible. We feel that we were affected more than we expected to be affected by the rules change that happened.
"In some cases the issues that we had [at Indianapolis], we didn't think, from our perspective, that we needed to go to the extremes that were imposed on us," he added. "However, for the good of IndyCar, we didn't want to park the cars or do anything like that."
The perception that Honda has once again lost trust in Indy car racing's current sanctioning body is also very real. And that's potentially a very unhealthy thing for the IndyCar Series.
In addition to carrying IndyCar in terms of engine supply for six years, Honda has also done much of IndyCar's heavy marketing lifting over the past decade, including race sponsorships and print and television ad campaigns.
Sources familiar with the negotiations for Honda's renewal with the IndyCar Series say the process has dragged on for six months because IndyCar wants Honda to carry an even greater promotional load. Until recently, Honda was happy with the racing side of things, even if the competitive balance is currently tilted heavily toward Chevrolet teams.
Now the way the Indianapolis aero crisis was handled behind the scenes with Chevrolet in a manner reminiscent of the popoff valve spacer with CART and Toyota in 2001 has Honda questioning their confidence and trust in IndyCar.
Little things that take a long time to develop, that can be erased quickly.
IndyCar Series management has a tendency to be very selective about what part of the sport's past history they choose to study and understand. So I'm hoping the good folks running the show at 16th and Polco in Indianapolis learn a lesson about past mistakes.
IndyCar has a problem right now, because Honda has a problem with IndyCar. I don't have any idea how they're going to fix it. I do know that recognizing it and acknowledging it would be a good first step.
Honda didn't park its cars in Indianapolis. But there's a pretty good chance they might do that at the end of the season if IndyCar doesn't work on repairing what appears to be a very damaged relationship with arguably its most important corporate partner.Great Britain's Ben Ainslie became the most successful sailor in Olympic history after securing a fourth successive gold medal.
The 35-year-old replaced Denmark's legendary Paul Elvstrom as the Games' most decorated sailor after triumphing on home waters in front of thousands of supporters in Weymouth.
Ainslie faced fierce resistance throughout the week from Elvstrom's countryman Jonas Hogh-Christensen, although he managed to finish ahead of the Dane in the medal race to increase his Olympic haul to four golds and a silver.
The Brit was in control heading to the third mark and remained ahead of Hogh-Christensen, who attempted a breakaway on the last upwind leg.
The tactic did not work as Ainslie stayed ahead around the fifth mark, but the Briton was ninth and Postma had moved into second - positions that would have seen the Dutch sailor win gold.
However, attention from New Zealand's Dan Slater put Postma off towards the sixth mark and he eventually finished fifth, while Ainslie came in ninth ahead of Hogh-Christensen to win gold in a medal race won by Lobert, who took bronze ahead of Postma.
Earlier, British hearts were broken as Sweden denied Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson gold in the Star class.
The defending Olympic champions sailed exceptionally throughout the week and came into the medal race with an eight-point lead over Brazil's Robert Scheidt and Bruno Prada.
However, it was Sweden, not Brazil, that proved Percy and Simpson's undoing as the Brits lost their crown to Fredrik Loof and Max Salminen, who won the race. Britain entered the final leg of the race in sixth but slipped away in the last 100 metres to finish eighth, handing Loof and Salminen gold on the Nothe Course.Every Home Run Derby in MLB history, ranked
We're now just hours away from the 2017 T-Mobile Home Run Derby, live from Marlins Park in Miami at 8 p.m. ET. And with rookie dinger machines Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger joining defending champion and probable X-Man Giancarlo Stanton in a star-studded field, it's shaping up to be one of the best Derbies of all-time.
But that got us thinking: What actually is the best Derby of all-time? Griffey off the warehouse? Josh Hamilton's Yankee Stadium barrage? Todd Frazier coming through for his hometown crowd? There are almost too many iconic moments to count, so we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way -- namely, by ranking every single Home Run Derby in Major League history.
Disagree with our list? By all means, let us know in the comments. (But please remember that this is backed by cold, hard science, and certainly not a methodology that we made up on a whim.)
Note: The 1988 Home Run Derby was canceled due to rain.
31. 1987, Oakland Coliseum
The Derby's format was a bit different in its early years: From 1985 to 1990, four or five hitters from each league were simply given two "innings" of five outs each to hit as many homers as they could, with the league with the highest total declared the winner. Unsurprisingly, this produced some pretty low home run totals -- like in 1987, when the entire field combined for just eight homers. (The individual winner? Andre Dawson, who hit four.)
30. 1989, Angel Stadium
Speaking of which, Eric Davis and Ruben Sierra split the 1989 crown with three dingers apiece -- though Davis' NL hit more homers as a team. At least this time five different players hit multiple dingers.
29. 1985, Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome
Pirates legend and certified bopper Dave Parker had moved on to the Reds by 1985, but he could still go yard with the best of them: The outfielder hit six homers to top a stacked field -- including Jim Rice, Eddie Murray, Carlton Fisk and Dale Murphy -- and win the first Home Run Derby in Major League history.
28. 1997, Jacobs Field
Tino Martinez wasn't necessarily known for his power, but he managed to take home the title in '97 thanks to a workmanlike effort: five homers in the first round, eight in the semifinals and three to knock off Larry Walker in the finals.
27. 1990, Wrigley Field
On paper, the 1990 Home Run Derby doesn't seem like much: The entire contest featured just five homers, and five of the eight players in the field put up goose eggs. On the plus side, though, hometown hero Ryne Sandberg took home the trophy -- and the event was emceed by none other than Cubs fanatic Bill Murray himself.
26. 2007, AT&T Park
Seemingly every kayak in America packed into McCovey Cove for the first Home Run Derby in the history of AT&T Park, but alas, they would go home empty handed: The field produced a grand total of zero splash landings, while Vladimir Guerrero cruised to a win over Alex Rios in the final round.
25. 1986, Houston Astrodome
The 1986 Home Run Derby featured just 15 homers, but what it lacked in quantity it more than made up for in quality. Eventual co-champion Darryl Strawberry somehow managed to hit a ball off a speaker hanging from the roof of the Astrodome -- some 350 feet away and 140 feet off the ground, a place no one ever reached before or since. "It would have hit the Coke sign [roughly 550 feet away]," Dave Parker said at the time. "It was the longest ball I've ever seen hit to right field anywhere."
24. 1995, The Ballpark in Arlington
The 1995 Derby quickly turned into a two-man race, with Albert Belle and Frank Thomas going back and forth all night. Finally, the two men met in the final round -- with Thomas coming out on top, 3-2.
23. 2001, Safeco Field
Jason Giambi set Seattle on fire with a then-record 14 homers in the first round, but it was slow-and-steady Luis Gonzalez who emerged victorious thanks to six final-round dingers.
22. 2012, Kauffman Stadium
After a slow start in Kansas City, Prince Fielder was never seriously threatened, hitting 11 in the semifinals and 12 in the finals to cruise past Jose Bautista for his second Derby win (we'll get to his first later).
The poor Kauffman fountains never had a chance:
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21. 2014, Target Field
Speaking of second wins, Yoenis Cespedes notched his back in 2014 -- and he did it in convincing fashion. After escaping Round 1 in a swing-off, Yo hit nine, seven and nine and was never seriously threatened. He ended up with 28 dingers in all, double the total of the next-closest slugger.
20. 1992, Jack Murphy Stadium
In the second year of the Derby's new, three-round format, two of the game's biggest stars decided to put on a show. Making the second of what would be a record eight Home Run Derby appearances, Ken Griffey Jr. hit seven homers, good for second-most in the young history of the competition... but not good enough to top Mark McGwire, who lapped the field with 12.
19. 2009, Busch Stadium
In 2009, the Fielders became the first father-son duo to each take part in a Derby -- and Prince put on a show, lighting up Busch Stadium with 23 total homers to win the whole thing. He may not have hit a ball over a restaurant, but he did manage to clear the bleachers in right-center on the fly, so that's something:
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18. 2010, Angel Stadium
David Ortiz didn't always have the best luck in Home Run Derbies -- we'll get to that -- but he made sure that 2010 was his year. Papi posted 13 homers in the semifinals before routing Hanley Ramirez in the final round, setting an excellent example for his son to follow.
17. 2003, U.S. Cellular Field
Another early '00s Home Run Derby, another scorching performance from Jason Giambi. This time, the first baseman launched 12 in the first round and followed that up with 11 in the next -- but it wasn't enough, as his opponent in the semifinals, Albert Pujols, went for 14 dingers of his own in the one of the most outrageous showdowns in Derby history. (Pujols would go on to lose to Garret Anderson in the final round.)
16. 2000, Turner Field
To this day, no one knows what exactly Turner Field's left-field upper deck did to Sammy Sosa, but he apparently took it very personally. Slammin' Sammy sent eight baseballs either into the upper deck or off the facing en route to a dominating Derby win, and capped things off with a homer over the camera well in dead center as a nice cherry on top.
15. 2006, PNC Park
Since the day it opened back in 2001, PNC Park has been one of the most beautiful parks in baseball. Among its many charms: a scenic view of the Allegheny River, which flows just beyond the right-field seats.
On most days, this is merely part of the ambiance of a day at the ballpark -- the river is some 456 feet away from home plate at its nearest point, after all. For Ryan Howard during the 2006 Home Run Derby, however, it was target practice.
In one of the most outrageous displays of power in Derby history, Howard reached the Allegheny six times -- four on the fly, two on the bounce. "I was hoping he was going to kill some fish out in that river," said his personal Derby pitcher, then-Phillies coach Ramon Henderson. "And he did."
Fate of local aquatic life notwithstanding, Howard ended up with 23 homers on the night, and it could've been a lot more: He topped David Wright in the finals with five outs still remaining.
14. 2004, Minute Maid Park
The 2004 Derby boasted one of the most loaded fields in history, including all three active members of the 500 home run club (Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds) and two more who would eventually join them (Jim Thome and David Ortiz). So, naturally, it turned into a duel between two guys with fewer than 500 career home runs combined.
Lance Berkman and Miguel Tejada put up seven dingers each in the first round, then proceeded to absolutely lose their minds in the semifinals. Playing in front of his home crowd, Berkman launched 10 homers -- five of which wound up on the streets of Houston after the league decided to open the Minute Maid Park roof.
But somehow, Tejada managed to do him one better -- the shortstop saw Berkman's 10 homers and raised him a then-record 15, including one that nearly derailed the train atop left field. And that wasn't the only record he would set: After hitting five more in the finals to top Berkman, Tejada finished with 27 total homers, the most ever in a single Derby up to that point.
13. 2002, Miller Park
There are many ways that one could try to describe just how impressive Sammy Sosa's first round of the 2002 Derby was. One could point out that he hit 12 homers, at the time the third-most ever in a single round. One could note that those 12 homers traveled an average of 477 feet, and seven of them crossed the 500-foot mark. One could simply list the objects that Sosa managed to clear: the scoreboard, Bernie Brewer's slide, even the left-field concourse.
But the best way is probably just to let you watch it for yourself:
Despite that early onslaught, though, Sosa wouldn't walk away the winner -- that honor went to long-time Derby stalwart Jason Giambi, who hit 11 first-round homers of his own and beat Slammin' Sammy in the finals.
12. 1994, Three Rivers Stadium
You know that you've hit an iconic dinger when it lives on well after even the stadium it was hit in has been demolished. Case in point: Frank Thomas, who launched a 519-foot blast during the 1994 Derby that managed to reach the upper deck... in almost straight-away center field.
We now turn to fellow '94 All-Stars Ruben Sierra and Ricky Bones for their thoughts:
The Pirates put a star on the seat in which the ball landed later that year, and when Three Rivers Stadium was torn down back in 2001, Thomas and his pitcher, pitching coach Rick Donnelly, signed the star and auctioned it off for charity.
Of course, the rest of the '94 Derby was no slouch, either. Ken Griffey Jr. won his second of three Derby crowns, narrowly edging Fred McGriff in the final round.
11. 2013, Citi Field
Just over a year after coming to the Major Leagues from Cuba, |
from doctors. At the same time, 117 general practitioners and 50 health authorities were sued by patients to recover damages for the harmful effects of dependence and withdrawal. This led some doctors to require a signed consent form from their patients and to recommend that all patients be adequately warned of the risks of dependence and withdrawal before starting treatment with benzodiazepines.[184] The court case against the drug manufacturers never reached a verdict; legal aid had been withdrawn and there were allegations that the consultant psychiatrists, the expert witnesses, had a conflict of interest. This litigation led to changes in the British law, making class action lawsuits more difficult.[185] Although antidepressants with anxiolytic properties have been introduced, and there is increasing awareness of the adverse effects of benzodiazepines, prescriptions for short-term anxiety relief have not significantly dropped.[9] For treatment of insomnia, benzodiazepines are now less popular than nonbenzodiazepines, which include zolpidem, zaleplon and eszopiclone.[186] Nonbenzodiazepines are molecularly distinct, but nonetheless, they work on the same benzodiazepine receptors and produce similar sedative effects.[187]
Society and culture Edit
Veterinary use Edit
Benzodiazepines are used in veterinary practice in the treatment of various disorders and conditions. As in humans, they are used in the first-line management of seizures, status epilepticus, and tetanus, and as maintenance therapy in epilepsy (in particular, in cats).[208][209][210] They are widely used in small and large animals (including horses, swine, cattle and exotic and wild animals) for their anxiolytic and sedative effects, as pre-medication before surgery, for induction of anesthesia and as adjuncts to anesthesia.[208][211]Peter Bergman, a founding member of the surrealist comedy troupe Firesign Theater, whose albums became cult favorites among college students in the late 1960s and ’70s for a brand of sly, multilayered satire so dense it seemed riddled with non sequiturs until the second, third or 30th listening, died on Friday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 72.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said Jeff Abraham, a spokesman for the group.
Mr. Bergman hosted an all-night radio call-in show on KPFK in Los Angeles beginning in 1966, “Radio Free Oz,” which served as the testing ground for the high-spirited Firesign sensibility. Phil Austin and David Ossman, two other founders of the four-man group, were the producer and director of the show; the fourth founder, Phil Proctor, was a frequent guest.
“We started out as four friends, up all night, taking calls from people on bad acid trips and having the time of our lives,” Mr. Austin said in a phone interview Friday. “And that’s what we always were: four friends talking.”
Mr. Bergman and his friends recorded their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” in 1968, followed the next year by “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?”
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By 1970, their mordant humor and their mastery of stereophonic recording techniques had made them to their generation of 20-somethings what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are to today’s (if Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart had a weakness for literary wordplay, psychedelic references and jokes about the Counter-Reformation).This is a free listing and not part of any publication. Information has been received from various sources; no responsibility for its accuracy is assumed by the WSCJTC. You must contact the individual agency listed to get further information. New listings are marked for seven days.
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Police Officer and Deputy
Position, City Agency, County, Details & Contact Information
Enforcement Deputy Sheriff
Vancouver
Clark County Sheriff's Office clark.wa.gov/sheriff/… If you’re ready for the challenges, rewards and opportunities that come with a law enforcement career at the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, apply at publicsafetytesting.com or call toll-free 1.866.HIRE.911. Click here for more information (ad posted 01-29-19)
Police Chief
Port Orchard
Port Orchard Police Department is seeking a Police Chief to join their team. This position is an FLDA exempt position and is a member of the Law Enforcement Officers and Fire Fighters Retirement System as well as great benefit packages. Please click the link for more information. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-07-19)
Police Officer
Brier
Brier Police Department The City of Brier is currently accepting applications for full-time Lateral and Post-Police Academy Graduates Patrol Officers. Hourly rate is $27.61-$36.83 plus basic benefits. Applicants must meet the WSCJTC Peace Officer certication requirements and City of Brier Requirements.Applications may be downloadedfrom the City of Brier Website at: ci.brier.wa.us Applications must be complete and include a cover letter and detailed resume to be considered. Click here for more information (ad posted 01-30-19)
Entry & Lateral Police Officers
Auburn
City of Auburn Join a police force where you can make a difference in the community you serve, that’s small enough where you can be a part of cases from start to finish, and busy enough to challenge you. Visit TeamAPD.org to learn more about joining Team APD! Click here for more information (ad posted 12-27-18)
Lateral Police Officer
Moses Lake
Moses Lake Police Department Police Officer–Lateral IMMEDIATE OPENINGS Qualified Lateral Officer Signing Bonus of up to $10,000.00 DOQ The City of Moses Lake Civil Service is currently accepting applications to form a register of eligible candidates for the position of Lateral Police Officer. The Moses Lake Police Department employs 37 commissioned officers and 8 civilian staff members. Officers within the department have the ability to serve in different assignments including; Investigations, Street Crimes, SWAT, K9 and as School Resource Officers. Benefits: • Work Schedule consists of 12 hour shifts (4 on/4 off rotation) • Salary; $61,032 to $76,296 DOQ • 96 hours of paid vacation leave annually (w/progressive increases) • 96 hours of paid sick leave • 88 hours of straight time pay in lieu of holidays • 104 hours of Kelly Time Off • Specialty Assignments • Education Pay • LEOFF 2 Retirement System • Excellent Benefits Requirements: Applicants must be currently employed as a certified full-time law enforcement with at least 12 months of service. Officers with certifications from outside of Washington State must successfully complete the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission Equivalent Academy. Signing bonus is based on years of service, training, qualifications, instructor certifications and specialty assignments from previous employer. Apply: Interested applicants may obtain an application via our website at cityofml.com/…, Job Opportunities or by contacting the City of Moses Lake Human Resources Department at (509) 764-3703. Completed applications must be submitted to: City of Moses Lake Human Resources 401 S Balsam St Moses Lake, WA 98837 The City of Moses Lake is an equal opportunity employer. Area Information: For information about Moses Lake and surrounding areas view the Port of Moses Lake video found at: portofmoseslake.com/quality-of-life/ (ad posted 09-17-18)
Lateral/Exceptional Entry Police Officer
Duvall
Duvall Police Department Establishing an eligibility list. Click here for more information (ad posted 09-23-18)
Entry-Level Police Officer
Seattle
Seattle Police Department The Seattle Police Department is hiring entry-level police officers. Starting pay after graduation from the Police Academy is $39.00 per hour (Step 1) - $51.06 per hour (Step 6, 54 months). Test dates, application, minimum standards, job requirements and more information can be found at seattlepolicejobs.com (ad posted 01-07-19)
Entry Level Deputy Sheriff
Kelso
Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office The Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office is actively seeking applicants for the position of entry-level Deputy Sheriff. Pay starts at $5100 a month and goes to $6300 month with additional pay steps each year. In addition, there is a 1.5%-3% education pay for an AA and BA degrees respectively. Click here for more information (ad posted 12-26-18)
Lateral Deputy Sheriff
Walla Walla
Walla Walla County Sheriff's Office We always accept lateral applications. If you are interested in working in the Walla Walla area please complete the applications process that is available on our website at co.walla-walla.wa.us Civil Service Commission page Click here for more information (ad posted 01-03-19)
ENTRY LEVEL POLICE OFFICER
Elma
ELMA POLICE DEPARTMENT The City of Elma is taking applications for an Entry level police officer. Applicants must possess a High School Diploma or equivalent, be a U.S. Citizen and have a valid Washington State Driver's license. Applications are available at Elma City Hall, 202 W Main St, Elma, 98541 or call 360-482-2212. (ad posted 02-22-19)
Police Chief
Blaine
City of Blaine Salary: $110,000 - $118,500. For a complete position profile and to apply online, visit Prothman at prothman.com/ and click on "Open Recruitments." For questions, call 206-368-0050. The City of Blaine, Washington, is situated along the Canadian border just 15 miles north of Bellingham, and 30 minutes south of Vancouver, BC. The City of Blaine Police Department operates with a 2019 budget of $2.6 million and a staff of 13 commissioned officers, including the Police Chief, and two professional support personnel. Working under the general guidance and direction of the City Manager, the Police Chief is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the City’s police services. This position requires a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in criminal justice, public administration, or a related field, and ten years of increasingly responsible law enforcement experience, including at least five years of senior command and management experience. Please see the complete position profile for additional requirements. The City of Blaine is an Equal Opportunity Employer. First review: March 24, 2019 (open until filled). Click here for more information (ad posted 02-15-19)
Lateral/Post Academy Graduate
Clyde Hill
Clyde Hill Police Department Clyde Hill Police Department - The City of Clyde Hill is actively recruiting Lateral/post academy graduate Police Officers to fill immediate vacancies. Applicants must meet the WA State Criminal Justice Training Center Peace Officer Certification (WSCJTC) requirements. Salary: $5474 - $6945 per month DOQ + approximately $820.00 per month for our Flexible Spending Program. Educational/Career Development Incentive Program, up to 6%. Health Care: Regence/Blue Shield or Kaiser Permanente, 90% employer paid medical, 100% employer paid dental/vision. Retirement LEOFF2, optional Deferred Compensation program, Vacation/Holidays 176 hours/year – 296 hours/year; Sick leave: 8 hours per month. Accidental Death & Dismemberment Insurance and Long-Term Disability Insurance. Opportunities include: Civil Disturbance Unit, Bicycle Patrol, CSPA Major Crimes Task Force, Field Training Officer, Investigations. Lateral Applicants must have been employed as a full-time law enforcement officer with a civilian law enforcement agency within the last 24 months and must have lasted a minimum of one year and possess current basic certification upon application from the WSCJTC. Post academy graduate must possess current basic certification upon application from the WSCJTC. Out of state candidates, who have been previously certified in another state, must pass the WSCJTC equivalency. Applicant minimum age is 21, high school graduate, possess or be able to obtain a valid Washington State Driver’s license by the time of hire, U.S. citizen, no felony or DV convictions. A criminal record may disqualify the candidate. All candidates must successfully pass an entrance interview, oral board examinations and background in accordance with the Civil Service Rules 7 and 8. Please submit a letter of interest and resume to: Police Testing, 9605 NE 24th Street, Clyde Hill WA, 98004. For more information please call 425-454-7187 or visit clydehill.org. Click here for more information (ad posted 12-31-18)
Trooper & Lateral Trooper
Coeur d Alene, Idaho
Idaho State Police is looking for an Idaho State Police Trooper and Lateral Trooper to join their team. Please click the link for more information. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-25-19)
Entry Level Police Officer
Tacoma
Tacoma Police Department is seeking a Police Officer to join their team. This is general duty police work involving the protection of life and property, enforcement of laws and ordinances, maintenance of order, and prevention and investigation of crimes. Work is performed according to departmental regulations and procedures described by superior officers and normally consists of routine patrol, traffic regulations, and crime prevention and investigation on motorcycles, or on foot. Please click the link for more information. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-25-19)
Lateral Police Officer
Everson
Everson Police Department is currently accepting applications for a lateral police officer position. The position will be open until filled. For Applications and a copy of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, please go to ci.everson.wa.us or contact Chief Dan MacPhee at dmacphee@ci.everson.wa.us. (ad posted 02-25-19)
Lateral/Post Academy Graduate Police Officer
Clyde Hill
Clyde Hill Police Department ANNOUNCEMENT Clyde Hill Police Department - The City of Clyde Hill is actively recruiting Lateral/post academy graduate Police Officers to fill immediate vacancies. Applicants must meet the WA State Criminal Justice Training Center Peace Officer Certification (WSCJTC) requirements. Salary: $5474 - $6945 per month DOQ + approximately $820.00 per month for our Flexible Spending Program. Educational/Career Development Incentive Program, up to 6%. Health Care: Regence/Blue Shield or Kaiser Permanente, 90% employer paid medical, 100% employer paid dental/vision. Retirement LEOFF2, optional Deferred Compensation program, Vacation/Holidays 176 hours/year – 296 hours/year; Sick leave: 8 hours per month. Accidental Death & Dismemberment Insurance and Long-Term Disability Insurance. Opportunities include: Civil Disturbance Unit, Bicycle Patrol, CSPA Major Crimes Task Force, Field Training Officer, Investigations. Lateral Applicants must have been employed as a full-time law enforcement officer with a civilian law enforcement agency within the last 24 months and must have lasted a minimum of one year and possess current basic certification upon application from the WSCJTC. Post academy graduate must possess current basic certification upon application from the WSCJTC. Out of state candidates, who have been previously certified in another state, must pass the WSCJTC equivalency. Applicant minimum age is 21, high school graduate, possess or be able to obtain a valid Washington State Driver’s license by the time of hire, U.S. citizen, no felony or DV convictions. A criminal record may disqualify the candidate. All candidates must successfully pass an entrance interview, oral board examinations and background in accordance with the Civil Service Rules 7 and 8. Please submit a letter of interest and resume to: Lt. D. Hanson 9605 NE 24th Street, Clyde Hill WA, 98004. For more information please call 425-454-7187 or visit clydehill.org. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-08-19)
Police Officer
Sumner
City of Sumner - Sumner Police Department The City of Sumner has one (1) Police Officer opening to be filled in 2019. 2019 Pay Range: $5,853.00 - $7,488.00 per month plus potential for education premiums. Police Officer Position Hiring Levels: Entry Level Police Officer: 0 years' experience as a fully commissioned law officer. Exceptional Entry Police Officer: Less than 2 years' experience as a fully commissioned law officer, with no more than a 24 month break in service. Lateral Police Officer: 2 or more years' experience as a fully commissioned law officer, with no more than a 24 month break in service. To view the full job description and to apply online please visit: governmentjobs.com/careers/… To learn more about Sumner and the Sumner Police Department visit our City Website: sumnerwa.gov (ad posted 12-12-18)
Lateral Police Officer
Ridgefield
Cowlitz Department of Public Safety Immediate openings for lateral Police Officers with new Department. Ideal for WA State Officers retiring from the LEOFF system. 65K-75K DOQ, full benefits and 401K. Take home vehicles and excellent opportunity for advancement. Please send go to Cowlitz.org and click on jobs. (ad posted 01-10-19)
Deputies- Entry and Lateral
Newport
Pend Oreillle County Sheriff's Department Pend Oreille Country is located in North Eastern Washington, on the boarder of Northern Idaho with Newport, Washington being the County seat. We are just miles from major cities such as Spokane, Washington and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and the Canadian boarder. We offer rural living, fantastic recreational opportunities, and beautiful scenery! In short, Pend Oreille County is a great place to live, work, and play. Positions to be filled: up to THREE (3). Full-time, union, great pay and benefits. See pendoreilleco.org under Human Resources for all the details. Closes: March 13, 2019 Click here for more information (ad posted 02-08-19)
Lateral Deputy
Colville
Stevens County Sheriff's Office is seeking candidates for a Lateral Deputy Sheriff. Stevens County, located in Northeastern Washington boasts some of the best hunting, fishing and recreational opportunities in the state. If you’re considering a rural lifestyle for you and your family, take a look at what Stevens County has to offer. DON’T DELAY - Civil Service testing to establish a Lateral Deputy Sheriff eligibility list is coming up fast. A completed application; resume; $25.00 (non-refundable application/exam fee); and three (3) incident reports (completed by the applicant prior to 11/01/18), must be received by 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Please refer to the official announcement for exam details. The announcement, application and job description are available online at stevenscountywa.gov under Employment, or by contacting Stevens County Civil Service at (509) 684-7524 or civilservice@stevenscountywa.gov. Stevens County is an equal opportunity employer and a drug-free workplace. (ad posted 01-24-19)
Lateral Police Officer
Soap Lake
Soap Lake Police Department is actively seeking individuals to establish a list for an anticipated Lateral Police Officer position. Soap Lake is located 17 miles north of Moses Lake and 6 miles east of Ephrata. Soap Lake has recently changed is benefit packages and pay ranges to become more competitive with agencies. Pay Range: $50,346.55 – $55,120 (2019) $51,353.48 - $56,222.50 (2020)plus great benefit package. Please Contact Autumn McHugo at Autumnm@soaplakewa.gov, Civil Service Secretary, to request an application. Click the link for more information. Click here for more information (ad posted 01-17-19)
Lateral Police Officer
Arlington
Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians Performs the functions of law enforcement necessary to maintain community interaction, public peace, protect life and property, prevent crime, apprehend violators of the law and otherwise assure proper enforcement of the laws and ordinances of the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians. Contribute to the apprehension of criminal suspects by conducting preliminary and follow-up investigations. This would involve contacting and interviewing witnesses and victims of a crime; sketching, photographing a crime scene; dusting for latent fingerprints; and collecting other evidence and preserving the chain of evidence. The position prepares criminal investigation reports and testifies in court Essential Duties and Responsibilities • Investigate all crimes that occur within the lands owned by the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians • Prepare written reports when necessary that document incidents that occur within Tribal lands • Enforce the Stillaguamish Tribal Law and Order Code to include the Fish and Wildlife Code • Defend the Stillaguamish Tribe against those who endanger the public peace or safety • Execute the process and orders of the courts of justice or judicial officers when delivered for that purpose according to law • Attend the sessions of the courts of record held within the Stillaguamish jurisdiction and obey their lawful orders or directives • Keep and preserve the peace in the Stillaguamish jurisdiction, patrol the lands owned by the Stillaguamish Tribe (ad posted 01-17-19)
Public Safety Senior Officer
Ridgefield
Cowlitz Indian Tribe Schedule: Sunday through Saturday Hours: Variable Location: Cowlitz Indian Reservation - Ridgefield WA. Salary: $60K - $70K Annual DOQ with benefits Click here for more information (ad posted 01-16-19)
Liquor Control Board Enforcement Officer 2
Tacoma
Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board Enfrocement is accepting applications for permanent LCB Enforcement Officer 2's (LEO2). The Enforcement and Education Division is headquartered in Olympia and has four regional offices in Tacoma, Federal Way, Mount Vernon, and Spokane. Salary for this position is $4,809 - $6,307 per month. The LEO2's work with over 13,000 liquor licensees and their employees by providing education and counseling on liquor licensing laws and regulations. LCB Enforcement Officers inspect premises, investigate complaints, and conduct compliance checks. At times they may take administrative and criminal action against licensees, employees, and the public who violate state liquor laws. The mission of the Enforcement and Education division is to protect and serve the public by ensuring legal acquisition and responsible use of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and vapor. The division's employees carry out their duties with the highest standards of personal and professional ethics based on honesty, integrity and trust. Every individual who comes in contact with a division employee is to be treated with the highest level of courtesy and respect. To apply, please submit your application at careers.wa.gov. (ad posted 01-17-19)
Lateral Police Officer
DuPont
DuPont Police Department Now accepting resumes for Lateral Police Officer until position is filled. DuPont Police Department Offers: A competitive annual salary range: $63,000—$68,500; Rotating schedule: 12 hour shifts, 4 on/4 off; Benefits: 10 Paid floating holidays with an additional 96 hours of annual leave per year; take home patrol vehicles and a $1,200 Uniform allowance; A variety of special assignments that offer additional specialty pay year round. Interested Applicants Must: Be a United States Citizen, 21 years of age and have a valid Washington State driver’s license at the time of appointment; Have a minimum of 24 months of full time, paid, police experience in a city, county or state police agency in WA state, and must have no break in employment as a commissioned WA State law enforcement officer longer than 18 months; Applicants who meet all other requirements but have less than 24 months of full time, paid, police experience may qualify for the exceptional consideration with the consent of the Chief of Police and upon review and authorization by the Civil Service Commission. Interested in becoming part of our family? Email a letter of interest and resume to Police@DuPontWA.gov. Click here for more information (ad posted 01-24-19)
Lateral Police Officer
Elma
Elma Police Department The City of Elma has an immediate opening for a Police Officer. Elma is a great place to live, play, work and invest in. The City of Elma is actively seeking an individual for a Lateral Police Officer position. It’s our people that make us great and we would love to have you join our team. With a population of over 3300, which is growing quickly, Elma has small town charm with supportive community members. We are located 25 miles west of Olympia and serve as the Gateway to Grays Harbor. It is also centrally positioned south of the beautiful Olympic Mountains and east of the ocean beaches. Take a look at our website, cityofelma.com and discover how the City of Elma can make your next career move a great one. The candidates must have been employed as a full time, sworn, law enforcement officer within the last five (5) years; and are able to provide a copy of certification or transcript from Washington State or an equivalent Basic Law Enforcement Academy that satisfies the Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission requirements. Salary range $4621 - $4996 to start with educational incentives available. The City of Elma provides a competitive benefit package which includes, but is not limited to, medical, dental, vision and disability coverage. Applications are available at Elma City Hall, 202 W. Main in Elma and also on the website at cityofelma.com. If you have any questions, please contact us at 360-482-3131 Click here for more information (ad posted 01-29-19)
Entry Level Sheriff's Deputy
Okanogan
Okanogan County Sheriff's Office The Okanogan County Sherriff's Office has currently three (3) openings for Entry Level Field Deputy. Please go to okanogancounty.org/HR/… for more information. (ad posted 01-28-19)
Deputy Sheriff - Entry Level
Tacoma
Pierce County Sheriff's Department Deputy Sheriff ( Entry Level) Pierce County Sheriff’s Department Salary: $62,754 - $83,034 annually This is responsible, general duty and investigatory law enforcement work involving the protection of life/property and the preservation of the peace for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department in the Tacoma, Washington area. We are actively hiring for Deputy Sheriff and Corrections Deputy. To review required qualifications, apply and sign up for pre-employment testing, go to nationaltestingnetwork.com. For questions concerning the testing process, please contact NTN Support on their website or at 866-563-3882. To learn more about the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department please contact the Recruiter at 253-798-4324 (ad posted 10-30-18)
Deputy Sheriff (In-State Lateral)
Tacoma
Pierce County Sheriff's Department Deputy Sheriff (In-State Lateral) Pierce County Sheriff’s Department Salary: $62,754 - $83,034 annually This is responsible, general duty and investigatory law enforcement work involving the protection of life/property and the preservation of the peace for the Pierce County Sheriff's Department in the Tacoma, Washington area. We are actively hiring for Deputy Sheriff and Corrections Deputy. Requirements to apply for lateral: • At the time of application must be currently employed fulltime with a City, County or State law enforcement agency within the State of Washington in a general law enforcement capacity that includes patrol experience; • Minimum one (1) year experience with the current agency and not on probation; and • Have successfully completed the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission basic law enforcement academy for police officers, or its equivalency academy, and be currently certified as a law enforcement officer in Washington State. To apply please contact Sherry Hieb, Civil Service Chief Examiner, at 253-798-6250 for a link to the lateral application. (ad posted 10-30-18)
Liquor Control Board Enforcement Officer 1
Tacoma
Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board Enforcement is accepting applications for LCB Enforcement Officer 1's (LEO1) In-Training. The Enforcement and Education Division is headquartered in Olympia and has four regional offices (Tacoma, Seattle, Mount Vernon and Spokane). Salary for this position is $4,466 - $5,307 per month. These positions begin as entry level LCB Enforcement Officer 1 and must successfully complete the 720 hour Basic Law Enforcement training and the Field Training Officer program. Upon completion of the programs, LEO1's will be promoted to the LCB Enforcement Officer 2 (LEO2) level. The Enforcement Division works with approximately 13,000 liquor and cannabis licensees and their employees by providing education and counseling on liquor & cannabis licensing laws and regulations. LCB Enforcement Officers inspect premises, investigate complaints, and conduct compliance checks. At times they may take administrative and criminal action against licensees, employees, and the public who violate state liquor, tobacco and cannabis laws. The Enforcement and Education division serves to protect the public by ensuring legal acquisition and responsible use of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco. The division's employees carry out their duties with the highest standards of personal and professional ethics based on honesty, integrity and trust. Every individual who comes in contact with a division employee is to be treated with the highest level of courtesy and respect. To apply, please submit your application at careers.wa.gov. (ad posted 01-17-19)
Police Officer
Long Beach
Long Beach Police Department Police Officer – Lateral / Advanced Entry Level Long Beach Police Department Long Beach, Washington The City of Long Beach is an equal opportunity employer. $4,399 - $5,613 a month plus generous medical, dental and vision benefits. The City of Long Beach is currently accepting lateral and advanced entry level applications for a current vacancy for the position of Police Officer. Lateral applicants must meet the following requirements: Successfully completed the Washington State Basic Law Enforcement Academy or Washington State Equivalency Academy. Must have been employed as a commissioned police officer on a full time basis by a law enforcement agency within the State of Washington for 24 consecutive months and be currently employed as a full time commissioned officer for a law enforcement agency within the State of Washington. Be able to perform essential job requirements of the position and other minimum requirements. Testing for lateral applicants shall consist of an interview with the Chief of Police. Advanced Entry Level applicants must have successfully completed the Washington State Basic Law Enforcement Academy or be eligible to go through the Washington State Equivalency Academy. Be able to perform essential job requirements of the position and other minimum requirements. Testing for advanced entry applicants will consist of a competitive oral examination by the Civil Service Board. The provisions of this advertisement do not constitute an expressed or implied contract. Those interested in receiving an application please contact Civil Service Secretary David Glasson at dglasson@longbeachwa.gov for an application. Applications need to be returned by March 1st. (ad posted 01-08-19)
Miscellaneous
Position, City Agency, County, Details & Contact Information
LCB Enforcement Officer 1 (In-Training)
Coeur d Alene, Idaho
WA State Liquor and Cannabis Board Opens: January 13, 2019 Closes: March 3, 2019 Salary: $4,466 - $5,307 per month Job Type: Permanent Location: Multiple Locations Department: Enforcement Your opportunity at a glance The Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board's Enforcement and Education division is accepting applications for LCB Enforcement Officer 1's (LEO1) In-Training. The Enforcement and Education Division is headquartered in Olympia and has four regional offices (Tacoma, Seattle, Mount Vernon and Spokane). These positions begin as entry level LCB Enforcement Officer 1 and must successfully complete the 720 hour Basic Law Enforcement training and the Field Training Officer program. Upon completion of the programs, LEO1's will be promoted to the LCB Enforcement Officer 2 (LEO2) level. The Enforcement Division works with approximately 13,000 liquor and cannabis licensees and their employees by providing education and counseling on liquor & cannabis licensing laws and regulations. LCB Enforcement Officers inspect premises, investigate complaints, and conduct compliance checks. At times they may take administrative and criminal action against licensees, employees, and the public who violate state liquor, tobacco and cannabis laws. The Enforcement and Education division serves to protect the public by ensuring legal acquisition and responsible use of alcohol, cannabis and tobacco. The division's employees carry out their duties with the highest standards of personal and professional ethics based on honesty, integrity and trust. Every individual who comes in contact with a division employee is to be treated with the highest level of courtesy and respect. To apply, please submit your application at careers.wa.gov. (ad posted 01-15-19)
Corrections
Position, City Agency, County, Details & Contact Information
Corrections Officer
Issaquah
City of Issaquah The City of Issaquah Human Resources Department is recruiting to form a hiring list of eligible candidates for positions as Corrections Officers. Gender-specific (female) hiring preference may apply to fill the Corrections Officer positions in order to create a safer booking process of same gender pat-downs, for minimum staffing levels and to comply with conventional standards of sexual privacy. If you are an entry level applicant please submit an application through Public Safety Testing: publicsafetytesting.com/ If you are a more experienced applicant, please apply for our lateral opportunity at governmentjobs.com/careers/… (ad posted 01-29-19)
Corrections Deputy - Entry Level
Tacoma
Pierce County Sheriff's Department Corrections Deputy (Entry Level) Pierce County Sheriff’s Department Salary: $57,886 - $75,005 annually We are actively hiring for Corrections Deputy; take the employment test for FREE! To review required qualifications, apply, learn about the free offer and sign up for pre-employment testing, go to nationaltestingnetwork.com. For questions concerning the testing process, please contact NTN Support on their website or at 866-563-3882. If you would like to learn more about the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department please contact the recruiter at 253-798-4324. (ad posted 10-30-18)
Corrections Deputy - Lateral
Tacoma
Pierce County Sheriff's Department Corrections Deputy – Lateral Pierce County Sheriff’s Department Salary: $57,886 - $75,005 annually We are actively hiring for Corrections Deputy. This is work performed to provide care and custody of adult prisoners and to maintain order and discipline among the prisoners of the Pierce County Corrections and Detention Center, a maximum-security facility in Tacoma, Washington. Requirements to apply for lateral: • At the time of application, must be currently employed, full-time, with a city, county, state or federal correctional agency. • Minimum (1) one year experience with the current agency providing direct and/or indirect supervision of adult inmates and not currently on probation. • Must have successfully completed the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission Corrections Officer Academy or possess an equivalent Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission certification as a Corrections Deputy; OR Have successfully completed the Washington State Correctional Worker Core (CWC) Academy or a Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission approved Corrections Academy or equivalency academy from another state. To apply please contact Sherry Hieb, Civil Service Chief Examiner, at 253-798-6250 for a link to the lateral application. (ad posted 10-30-18)
Correction Officer
Goldendale
Klickitat County Sheriff Klickitat County Civil Service will be testing for the position of Correction Officer to work for the Klickitat County Sheriff. Applications and job description can be obtained online at the Klickitat County website: klickitatcounty.org/ and clicking on the job listing. Any questions or requests can be sent to Klickitat County Civil Service at email civilsc@klickitatcounty.org or by calling 509-773-2483. The closing date is 5:00 p.m. on March 8, 2019. Exams will be held on March 9, 2019, in Goldendale WA. A $20 exam fee is required. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-15-19)
Control Board Operator
Goldendale
Klickitat County Sheriff Klickitat County Civil Service will be testing for the position of Control Board Operator to work for the Klickitat County Sheriff. Applications and job description can be obtained online at the Klickitat County website: klickitatcounty.org/ and clicking on the job listing. Any questions or requests can be sent to Klickitat County Civil Service at email civilsc@klickitatcounty.org or by calling 509-773-2483. The closing date is 5:00 p.m. on March 8, 2019. Exams will be held on March 9, 2019, in Goldendale WA. A $20 exam fee is required. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-15-19)
Lateral Correction Officer
South Bend
Pacific County Notice is hereby given that the Pacific County Civil Service Commission is establishing an eligibility register for Lateral Corrections Officer with the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. Applications will be accepted until MARCH 7, 2019 at 4:00pm. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-15-19)
Entry Level Correction Officer
South Bend
Pacific County Notice is hereby given that the Pacific County Civil Service Commission is establishing an eligibility register for Entry Level Corrections Officer with the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. Applications for examination will be accepted by the Civil Service Examiner until MARCH 7, 2019 at 4:00pm. Click here for more information (ad posted 02-15-19)
Lateral Correction Officer
South Bend
Pacific County Sheriff's Office Notice is hereby given that the Pacific County Civil Service Commission is establishing an eligibility register for Lateral Corrections Officer with the Pacific County Sheriff’s Office. Applications will be accepted until FURTHER NOTICE. The salary range for Corrections Officer is $3,385 - $3,991. Duties Include: • Booking prisoners • Releasing prisoners • Assisting in feeding prisoners • Disciplining prisoners for violation of jail rules • Supervising prisoner cell movement, recreation activities, chapel, special call-outs, etc. • Transporting prisoners • Completing reports, forms, etc. All duties performed are in accordance with state law and departmental policies and procedures. Employees work with offenders in a potentially hazardous setting. Please consider this when deciding whether to apply. Lateral Corrections |
-4.
Hesler LR, Smith AH (1979). North American Species of Lactarius. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08440-2.I love to travel, and when I can mix business trips with pleasure, it’s the best combination ever. Attending a conference can be the perfect way to improve professionally and escape a little bit from the everyday routine.
Conferences are also a great way to network, improve professionally, get a leg up on the latest technology and trends, and honestly just have fun.
However, there’s a ton of conferences to choose from. We’ve been collecting awesome events for designers and developers on our site and the list can be a bit overwhelming.
So I made a list of the coolest conferences coming up this summer, to try to give some order and guidance to the decision. I focused on the quality of the conference itself and the speaker lineup,as well as the location and ability to turn it into a work-cation.
If you’re going to attend one of these events, please let us know on Twitter. We hope to see you at an event soon.
April
An Event Apart Seattle
📆 April 3-5, 2017
📍 Seattle, WA, USA
This is a 3-day conference for digital creators with one of the most impressive speaking lineups I’ve seen. The creators, Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, always do a great job hosting fun events and making it social. Moreover, who didn’t fall in love with “Sleepless in Seattle”, and the Space Needle in the backdrop that made the movie even more romantic. Be blown away by the view of the Seattle skyline and Cascade Mountains on its viewing deck. After 3 days of UX and front-end, reward yourself, dine and enjoy the sunset view in the revolving SkyCity restaurant. AEA Seattle is gearing up to be an absolutely stunning experience apart from learning the best practices and techniques from industry leaders.
Front End Design Conference
📆 April 19-21, 2017
📍 St. Petersburg, FL, USA
Spend a beautiful weekend on Florida’s gulf coast in St. Petersburg. Known as the “Sunshine City”, it’s the perfect summer destination because of its pleasant weather,incredible golfing, boating and beachgoing. It’s also home to one of the most heartfelt, genuine and immersive web design and front-end dev conferences formed by a great community of web folks in and around the Tampa/St.Pete area.
FITC Toronto
📆 April 23-25, 2017
📍 Toronto, Canada
Let’s go up north! FITC Toronto brings you 5 inspiring tracks covering creativity, development, business, marketing, hardware, creative coding and more. In between the 3-day action-packed event, getting a Toronto Citypass is your ticket to the best views in the city. From the skyscraper – CN Tower; a mix of art and culture – Royal Ontario Museum; a taste of Gothic Revival architecture – Casa Loma; the marine life walk-through tank – Ripley’s Aquarium; to the giant pandas at the Toronto Zoo or the interactive experience at the Ontario Science Centre.
May
HOW Design Live
📆 May 2-6, 2017
📍 Chicago, IL, USA
Be a certified HOWie as you build connections and opportunities with fellow creatives. The speaker lineup is excellent with a nice mix between design leaders like Jeffrey Zeldman, and inspiring speakers from other industries such as Malcolm Gladwell. While you fuel your creativity and explore the latest products and technologies, get some fresh air and take a stroll along Chicago’s Lakefront Trail. An 18-mile-long paved path with scenic views where you can run, walk, or bike with the blue waters of Lake Michigan on one side and gorgeous, green parks on the other.
Pixel Up!
📆 May 8-10, 2017
📍 Cape Town, South Africa
Sunset at the top! Pixel Up! is a conference unlike any other because this year, they’re bringing you to the amazing city of Cape Town. Nothing beats the backdrop of Table Mountain – a perfect setting for new ideas, new connections, and new perspectives as you get practical insights from design experts. And don’t ever miss to catch a cable car up Table Mountain. You won’t be sorry you did when you see the breathtaking Instagram-worthy sunset.
An Event Apart Boston
📆 May 15-17, 2017
📍 Boston, MA, USA
When old meets new. This 2nd installment of the An Event Apart series gives you a taste of both generations. Uncover the past as you take a walking tour on the cobbled-stone streets and the historic Freedom Trail. Alternatively, a few blocks away are the high-end luxury shopping malls where you can splurge on. Moreover, you get yourself loads of new ideas and techniques from the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Chris Coyier, Dan Mall, and other fantastic speakers.
The Design Conference
📆 May 24-27, 2017
📍 Brisbane, Australia
G’day mate! Pack your camping gears, picnic baskets, and have some Barbie (barbecue) surrounded by stunning displays of natural beauty – national parks and lakes worth pitching a tent at. Take part in this world-class design, art and business conference featuring a curated selection of talks, breakouts, exhibitions, celebrations and workshops.
June
Awwwards LA Conference
📆 June 1-2, 2017
📍 Los Angeles, CA, USA
Secret no more! Bring out the fangirl/fanboy in you because you’re in the entertainment capital of the world! If you’re a fan of movies, take the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood. Shop til you drop in Rodeo Drive, you’ll never know you’re shopping right next to Julia Roberts. Apart from that, meet top international digital masters, thought leaders and influencers in this unique 2-day conference.
99U Conference
📆 June 7-9, 2017
📍 New York City, NY, USA
New York, the concrete jungle where dreams are made of, is an absolutely perfect venue for this one-of-a-kind event that inspires creative professionals to bring their ideas to life and shape the future of the industry. The best part of the conference is when you explore some of NYC’s leading creative workspaces. Don’t miss the symbolic Statue of Liberty and the iconic Empire State Building. “Big lights will inspire you” when you get a view of Times Square. And to cap off the day, hang out in Central Park and reflect on the fresh insights you learned from the conference.
Kerning 2017
📆 June 7-9, 2017
📍 Faenza, Italy
In the current digital world, Kerning brings us the true art of typography and web typography and how it influences our visual culture. This conference is also the perfect opportunity to indulge in renaissance architecture and visit the fascinating Piazza del Popolo, ancient cathedrals and art galleries showcasing exquisite workmanship. Go by the ceramics museum that has an extensive range of local pottery that continues to enrich the ancient art and culture.
July
An Event Apart Washington DC
📆 July 10-12, 2017
📍 Alexandria, VA, USA
The premiere web & interaction design conference – An Event Apart brings you this time to the nation’s capitol. In this event you can learn from experts like Dan Mall, Val Head, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and a host of other industry leaders. When you’re not attending the conference, board water taxis and river cruises for a leisurely view of D.C. monuments. You won’t miss the U.S. Capitol Building, Lincoln Memorial and don’t ever forget to take a selfie with an unobstructed view of the White House.
International Experience Design Conference (IXDC)
📆 July 12-16, 2017
📍 Beijing, China
Beijing’s most influential experience design conference is also an event on an absolutely massive scale. And if you’re craving some authentic Chinese food go by Donghuamen Food Night Market to satisfy your craving with local Chinese dishes, or be adventurous to try some exotic snacks. You’ll be able to see Beijing sparkle at night with the city spectacularly floodlit – Tiananmen Square, Olympic Stadium, Water Cube, and more. Leave yourself plenty of time and wear your most comfortable shoes as you discover China’s rich cultural heritage like – the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven and the most iconic, Great Wall.
The Design & Content Conference
📆 July 17-19, 2017
📍 Vancouver, Canada
Attend this 3-day event where designers and content strategists team up as they craft experiences and tell stories that shape the future of the web. In one of the coolest professional mixes, this conference is filled with a great mix of speakers from both industries and has a great day of workshops as well. On top of that, it’s Vancouver in the summertime! Perfect weather to enjoy the outdoors. Stroll around Stanley Park as you walk, jog, or bike, while exploring the 14-mile-long seawall with a spectacular view of the Vancouver coastline. When you’re ready to refuel, feast your eyes on the variety of food stalls, fresh produce and local crafts in Granville Island.
August
RealUXCamp
📆 August 11-13, 2017
📍 Bukovina, Czech Republic
Getting tired of the fast-paced digital world? Slow down, pause, and enlist in the RealUXCamp. Bring your tents and sleeping mats because the day 1 task is to find a place to camp. What’s really cool about this format is that everybody can contribute. Lectures range from topics about chopping wood for the fire and smoking meat, mobile and web apps, product management, and more. It’s not just about UX workshops, there will be lots of birds, sheep, deer, barbecue grilling and fresh air – an ideal place for a UX designer to relax and get away.
Prototypes, Process, & Play
📆 August 10-11, 2017
📍 Chicago, IL, USA
This is the perfect conference if you’re looking to become a design manager or improve your managerial skills. The schedule is packed with leadership talks by experienced managers from large organizations. And even though it’s probably not your first time in Chicago this time check out some world-class architecture – top on the list is the massive, stainless steel structure “The Bean”. Enjoy a 360-degree view of the lakefront and the magnificent skyline with 360 CHICAGO’s TILT – Chicago’s highest moving experience with downward-facing views from 1,030 feet up.Ello, an ad-free Facebook alternative, was originally built as a virtual, invite-only walled garden and private gallery for a few thousand artists and designers. Users would trickle in a few hundred at a time at most. But the whole enterprise was pretty low-key, and its founders were happy with that.
Until Tuesday, September 23, when the Ello founders checked in on their budding site and found that the invite list had suddenly started to pile up, first at 500 per hour. A few hours later, it was 1,000 per hour. “We were like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’ ” Todd Berger, one of the co-founders and leading designers on the project, told us. “We couldn’t trace it back to any one thing.”
Just that Monday, the founders had met to map out their game plan for the rest of the year. By the time Wednesday morning came around, their modest plans seemed quaint and obsolete. Someone pulled up Twitter. There were new tweets about Ello every 20 to 30 seconds, and then every few seconds, and then dozens every minute.
The collective attention of the Internet had turned its eyes toward Ello, and in the span of 48 hours, the Ello team saw what had started as their pet project become the fastest-growing social network in history.
“It’s like one of those scenes in Star Trek, when the engine speeds up, and Scotty’s in the basement fixing the dilithium crystals with a screwdriver,” said Paul Budnitz, a co-founder, “and suddenly everything jumps into warp speed.”
Facebook, the incumbent social networking titan, has 1.3 billion like-addicted users worldwide. Every so often, it runs some Machiavellian emotional experiment on its users or redesigns the layout to cater to advertisers, but before last month, it had never done anything to spark defections en masse.
But in early September, Facebook started enforcing an old policy that says users have to go by their real names. While the rule was meant to cut out trolls and spammers, it wound up freezing the accounts of gay and transgendered users who were protecting their identities with pseudonyms.
Taylor Hatmaker had been covering the blowback for The Daily Dot, and in an article called “The great gay Facebook exodus begins,” tapped Ello as the destination for fleeing users on Monday, September 22. Soon, Ello was getting 4,000 requests to join every hour. That number would be 27,000 an hour by Wednesday evening.
Twitter exploded with people begging for invites to Ello—the team had given each new user 35 invites, so just tweeting the request turned back multiple replies, further fueling the virality. EBay had a black market for where invites were listed for hundreds of dollars. “Ello” was Google’s sixth hottest search of the day. A real estate broker Mr. Budnitz hadn’t spoken to in five years emailed him asking about an invite.
It was more than Mr. Budnitz had asked for, or even wanted. The coding team, Mode Set, told us that the server was nearly pulling apart at the seams trying to manage the sudden traffic.
That night, Mr. Budnitz stepped off a plane in Vermont to discover more than 200 press requests in his inbox. He told us that he was putting a halt to all new user intake first thing in the morning—the coders hadn’t slept in days and the servers were groaning under the demand.
“It seems like we’ve got a big portion of the U.S. and much of Europe all trying to get on Ello at the same time,” Mr. Budnitz said. “We’re going to turn off the spigot for a while. We’re not Facebook, our mission isn’t to grow fast.”
The morning came, and along with it were 34,000 requests to join every hour. But the velvet rope hadn’t yet gone up in front of the Internet’s hottest new club. When noon hit, we gave Mr. Budnitz a second call. It turned out that the Mode Set crew had called in a favor from its hosting service, and was managing to keep the site alive. Ello would carry on, even as requests-per-hour approached 40,000.
“We’re still at warp speed,” Mr. Budnitz said that afternoon. “It’s a little bit like the Starship Enterprise—Scotty always says he can’t do it, but then he does.”
Ello is the product of a super-group of seven designers and coders led by Mr. Budnitz, a boutique toy maker and bicycle designer. His toy company Kidrobot has storefronts in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Boulder. In 2008, 13 toys designed by Mr. Budnitz in collaboration with illustrator Tristan Eaton were accepted into the permanent collection at MoMA.
Mr. Budnitz messed around with programming video games on a Commodore in high school, and in 1996 became one of the first filmmakers on record to cut a feature film on a consumer-grade computer, picking up film festival awards at the time. Other than having been a self-taught enthusiast, Mr. Budnitz is distinctly not a techie.
Ello started as an insider’s hideaway for Mr. Budnitz and his designer friends, closed off to the general public. For about a year they eased off of Facebook to share media and collaborate on projects using Ello before taking it down to build it into an open network.
The first step in Ello’s semi-public debut was to quietly release a manifesto. The Ello Manifesto is a brief, anti-Facebook screed telling you that “you are the product that’s bought and sold” when other social networks track your browsing and sharing habits for the sake of marketers.
“We believe there is a better way,” the manifesto says. “We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.”
Click “I Agree,” and you’re encouraged to share the manifesto. Click “I Disagree,” and you’re directed to the page where Facebook keeps its privacy policy. The manifesto sat on a landing page with Ello’s logo, an eerie black smiley face with no eyes and a Cheshire Cat grin, and collected email addresses before their private beta began in July.
That manifesto would be quoted over and over again, both by the users who took it up as a rallying cry against Facebook’s invasive privacy practices, and the tech media, who would use it to bludgeon Ello over their idealism.
Where many new tech companies strive to make apps with “delightful” or “seamless” interfaces, Ello’s is almost inconvenient for the sake of elegance. Many of the basic buttons on the site are nearly invisible, and to get the most out of using Ello, you’d practically need a user’s manual to explain it.
Ello’s sparse layout is an expression of Mr. Budnitz’s psychological aversion to clutter, which he believes is one of the great management challenges of our age. Mr. Budnitz, who splits his time between New York City—the ninth level of hell for outdoor advertising—and Vermont, where roadside billboards are strictly illegal, prioritizes elegance and order in Ello’s interface.
When building Ello, the team experimented with posting “the most horrible, ugly, tasteless content” they could find and built a platform where even garbage could shine. All of the site’s text is shown in a command-line courier, and the layout is dominated by white space.
Ello’s features are borrowed largely from other networks. Profiles are limited and visual like Twitter’s. When you add friends, you place them into one of two categories: “Friends” for a large format, Facebook-style news feed, or “Noise,” which is like browsing a condensed Tumblr archive.
Ello is also still in a beta testing, which means it is fundamentally an incomplete product. Many features implicit to fully developed social networks, like reblogging and private messaging, are still on Ello’s public to-do list. There are even buttons that simply don’t do anything when clicked. But most glaringly, there were no options to allow for private accounts, which put Ello at odds with the people who left Facebook seeking shelter from abuse or harassment.
The Facebook refugees were mostly understanding when Mr. Budnitz immediately promised that privacy features were on their way.
The media, not so much.
Once the Ello buzz on social media became a furor, a few tech publications took note. They were soon joined by anyone who had a tech vertical, and then The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker. Vox wrote an explainer on Ello, and the typically scathing ValleyWag gave Ello a glowing review. Hundreds of snarky first-looks and breaking news items were written about the sudden rush.
And then came the blur of critical think pieces. Some poked fun at Ello’s manifesto, and some just called bullshit on their claim that they’d never take ad money. Then, on Ello itself, a tech blogger drew sudden attention to the fact that Ello had received $435,000 in venture capital from a small-town VC firm in Vermont called FreshTracks Capital.
The investment wasn’t a secret, and anyone could see where the money had come from by checking publicly available databases like AngelList or Crunchbase. But the Twittersphere treated it as a salacious breaking news development, and took it as a sign that Ello can’t and won’t hold true to its values.
To the venture-obsessed tech media, a VC investment always raises questions of the scalable, long-term growth of a company. Tech blogs typically justify their coverage of early-stage start-ups by examining their business model and speculating about the exit strategy. The question for the armchair critics wasn’t if Ello would sell out, but when, and how.
“I’ll be frank,” Mr. Berger, Mr. Budnitz’s gruffer Colorado counterpart, said. “We do not have an exit strategy.”
Another popular shot at Ello was that the founders couldn’t be taken seriously as businessmen. Wired’s take on Ello, called “‘Facebook Killer’ Ello Doesn’t Care About Money — So It Won’t Work,” pointed out that despite his reputation of starting Facebook as a hoodied nobody, Mark Zuckerberg had been an advertising war hawk since Facebook’s inception. They argued that Ello’s manifesto was “unrealistic, and will cause the project to fail” as long as Mr. Budnitz puts his values ahead of Ello’s bottom line.
Mr. Berger has grown impatient with the critics. “We’re not idiots, we have a business plan,” he said. “We’re trying to throw a party. If you want to leave, get the fuck out! Go hate some other thing.”
So if the plan isn’t to sell data or run ads, how do they expect to turn a profit? The answer to that is a freemium features model. Ello will always be free to use, but eventually, it will start offering cosmetic upgrades for a few dollars each, like the option to link multiple Ello accounts, or to reverse Ello’s color scheme so that it presents white text on a black background—a sought after feature for Ello’s German and Japanese users, Mr. Budnitz said.
Freemium might be untested as the core model for a social network, but it’s tried and tested on dating sites, LinkedIn and, notably, WhatsApp, which sells custom emojis and stickers, and was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion.
Mr. Budnitz and the other founders have retreated from the public eye to keep the site up and running while building up the most wanted features list. Users are crying out for enhancements like reblogging, messaging and better search so that they can find their friends. But Ello’s priority is the initial group of Facebook refugees: the LGBTQ community.
The coders have put private profiles and abusive content flagging at the top of the upcoming features list, even if it’s at the cost of more exciting tools that could retain the larger wave of new users—another way Ello’s principles could possibly hinder their sustained success.
“Those other people can wait,” Mr. Berger said. “There are higher priorities—we have people here with needs, and we want to give them safety and security.”
Mr. Budnitz didn’t want to build a Facebook-killer so much as a small alternative. If only a tenth of its new user base sticks around, Mr. Budnitz will happily make do with the small community left behind.
“People assume we want to take over Facebook, and it’s flattering and strange, but that’s not what we’re trying to do,” he said. “Success to us just means that Ello works and that people use it. There’s no way we’re not going to survive.”Lucknow: A case has been registered against six men who assaulted a Muslim woman for painting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia, the police said on Monday.
“We will take further action as probe progresses,” said Anil Kumar, Superintendent of Police, Ballia.
Newly-married Nagma Praveen was severely beaten up by the husband and thrown out of the house for painting PM Modi and UP Chief Minister, claimed Shamsher Khan – the victim's father.
“Her husband called her insane for painting those pictures, said she has lost mental balance and just threw her out,” said Khan.
He filed a complaint against six people including the husband, Pervez Khan, at Sikandarpur police station on Sunday, said the police.
Nagma married Pervez last year in Basarikpur village in the Sikanderpur area.
With agency inputsUnder ordinary circumstances, accelerating inflation is bad for stock prices. Present circumstances, however, create a rare exception.
Investors who aim to increase their wealth by owning stocks over the next decade should hope Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke fails in his stated goal of holding inflation to 2% or less.
Inflation and Stock Prices
The 1970s discredited the previous belief that equities represent an effective hedge against inflation. As measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), annual inflation averaged 7.1% for the decade 1970-1979, while the Standard & Poor’s 500(1) advanced by just 1.60% per annum. Instead of preserving their wealth by owning stocks, investors lost ground, in real terms, at a rate of 5.50% a year.
Edifying as this experience was, investors should not leap to the conclusion that inflation is the key to determining whether to own stocks. For example, Exhibit 1 shows that the inflation rate was essentially the same in the 1940s and the 1980s, yet stock prices advanced at meager 3.02% annual rate in the former decade but a robust 12.59% in the latter. In the same vein, the 1950s and 1960s had very similar inflation rates but the rates of stock price appreciation were vastly different, at 13.55% and 4.39%, respectively.
This seeming inconsistency is resolved, at least for the six-decade stretch of the 1940s to the 1990s, by substituting for the inflation rate the change in the inflation rate. (See Exhibit 2.) For those decades, Exhibit 3 shows a clear, negative correlation between stock price appreciation and the change in the average annual inflation rate versus the preceding decade: For each one-percentage-point decline (rise) in inflation, the rate of appreciation in stock prices rose (fell) by 1.20 percentage points. This relationship explains 76% of the variance in decennial stock market appreciation during the period 1940-1999.
For example, in the 1950s the rate of increase in the Consumer Price Index declined by 3.5 percentage points versus the 1940s. The S&P responded by climbing at a rate of 13.55% a year during the decade. At the opposite extreme on Exhibit 3’s horizontal scale, the 1940s registered a 7.6-percentage-point rise in the average annual inflation rate versus the 1930s. In the 1940s, the S&P advanced by just 3.02 percentage points per annum.
This relationship is consistent with the view now generally held by economists, that stock prices are affected by inflation expectations, rather than inflation. For instance, a 1999 study by Steven A. Sharpe of the Federal Reserve Board(2) finds that an increase in expected inflation adversely affects stock prices by (a) lowering expected real earnings growth and (b) raising investors’ required real returns. It seems reasonable to conjecture the following link: A decade-over-decade drop in inflation reduces expectations of future inflation, causing stock price appreciation to accelerate.
The Renegade Decades
Exhibit 3 demonstrates that from the 1940s to the 1990s, the stock market consistently liked disinflation. Bookending that 60-year period, however, are two renegade decades. In the 1930s and the 2000s, the inflation rate declined versus the preceding decade. The stock market did not merely rise slowly, as it did when inflation spiked in the 1940s and 1970s, but declined in nominal terms over a full decade. The outlier positioning of the 1930s and 2000s plot points in Exhibit 3 underscores the anomalous results for the first and last decades of the full study period.
An explanation of these anomalies emerges from Exhibit 2. The two renegades are the decades in which the inflation rate fell from already low levels, i.e., 0.1% in the 1920s and 3.0% in the 1990s. (Inflation was less than 3.0% annually in the 1950s and 1960s, but both of those decades were followed by increases, rather than decreases, in inflation.)
Based on these observations, an amended statement of the relationship between inflation and stock prices reads as follows:
A decline from a high rate of inflation is associated with a high rate of stock price appreciation.
A decline from a low rate of inflation is associated with a low rate of stock price appreciation.
A possible explanation of this bifurcation is that below a certain level of inflation, a further decline reflects economic weakness more than it reflects a salutary reining in of excessive monetary expansion.
Implications for the Current Decade
Judging by the experience of the 1930s and 2000s, equity investors should be hoping for stabilization of inflation or, to be on the safe side, reinflation from the present level. If it is true, however, that steady to higher inflation is a precondition for rising stock prices in the current decade, the signals from the Federal Reserve are not encouraging. Chairman Ben Bernanke has not instituted an explicit inflation target, something he advocated before joining the Fed, but he has suggested that inflation of “about 2% or a bit below” would be consistent with the monetary authority’s mandate(3). Achieving that objective would represent disinflation from an already low rate (2.6% in the 2000s), something that has been associated historically with declining stock prices.
Even more discouraging to anyone rooting for reinflation is January’s year-over-year CPI rise of only 1.6%. If inflation were to average that low a level throughout the 2010s, stocks would be expected to suffer their second consecutive, decade-long decline.
On the other hand, an acceleration in the inflation rate to just 3.0% would be expected to boost the level of the index by 8.92% annually through 2019. The estimate is derived from the trend line shown in Exhibit 3.(4) Subtracting a 3.0% inflation rate would net a respectable 5.92% annual rate of real wealth increase.
This bullish scenario does not seem improbable, at least in the short run. The Fed justified its second round of quantitative easing partly on grounds that the wealth effect of rising stock prices would stimulate consumer spending and, by extension, boost output and reduce unemployment. To be sure, it is unlikely that this policy will remain in place through the end of the decade. Long before then the U.S. economy should be expanding vigorously enough to permit the termination of monetary stimulus.
Some caution is warranted regarding the optimistic scenario. First, as noted above, the change in the inflation rate explains 76% of the variance in the rate of stock price appreciation, but that leaves 24% to be determined by assorted other factors. The scatter around the trend in Exhibit 2 is instructive. By formula, stocks should have advanced at a rate of 9.04% per annum in the 1960s, but the actual rate was only 4.39%. A second caveat is that this report’s focus on ten-year chunks of time limits the analysis to a very small sample size. Moreover, two of the eight available observations are deemed to be outliers. On the other side, there is no precedent for stocks advancing during a decade in which inflation declined from a level of less than 5.5%.
Nothing in the preceding discussion is intended as a prescription for Federal Reserve policy. It is by no means clear that promoting long-run appreciation in stock prices ought to be an objective of the Open Market Committee. Furthermore, there is no assurance that the Fed can push the inflation rate up to, say 3.0%, without triggering a substantially steeper escalation. That could lead to a replay of the 1970s, when inflation jumped by 4.7 percentage points from 2.4% in the preceding decade. The result was the lowest annual stock price appreciation of the 1940-1999 span, a paltry 1.60%. For that matter, it is fair to ask whether the Fed should be promoting inflation at all, given its dual mandate of price stability and full employment.
Whatever stance one might wish the Fed to take, a purely descriptive approach to the relationships examined in this study indicates that equity investors should be rooting for reinflation. The record suggests that further disinflation from the comparatively low level of the 2000s will push stock prices lower over the next decade. A modest acceleration in inflation, on the other hand, should head off the negative real returns experienced in both the high-inflation 1970s and the low-inflation 2000s.
See related article: 7 Reasons Investors Should Embrace Inflation
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1 - Throughout this paper, inflation is defined by CPI and the level of stock prices is defined by the S&P 500.
2 - Steven A. Sharpe, “Stock Prices, Expected Returns, and Inflation.” Working Paper. Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Reserve Board (August 1999).
3 - Jon Hilsenrath, “New Push at Fed to Set an Official Inflation Goal,” WSJ.com (January 24, 2011).
4 - The relevant regression formula is y = -1.1976x +9.4014.The answer, of course, to the question posed in the title is obviously “yes.” People of every possible view get persecuted in some way in every society, especially if one defines persecution broadly enough to include things like “being called stupid by a complete stranger on Facebook.”
But since by that definition every category of people is persecuted, then clearly Christians are not being singled out.
We could easily add that there are liberal to moderate Christians who find themselves bullied, harrassed, and losing their jobs in the United States. But since the perpetrators are conservative Christians, it may be inappropriate to put “persecution of Christians by other Christians” into this category.
But if we narrow the question, to ask whether there is a state-sponsored attack on Christians or curtailment of their rights, other than in instances in which the restriction is protecting the rights of others, then I think the answer is clearly “no.”
Bruce Gerencser took a different approach, pointing out that, in a context of organized persecution of Christians on a societal or governmental level, this car would not be able to drive around without being seized and confiscated:Cornell University professor Brian Wansink claimed that he’d found a way to get kids aged 8 to 11 to choose fruit over junk food. But the research was actually done on toddlers.
Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images Brian Wansink
Last month, a controversial study about the food choices of elementary school students was retracted for statistical errors and replaced with a new analysis. But the updated version is also seriously flawed, undermining the study’s premise, BuzzFeed News has learned. Originally published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2012, the study found that children were more likely to choose apples over cookies during lunch when the apples had a sticker of Elmo. Both the original and the replacement claimed that the study included 208 students “ranging from 8 to 11 years old” at seven schools in upstate New York. But, as confirmed to BuzzFeed News by the leader of the study, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, the data was actually collected while observing kids 3 to 5 years old. “We made a mistake in the age group we described in the JAMA article. We mistakenly reported children ranging from 8 to 11 years old; however, the children were actually 3 to 5 years old,” Wansink told BuzzFeed News by email. After discovering the mistake last week, Wansink added, he asked for the article to be retracted. “We just learned that the study was indeed conducted with preschool children, not 8-11 year old children and are considering the appropriate next steps,” JAMA Pediatrics Editor Frederick Rivara told BuzzFeed News by email on Wednesday. What’s more, emails obtained by BuzzFeed News via public records requests suggest that another paper by this research team, a study about carrots published in Preventive Medicine in 2012, looked at kids in preschools while claiming to be about older children. Wansink did not answer any questions about this study.
The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement gives advice to nearly 30,000 elementary, middle, and high schools.
These age discrepancies matter because both studies are touted as evidence for the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, the $22 million, federally funded program that gives advice to nearly 30,000 elementary, middle, and high schools about how to get kids to choose healthy foods. The errors are only the latest in a slew of scientific misconduct allegations facing at least 50 of Wansink’s studies. Journals have so far retracted three papers (including the first retraction of the apples study) and corrected at least seven. “The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement is all about influencing the choice that children make,” Nicholas Brown, a graduate student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and one of Wansink’s loudest critics, told BuzzFeed News. “If a daycare worker is standing over a 3-year-old and saying, ‘Now Tommy, do you want a cookie or an apple?’, it doesn’t tell us anything about how 8- or 9-year-olds are going to react when we offer them a choice.” Brown flagged this age issue in a letter sent to Rivara on Wednesday and shared with BuzzFeed News. “We are taking the questions raised about Professor Wansink’s work quite seriously,” Cornell Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina told BuzzFeed News through a spokesperson. “The University is undertaking timely and appropriate action, in compliance with our internal policies and any external regulations that may apply.”
Brown first became suspicious of the apples study earlier this year, after he and two other researchers unearthed 150 errors in four of Wansink’s papers about pizza consumption.
Brown thought the apples study was fishy, too: Would 11-year-olds really pick something because it had an Elmo sticker? “That wouldn’t be my choice of character,” he said. In the letter he sent to Rivara, Brown pointed out that the revised study’s data spreadsheet included comments such as “no snack, didn’t wake up” and “picked neither was feeling sick after nap” — behaviors that sounded more like kids in a daycare or preschool rather than an elementary school. Brown also noticed that the comments seemed to contradict the study’s statement that “each child’s choice was unobtrusively recorded” by researchers. One child “told me what he wanted before he saw the options,” one of the |
publicly released in September last year.Adobe breach from October 2013 exposed over 153 million accounts containing internal IDs, usernames, emails, encrypted passwords and a password hint in plain text.MySpace data breach from 2008 exposed 360 million user accounts, containing usernames, emails and their decrypted (plaintext) passwords, which were leaked on the dark web in 2016.Google’s Gmail email service is known to be one of the most secure email services, but no company can secure their accounts from hackers due to a third party data breach.Millions of Gmail accounts, in which usernames, emails, and plaintext passwords were exposed, were stolen in multiple data breaches in Bitcoin Security Forum, Tumblr, Last.fm, 000webhost, Adobe, Dropbox, Flash Flash Revolution, LookBook and Xbox360 ISO, happened between 2008 and 2016.The data listed for sale by SunTzu583 has not been independently verified by The Hacker News, but has reportedly been checked by matching it to the data on a number of data breach notification platforms, including Hacked-DB and HaveIBeenPwned.Needless to say, you should immediately change almost all your account passwords at least once.Alsofor all your online accounts immediately.And once again, a strong recommendation:Also, you are recommended to change your password every few months, which limits how long a stolen password is useful to a hacker.Since no one can remember and recreate strong passwords for every single online account regularly, the best practice is to use a good password manager. It will generate, store and change regularly strong, unique passwords for all your accounts.In the early summer of 2008, my San Jose Earthquakes teammates and I were mired in a mediocre season trying to find our footing in Major League Soccer. We were the new team on the block, an expansion for the League looking to continue its growth.
I had played college soccer right down the road at Santa Clara University, where I was a four-year starter. My senior year I was named an ESPN the Magazine first team all American. I guess that means I was pretty good. Ha.
I was drafted in the fourth round of the 2008 MLS SuperDraft by the Los Angeles Galaxy. It was an amazing opportunity. I got to take the pitch with players like David Beckham and Landon Donovan. That didn't last long, as I was traded in the preseason to my hometown team, the Earthquakes.
By summer I was trying to make a name for myself on the team. I was in the starting line-up on the reserves, but I wanted to make the jump to the first team. My game was at my all-time highest level, and I was hoping that would soon lead to an appearance in a game. I was battling daily on the field in hopes of furthering my soccer career.
The battle I waged in my private life was never more apparent than on a team trip to Columbus that June. I found myself on the 18-man traveling team headed to face the Columbus Crew, who would go on to win the 2008 MLS Cup with Robbie Rogers a key cog on the team. While I didn't appear in the game, we won 2-0. It was a huge win for our squad. The Crew lost only two home games that season, and we won only two on the road.
We never missed a cause for celebration! Those rare victory dances always featured a bar, some beer... and women. It meant expectations and pressure on me from teammates to hook up with said women in said bar.
Up to this point I had been pretty good at deflecting questions and attention about my private life. But spending so much time with my teammates it became difficult to come up with stories and excuses for why I didn't have a girlfriend or didn't try to take anyone home at night.
This night stood out in particular: What should have been a great night celebrating one of our rare wins that season turned out to be a depressing nightmare. With teammates razzing me to talk to this woman and that woman, I turned to my drink and imbibed heavily to avoid confrontation. As the night wore on my teammates continued to enjoy themselves, as I felt worse and worse about my situation and myself.
As I so often did, I snuck out of the bar and returned to my hotel room alone, hoping that no one would notice or remember that night as we boarded the flight home the next morning. Thankfully nobody said a word.
When I was released from the Earthquakes the following preseason it was simultaneously disappointing and a blessing. I had the opportunity to play for Vancouver or Portland, but I felt I had to leave soccer to sort out my personal life and get things right in my head. I truly believed that I could never come out as gay while playing professional soccer. It was that year in MLS that I had reached my breaking point. My release from soccer put me on the path to coming out to myself, my family and my friends.
I soon tapped into Outsports, which helped turn my life around. It was in large part because of the stories of other gay athletes I read on the site that I found my path forward. So many of the stories of other athletes resonated with my own life. When I read about Rogers, who had been struggling with his own sexuality across the pitch of that memorable game in Columbus, I finally felt that I had a role model, someone whose story was so very similar to mine.
Following his public coming out in 2013 I came out to my family and friends. My life hasn't been the same since as I have found happiness like I couldn't understand before. It was five years after that fateful game that I finally felt my life finding completion.
My journey came full circle that summer. June 2013 was monumental in the gay-rights movement in California, as Proposition 8 was repealed and we said good-bye to DOMA. I was entering my last year of dental school in San Francisco and I finally felt comfortable in my own skin. My life was moving in the direction I wanted to go.
Some of my lifelong friends were in the City to celebrate with me, and - despite them being straight - they were supportive and open to going to the gay bars with me for the first time. With their support, I finally felt comfortable. After so many years of dreading the straight-bar scene with my teammates and friends - often leaving drunk, alone and dejected - sharing these new and comfortable experiences with my closest friends at Pride was liberating and vindicated my decision to start living a true, open and honest life.
It was during one of those Pride parties that I met my boyfriend. The level of excitement I had just talking with him that night - how natural our interaction felt - confirmed everything I had questioned in myself. Our first interaction was brief, the usual conversation about where you live in the city and what you do. He had recently moved to my neighborhood, and we agreed to meet up the next day to watch the Pride parade together. The conversation flowed easily and I was smitten from our first moment together.
I was a million miles and a lifetime away from that bar in Columbus five years earlier when I escaped into several pints of beer.
My boyfriend and I will celebrate our two-year anniversary next weekend. I graduated from dental school at the University of Pacific a year ago and now practice dentistry in San Jose with my mom (a hygienist) and dad (a dentist). I still go to Santa Clara and Earthquakes games from time to time. Once you've got that in your blood, you just can't let it go.
While my playing days are behind me - though I do venture onto the pitch for Santa Clara alumni games - I know I can still contribute to the beautiful game in other ways. The impact Rogers and the stories of other athletes had on me was profound. Without them I may still be drowning my sorrows in the beer of straight bars. I know other athletes' stories helped me immensely, so I am sharing mine here to help the next guy find acceptance and happiness.
Life got so much better for me after I came out to myself, my friends and my family. If I have one regret it's that I didn't live my life and share the real me with my teammates when I had the chance.
You can find Matt Hatzke on Facebook. He is also reachable via email at Mwhatzke@gmail.com.
Story Editor: Cyd ZeiglerLike it? Share it...
A week after the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) latest meteorological satellite went online,the European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched and put into orbit its’ SmallGEO platform after blasting off from Kourou, French Guiana. The satellite will now use its own thrusters in order to reach its geostationary orbit, over 36,000 miles above the equator.
The SmallGEO platform is the first of its kind to reach space, with aboard it the Hispasat 36W-1 satellite, which is expected to bolster Europe’s telecommunications network. Designed and manufactured by OHB Systems, the platform boasts a more flexible design capable of accommodating larger payloads than its predecessors.
A successful launch of the first SmallGEO platform has made the CEO of OHB very happy, as he explained to Phys.org. edit: original article link from Phys.org is no longer existent.
“The launch is a major milestone in the history of OHB. Hispasat 36W-1 proves that OHB’s concept of a modular and flexible SmallGEO platform fits into the market. SmallGEO is destined to build a cornerstone for Europe’s future activities in the segment of geostationary satellites in the three-tonne class. For OHB, Hispasat 36W-1 is the first project of a wide scope of future missions based on the SmallGEO platform, including a revolution in satellite technology: the full electric propulsion mission Electra.”
Meanwhile, Carlos Espinós Gómez, Hispasat’s CEO was also very satisfied with the result of the ESA’s launch, and described how the new telecom satellite is expected to perform once it becomes fully operational.
“For Hispasat, this new satellite represents an important step forward in its innovation strategy. Hispasat 36W-1 is not only the first mission of the new SmallGEO platform, but also incorporates an advanced regenerative payload that will provide the satellite with greater flexibility and signal quality thanks to its reconfigurable antenna and onboard processor, thus improving the telecommunications services it will provide to our clients.”
The Hispasat 36W-1 will be tasked with providing broadband services not only to Europe but also to South America, whilst its’ SmallGEO platform will be under scrutiny, with the ESA and OHB hoping to launch several more platforms in the near future. As the ESA’s Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Application Magali Vaissiere hinted at, the next satellite based on SmallGEO will be the European Data Relay System’s EDRS-C, which will help further upgrade Europe’s telecommuncations network.0 Study: Boston's rush hour is starting earlier, lasting longer
BOSTON - Labor Day and summer vacations are in the rear-view mirror.
Whether we like it or not, that means most of us are returning to our normal routines and getting back in our cars to drive to work or school.
A new phenomenon is the advent of rush hour type traffic at all hours of the day. A recent survey found Boston now ranks eighth in the country when it comes to bad traffic.
“Oh, it has gotten so much worse,” said Regina Sohn, who commutes daily between Brookline and Billerica.
Sohn said her drive has become very stressful.
“Because of my strange schedule to bring kids home, and bring kids where they need to go, I have seen traffic starting at 2 p.m.,” she said.
The research firm Inrix studied how Boston area travel has changed and they determined the number of miles being driven on area roads has jumped 10 percent over the past four years.
Many commuters are hitting the road at different times to try and beat the rush, but that doesn’t seem to work anymore.
MORE: Hundreds of Mass. schools find high levels of lead in drinking water
Matt Casale, a staff attorney at Massing who specializes in transportation issues, says rush hour now happens at any time of the day and any day of the week.
“The real reason for this is because of the amount of cars on the road... Our current transportation system, was developed in the 1950s,” explained Casale.
That creates a two-fold problem: the roads built in that era were designed to handle fewer cars; also, that infrastructure is now reaching the end of its life and either needs to be fixed of replaced.
Casale pointed to the recent Commonwealth Avenue bridge project near Boston University as an example of a construction problem that created all kinds of traffic mayhem.
Factor in lower gas prices and a healthy economy putting more people on the roads, and that creates a perfect storm for traffic.
“It was sort of this confluence of events that got people back on the road, and we can't trust that that is going to bottom out,” added Casale.
Dr. Danny Mendoza, chairman of the psychiatry department at Beth Israel Deaconess in Plymouth, said the lack of traffic’s predictability is tremendously anxiety provoking.
“You can’t disconnect from what’s happening, in terms of reverie, thinking about what you are going to eat tonight, whether you are going to the gym, because you are just focusing on going home and it’s no longer this peaceful drive home. It’s just stop and go traffic,” said Dr. Mendoza.
A scenario Regina Sohn knows all too well, as she juggles a busy career and the needs of her family.
“It’s very anxiety provoking. Sometimes, I plan for an hour, and because something like a call runs late, I have just 45 minutes or a half hour and that just doesn’t do it,” Sohn said.
MORE: FOLLOW LIVE TRAFFIC UPDATES HERE
© 2019 Cox Media Group.Hi, I’m Anatoli Ingram, and welcome to Hidden Arcana, where we’ll give you an inside look at some of the people and processes behind the creation of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™. This week, I spoke to Game Designer Sean Hughes about how he got his start in game development, the projects he’s working on at ArenaNet, and what beetles have to do with event design!
Sean started making mods for his favorite games when he was fourteen. After hearing a motivational speech in his senior year of high school about turning passions into new lines of work, he began seriously considering game design as a career. He studied at DigiPen Institute of Technology, and in his senior year became an intern at ArenaNet. His first responsibility was to help iron out bugs on the Skills team. Sean also worked on the mesmer’s elite specialization, the chronomancer.
Sean was offered a full-time position at ArenaNet following his internship, and he moved to working on maps for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. While creating content for the game was much different than his previous work on skills, the skills and combat systems of Guild Wars 2 are so pervasive throughout the game that his experience proved useful. Players have skills, creatures have skills, and even bundles and objects can have skills; knowing how they work helps him make the best use of them.
Event creation is Sean’s primary responsibility. He described the process of creating an event in one of the Maguuma Jungle maps, which came to him after he saw the Nuhoch hylek using their massive tongues to grab and toss insects. Sean thought it would be fun if players could do the same thing, and so he came up with an event that would make use of the ability to toss bugs around with wild abandon.
The premise of the event is that the players’ allies want to raise beetles to serve them, but they lack the necessary bugs to fuel the process. It’s the players’ responsibility to collect creepy-crawlies, but it’s not as simple as picking them up or escorting them to their new homes. Instead, the event requires players to use control abilities to push and throw beetles onto capture points.
Events are built around one concept that makes them stand out, and in this case, Sean wanted to have players use control abilities to accomplish objectives. The first step was to build a prototype of the event from start to finish and determine whether the concept worked in action; concepts that initially sound good can end up being either too complicated, a poor fit for the game, or simply not fun. If the prototype seems promising, the next step is to invite fellow developers to playtest the event. Feedback was mixed: throwing beetles back and forth was fun, but the event was too easy and lacked tension, so Sean raised the stakes by adding enemies to harass the beetles and their would-be herders.
Feedback is an important part of content development, but it can be challenging to use effectively. Sean said that feedback sometimes correctly identifies an issue, but not the right solution. An event may also be working as intended, but the goals and objectives may not be communicated correctly to the player. Interpreting the meaning of feedback is just as important as gathering it.
Sean said that his love of video games derives from the endless possibilities they provide for doing the impossible. As a gamer himself, he wants players who choose to spend their free time in Guild Wars 2—and the events he’s designed—to have the best experiences he can create.BEIJING (Reuters) - The discovery of dangerous levels of toxic cadmium in rice sold in the southern city of Guangzhou, the latest in a series of food scandals, has piled more pressure on China to clean up its food chain - possibly at the expense of Mao Zedong’s cherished goal of self-sufficiency.
A photo of former China's Chairman Mao Zedong is placed on top of a Mao charcoal portrait that was painted by Chinese farmer Yang Chuanye, in Jishan county, Shanxi province, May 13, 2013. REUTERS/Stringer
The ruling Communist Party has long staked its legitimacy on its ability to guarantee domestic staple food supplies, and has pledged to be at least 95 percent self-sufficient even as demand increases and the fastest and biggest urbanisation process in history swallows up arable land.
That has led to a drive for quantity rather than quality - securing bumper harvests even from land contaminated by high levels of industrial waste and irrigated with water unfit for human consumption. “China has a big population and we used to face food shortages so the government has focused on quantity,” said Li Guoxiang, a researcher at the state-backed Rural Development Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences.
But food safety is becoming a bigger worry than food security after a series of scandals ranging from melamine-tainted milk to toxic heavy metals in rice and vegetables - and raising the share of imports may be the least-worst option.
The government, under increasing public pressure and facing anti-pollution protests, has promised to reverse some of the damage done to the environment by three decades of breakneck industrial expansion. But the scale of the problem is huge, especially as China looks to maintain its economic growth, find jobs for millions of new urban residents and ensure that just 9 percent of the world’s land can feed a fifth of the global population.
“Quantity is still a precondition, but the government is now putting lots of effort into safety, and high-quality food imports will definitely increase,” said Li. “People will realise there are more advantages than disadvantages regarding rising food imports and things are turning in that direction.”
China is already the world’s biggest soybean importer after making a strategic decision to outsource production, mostly to the United States. Some predict Beijing might have to do the same with other land-intensive farm products like beef - a move that would benefit big producers like Australia.
While it has vowed to remain self-sufficient in major staples, imports of rice and corn are expected to hit record levels this year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts. [ID:nUIDAGE93Y] Wheat imports, too, are seen at a near record.
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Graphic: Production data r.reuters.com/xyk38t
Graphic: Arable land, yields r.reuters.com/fem38t
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LAND STRAINS
Inspectors in Guangzhou collected samples from 18 locations in the city and found cadmium levels in eight exceeded the national standard of 0.2 micrograms per kilogram, with some as high as 0.4 mg/kg, the local government said late last week.
Though experts insisted the health risks were very low and China’s standards for rice, its staple food, are far higher than the rest of the world, authorities swiftly came under attack from users of China’s popular microblogging service Weibo. Guangzhou was eventually compelled to reveal the tainted rice originated from central China’s Hunan province, the country’s biggest rice-producing region.
Hunan produces 30 million tonnes of rice a year, 15 percent of the national crop, but it is also a big miner of nonferrous metals and toxic elements such as arsenic and cadmium. In many cases, wastewater run-offs from the mines are used directly to irrigate farmland, and tailings also tend to be badly managed.
Yin Lihui, an official with the provincial environmental protection administration, told state media that nonferrous metals mining in Hunan has caused heavy pollution in a region dubbed the “home of rice and fish”.
“We call it ‘integrated food and mining complexes’ - basically food production and mining happening at the same place together, and this isn’t rational,” said Chen Nengchang, a researcher at the Guangdong Institute of Environmental and Soil Sciences who works on projects to rehabilitate land damaged by mining and heavy metal pollution. “The problem is that China has a big population and scarce land and soil, so we need to figure out another way of dealing with this.”
To ensure food supplies, China has said it will limit the amount of land given to development. This will not only require the government to declare farmland out of bounds to industry, but also require ruined wasteland to be returned to life. Some researchers say as much as 70 percent of China’s farmland is affected by pollution. After decades of contamination, land must be restored if it’s to return to agriculture.
That takes time and money. High real estate prices in urban areas make it relatively easy to find the money to clean up land contaminated by chemical or heavy metal waste, but cleaning up the countryside is a greater challenge, said Richard Fuller, president of the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based non-profit group that helps clean up polluted sites in China and elsewhere. “There are solutions for the majority of damaged sites but it’s going to take time, technology and money.”
RURAL POLLUTION
An official at China’s environmental ministry said last month that a nationwide soil survey revealed traces of toxic heavy metals that were deposited as long as a century ago. It also revealed extensive use of banned pesticides - a sign that farmers, under pressure to produce more, may be as culpable as heavy industry.
“Sea and river pollution, heavy metal pollution of the soil and atmospheric pollution are very serious causes of environmental damage, but we should say that the biggest contributor is agriculture,” said Wen Tiejun, dean at the School of Agricultural Economics at China’s Renmin University.
Experts say 60 percent of the pesticides used on China’s severely overworked farms are used improperly, further contaminating the food chain. Chinese farmers are also known to use arsenic in animal feed to help fight disease and speed growth, raising levels of the toxin in rice to dangerous levels in some regions.
With all this pressure on China’s farmland and water supplies, senior agricultural officials are beginning to question the long-held goal of self-sufficiency.
“An appropriate increase in imports, if it doesn’t affect our country’s security, will be of benefit in easing domestic resource and environmental pressures,” Chen Xiwen, head of the Communist Party’s top working group on rural policy, told a forum this month.
“We do need to consider a more positive strategy towards going overseas, and make full use of the global market.” (Additional reporting by Dominique Patton; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)Mar. 1990 Kansas adopts the country’s first ag gag law, making it illegal for a person to enter a private animal facility to take pictures or video if they have “intent to damage the enterprise conducted at the facility.”
Nov. 1990 Washington apple growers sue CBS for $250 million over a 60 Minutes episode alleging that the Alar chemical sprayed in orchards puts children at risk of cancer. The case is ultimately dismissed; Alar is taken off the market.
1991 Montana prohibits recording “with the intent to commit criminal defamation,” while North Dakota bans filming without the owner’s consent.
Jan. 1991 Colorado introduces the first “veggie libel” law, allowing ag producers to sue those who disparage their products. The governor vetoes the bill, but over the next six years, Colorado and 12 other states pass such laws, in some cases shifting the burden of proof to the party being sued.
1992 ABC PrimeTime Live reporters document Food Lion employees grinding expired beef with fresh beef and applying barbecue sauce to expired chicken to mask the smell. Food Lion sues ABC for fraud and trespass and is awarded $5.5 million. An appellate court reduces it to $2, saying the lawsuit tried to “end run” the First Amendment.
June 1996 The Texas Beef Group sues Oprah Winfrey for $11 million for an interview with a Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) representative who declared that mad cow disease was a potential epidemic worse than AIDS, to which Winfrey remarked, “It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger.” Beef prices drop 7 cents per pound. The jury ultimately rules in favor of Oprah.
Oct. 1997 Texas emu ranchers sue Honda for an ad in which a young job searcher is told, “Emus, Joe. It’s the pork of the future.” Ranchers claimed the line would make emu meat less appealing to Muslims and Jews. The case is dismissed.
1999 A three-month PETA investigation of pig farms leads to the first-ever felony indictments of farmworkers for animal cruelty.
2003 The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) introduces model legislation that would create a “registry of animal and ecological terrorists” and prohibit recording in an animal or research facility “with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner.”
2006 The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, inspired by ALEC’s model legislation, is signed into law by President George W. Bush.
2008 PETA’s multi-month investigation of Iowa’s MowMar Farms documents workers abusing pigs with metal rods and electric prods, and results in six convictions.
Jan. 2010 A Washington state senator introduces a law that labels anyone who protests animal and natural-resource facilities a terrorist. The bill, which borrows heavily from ALEC’s model legislation, dies in committee.
Nov. 2010 The HSUS films workers at Willmar Poultry Co. throwing sick, injured, and surplus birds into grinders alive.
Dec. 2010 The HSUS’s undercover investigation of a Smithfield facility shows sows confined inside small gestation crates. Safeway, Costco, Burger King, and Subway announce they will not buy from suppliers who use crates; Smithfield pledges to phase them out by 2017.
2011 Ag gag laws are introduced in five states and pass in two.
Nov. 2011 Undercover footage gathered by Mercy for Animals shows workers suffocating birds in plastic bags and hens crammed in dirty cages at Sparboe Farms, an egg supplier to McDonald’s and Target. Both companies drop Sparboe.
July 2012 Missouri is the first state to pass an ag gag law that emphasizes “quick reporting“: Those who suspect abuse “must provide the recording to a law enforcement agency within 24 hours” or face charges.
Sept. 2012 Beef Products Inc. files a $1.2 billion lawsuit against ABC News for its “pink slime” investigation.
Feb. 2013 Amy Meyer becomes the first to be charged under an ag gag law. Standing outside the barbed-wire fence enclosing the Smith Meatpacking slaughterhouse, Meyer videotapes “flesh being spewed from a chute on the side of the building” and a downer cow being carried by a tractor. The co-owner of the slaughterhouse is also the town’s mayor. Charges are dropped after blogger Will Potter publicizes the case.
April 2013 When his ag gag bill clears the Tennessee state House, Rep. Andy Holt emails the HSUS and calls its investigations “tape and rape” by “a pathetic group of sensationalists who seek to profit from animal abuse.” The governor vetoes his bill.Hydrogen gas squeezed at tremendous pressures has transformed into a metal in the laboratory. So say a pair of scientists in Germany, whose bold claim is being met with skepticism.
Many scientists have tried to make metallic hydrogen since its existence was first predicted in 1935. The exotic substance is thought to form at high pressures, such as those in Jupiter’s core. It may be a superconductor at room temperature, useful for making wires that carry electricity with little loss of current. And NASA hopes to one day put it to work as a rocket fuel that would be more powerful than anything around today.
“Making metallic hydrogen is often considered the Holy Grail for high-pressure physics,” says Mikhail Eremets, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, who with Ivan Troyan reported the results online November 13 in Nature Materials.
To see if hydrogen could be made to condu(CNN) — From its pillar box red, cast iron exterior and domed roof to its crown insignia and paneled windows, the red British telephone booth is a universally recognized icon.
Giles Gilbert Scott's famous design was first introduced following a competition in 1924, with variations appearing across the country, from London street corners to remote villages.
More than 90 years later, the phone box is a popular backdrop for thousands of selfies, but thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, these British classics are becoming obsolete.
Some, however, are being preserved as entrepreneurs and communities re-purpose them as unexpected places to swap books, buy coffee or even enjoy a meal.
British cool
Umar Khalid runs successful phone box cafe Kape Barako. Courtesy Rebecca Claire Photography
Though the phone boxes may not have been used by millennials, they've long been a part of pop culture in the UK, having been immortalized on the back cover of David Bowie's "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album.
Nigel Linge, Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Salford and author of The British Phonebox suggests it's all about the aesthetic.
Giles Gilbert Scott brought a design which captured people's imagination, he says.
"It was so different, it just looked dramatic on the street, in terms of how it appeared, with the windows, the domed roof, the red color."
Adopt a phone box
Recognizing their cult status, UK telecommunications company British Telecom introduced an " adopt a kiosk " program, encouraging communities and businesses to buy red phone boxes for £1 (less than $2) and give them a new lease of life.
Red Kiosk Company transformed these iconic kiosks at the end of Brighton pier. Courtesy Red Kiosk Company
Among them were two on the pier of the southern English seaside town of Brighton, which were spotted by locals Edward Ottewell and Steve Beeken.
"They were empty and run down and we thought we could sell sunglasses from the phone boxes and hats from this great location," says Ottewell.
The duo regenerated the Brighton kiosks and then formed the Red Kiosk Company with a plan to adopt 500 phone boxes across the country.
They helped Londoner Umar Khalid transform a phone box near Hampstead Heath, a large area of parkland in the city's northern suburbs, into a thriving cafe, Kape Barako.
Khalid says his kiosk is regularly photographed, making numerous appearances on Instagram and Facebook.
In the summer months, Londoners can also enjoy Spiers Salads in central Bloomsbury Square. In Birmingham, the UK's second-largest city, locals praise Jake's Coffee Shop.
Phone boxes = community
Scotland's smallest internet cafe is situated in this Aberdeenshire phone box. Courtesy Patsy Younie
Phone boxes are often associated with Britain's capital, but they can also be spotted in the country's more rural areas.
In the Scottish hamlet of Marywell in Ballogie, bordering the Cairngorms National Park, the community has converted its local phone box into Scotland's smallest Internet cafe -- a digital oasis in the Scottish Highlands where 3G and 4G phone signals are hard to find.
The Ballogie phone box dates from the 1940s and neighbors the Butterworth Gallery, run by Sarah Parker.
Parker had the idea of connecting the WiFi from her gallery to the phone box and adding a hot drinks machine.
"It had to be repainted, we had to seal all of the panes, it was leaking quite badly," Marywell resident David Younie says, adding that it's helped bring residents together and has become a focal point in the picturesque hamlet.
Occasionally residents take the coffee machine out of the phone box. Not because of fear of burglary, but because they worry the water might freeze.
Lending library
The Lewisham Micro Library is looked after by locals. Courtesy Matt Brown/Creative Commons/Flickr
In a suburb of southeast London, another community came together to transform a phone box into the successful Lewisham Micro Library
"Just the fact that you might be using it at the same time as someone else means you're talking to people who would be total strangers otherwise," says local "librarian" Susan Bennett.
The Lewisham phone box is beloved by the local residents, and initial fears of vandalism have proven unfounded.
"Generally it's in good order because people want that," says Bennett.
Working on the go
Working on the go? Check out Pod Works. Courtesy Trevor Wilson design
Pod Works is another company set up to convert telephone boxes, this time into mini work stations for commuters and tourists.
Its booths are decked out with printers, a 25-inch screen, a powerbank of plugs and a hot drinks machine.
Pod Works believe it's the future of mobile working.
People sign up to be members, book slots at pods across cities and get sent an access code for their chosen kiosk.
"At the moment the phone boxes are derelict, they are becoming a bit of an eyesore. We wanted to re-purpose them for the 21st century," says Lorna Moore, managing director of Pod Works.
Keeping the heritage
Will phone boxes become a thing of the past? ALESSANDRO ABBONIZIO/AFP/Getty
Two new types of modern, sleek phone kiosks will adorn British streets in 2017.
British Telecom has introduced a Links kiosk, a screen featuring advertising and information and WiFi, while World Pay Phones will introduce a screen which incorporates the iconic domed roof.
"The phone box has evolved, it's still an access to telecommunications service, but of course the nature of those services has changed dramatically," says Linge.
While some orignal red booths are protected as historic treasures, Ottewell worries others will simply be removed to make way for the new kiosks, leaving future opportunities for reinvention unlikely.
"We want to protect and save as many as we can," he says. "It's going to create employment, it's going to regenerate an area that's been left, and do some good.Aline Brosh McKenna discusses the Emmy-winning series' return, which includes new guest star Scott Michael Foster.
Since its premiere, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has had to balance multiple ambitious intentions: to create musical television with original songs, to sell a relative unknown as its star and to stand out from the rest of the genre programming on The CW. Not only did the Emmy-winning series succeed on all fronts, but it also put an intriguing twist on the romantic comedy genre: interpreting the familiar tropes through the lens of mental health.
While our titular protagonist Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) may not be literally insane, her behavior does raise questions of her mental stability. After all, she threw away a mid-six figure salaried job in New York for life in the far more humble West Covina, California, just because her childhood ex Josh Chan (Victor Rodriguez III) lives there. But after a season of increasingly erratic behavior, somehow — through magic perhaps? — she finally ended up with Josh in last year’s finale. Season 2 picks up with Rebecca having had her heart’s desire fulfilled, which has only served to reinforce her delusions of romantic destiny.
READ MORE: ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Emmys: Crafting Those Wacky Songs
“That’s exactly it,” co-creator and showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna told IndieWire in an interview. “She sort of was not admitting to herself why she was even in town. She wasn’t even really admitting to herself that she was in love with Josh. So now she has that absolute conviction that they love each other and they’re meant to be together. It’s kind of the next phase of romantic obsession, where you go from having really a crush to having a certainty. That really heightens the level of her obsession.”
Read on for McKenna’s insight into what other characters and elements will be reaching another level this season:
Scott Everett White/The CW
Rebecca’s Men
Brainy bartender Greg Serrano (Santino Fontana) had actually pined over Rebecca for a while before she finally gave into their obvious chemistry. But his self-destructive behavior in the finale pushed her away, straight into the arms of a newly single Josh.
“When will he get his act together?” McKenna mused. “ I think the trajectory of his life would’ve been completely different had it not been for Rebecca. Season 1 really set the stage for all the reverberations, and in Season 2 Greg is also dealing with all the things that he’s learned about himself, partly due to Rebecca’s insanity kind of stirring the pot.”
Scott Everett White/The CW
Meanwhile, Josh is now saddled with the reality that is Rebecca’s love turned on full blast. “Towards the end of last season he was sort of falling for her more than she was for him because she was preoccupied with Greg. And in that last scene she feels like she woke up and realized that the Josh thing was meant to be and that the Greg thing was, ‘God bless the broken road that led me to Josh.’ Then the question is how long is that going to last? And what is Josh going to do when confronted with the romantic certainty of this very intense young woman?”
As Rebecca’s idealized man, Josh hadn’t had the most revealing scenes character-wise, but Season 2 aims to rectify that oversight now that they’re together.
McKenna said, “We really do start to understand how Josh has gotten to the place that he |
úcio is another frequent occurrence. This time it's all about decision making on your part. More often than not, the attacking Lúcio will use his ultimate to push like previously stated. Now when this Lúcio pushes, your team should all be grouped together. If they are, then it's a good idea to use your ultimate. This part is all about timing as well. Getting the perfect timing can result in ultimate victory in the battle. The best time to use your ultimate in response is when two people on your team take a lot of damage and get to low HP. This is primarily because you gain an advantage because of this. By this time the enemy team's 'Sound Barrier' may have already faded and they're back to their normal HP. If you then use yours, your team will have the +500 shield advantage over the enemy. This doesn't always work though, as your team could be completely wiped out and it all depends on how confident you are in your team's ability to survive. If your team seem to be struggling, then the best course of action is to just use your 'Sound Barrier' immediately after the enemies, which puts you are on even ground and gives your team an equal chance to win the fight.
Enemy Ultimates is something that you will face a lot. Sometimes I see people using their Lúcio ultimate for silly things. It can sometimes save your team, however. As an example, using your 'Sound Barrier' during a McCree ultimate may be a silly idea. Even with your overshield, McCree can still charge his ultimate to break the barrier and take your team out anyway. However, if your team is low HP and the McCree pops his ultimate, you can use 'Sound Barrier' then speed boost out of the situation which could potentially save your teammates from being killed. It may not be worth it though and it all depends on the situation. The best thing to do in this situation is to assess it and make sure it isn't a waste of your ultimate.
Lúcio taking on the enemy team
During a Zarya ultimate it may be a good idea to use your ultimate. Again though this depends on variables. If there is an enemy Genji, Pharah or McCree who will combo with the Zarya, don't bother. You will die anyway and it will be a complete waste of the 'Sound Barrier'. However, if there is nobody that is comboing with the Zarya, then it's a good idea to use 'Sound Barrier' as it can keep your whole team alive through the potshots from other heroes and the Zarya herself. Ultimates like Genji's depends on how confident you are in both your team and yourself when trying to avoid him. If you have a Zenyatta, don't even think about popping the Lúcio ultimate. However, if you think that you can dodge the Genji and are confident in your team taking him out while you all have buffed HP, then go ahead and do it.
Conclusion
I hope these guidelines help you improve your Lucio abilities but remember, it mostly comes down to how you feel and what you think is best. Thanks for reading!“Fury” is a movie about war, but Jimmy Kimmel was stunned to learn that there was fighting going on during the shooting of the film even when the cameras weren’t rolling. Jon Bernthal, who stars in the David Ayer-directed WWII tank film, casually mentioned the film’s early morning fight club.
“David, in all his films, feels strongly that everybody fights each other every single morning before we go into our tank training and our rehearsals,” he said, at which point Kimmel had to stop him for clarification.
See video: Brad Pitt Tries to Teach Logan Lerman The Brutal Reality of War in ‘Fury’ Clip
Bernthal explained that everybody gets involved first thing in the morning. They’re only given MMA gloves and they have five minutes per round. It’s supposed to be a way to build camaraderie and a sense of equality.
But he did notice one thing. “We were definitely sort of told not to hit each other in the face,” Bernthal said. But on his first day of sparring, he found himself squaring off against Ayer himself.
“I’m sort of like, alright dude, I’m kind of gonna let you dictate this thing,” he said “And I’m standing there and he just — Wapow! — He just hits me right in the nose, you know. Blood starts coming out. I’m like alright, it’s gonna be this kind of party.”
See photos: The Scene at TheGrill 2014: TheWrap’s Media Leadership Conference
He said that when Brad Pitt showed up on set, they were told even more implicitly to not hit in the face. “I felt like there was a direct correlation to how important you were in Hollywood, or how important you were to that movie, to whether or not you could actually get hit in the face,” he said.
Kimmel called it insanity, but Bernthal disagreed. “I feel like it was awesome. It was a great way for us to get to know each other,” he said. “I felt it really bonded us. I’m gonna suggest it on the next rom-com I make.”
Fan can see if that bond translated to the screen when the film is released. “Fury,” written and directed by Ayer, also stars Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jason Isaacs and Scott Eastwood. Columbia Pictures will release it to theaters on Friday, Oct. 17.One of the most dramatic economic shifts currently taking place in the world is in the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf—until recently swimming in excess cash but now, as oil plummets, turning to a chronic trade deficit. Their misery, however, is to Europe’s benefit. Because of those lower oil prices, there is a very real possibility that the European Union will become the world’s largest surplus economy next year.
These are takeaways in a note to clients (pdf) from Michael Pearce at Capital Economics. Look at Pearce’s chart, which tracks the impact of $60-a-barrel oil. The Gulf’s considerable turn of fortunes means a trade deficit for the first since 1998, a time when oil prices plunged to $10 a barrel.
Capital Economics
But for China and the euro zone, $60-a-barrel oil means lower import payments and an improvement in their trade balances, worth 0.2% of global GDP in each case. Another big shift is in the US, whose oil imports have plunged from about 11 million barrels a day in 2008 to 7 million now, offset by domestic oil production surging to 9 million. The US trade imbalance looks likely to drop to below 2% of US GDP, its lowest since 1997.You know, writing and judging really have a lot in common. That probably has something to do with why I enjoy both of them so much. One of those things, one that it took me an incredibly long time to get over, is that it’s hard to know how you’re doing unless someone else tells you.
This isn’t a solo quest.
When you write something, you know what you meant to say. You know how you intended it to come across. You can clearly see the brilliance of your vision.
And that’s the problem. Your notion of what your writing is supposed to be clouds your ability to see what’s actually on the page—to listen to how you sound to the players—to understand how they feel about their interaction with you.
That’s why feedback is so vital, both to writing and to judging. Other people aren’t in your head. They don’t know what you meant–they only know what you wrote or did or said. They can tell you what they observed, and they can tell you what they felt about their observations. Your intentions don’t cloud their perception, and that different perspective is one of the most valuable things that we can offer to each other.
As a community, we’ve done a good job of talking about how important feedback is. We’ve even created places where we can talk about how to improve giving feedback. There are lots of articles floating around (see: this blog) about how important it is to be open to constructive criticism, to learn from it, and to use it as a springboard to improve yourself.
It seems like one of the pillars of that message is that you can’t take feedback personally.
Here’s the thing:
That advice is crap.
I wanted to say something stronger, but Angela, the editor of this blog, wouldn’t let me. So, I’m just going to say it again instead. You know, for emphasis:
That advice is crap.
Feedback can hurt. You devote time and energy to judging events. You have goals and aspirations. Being told that you didn’t live up to your vision, that you didn’t perform the way that you wanted to…that sucks.
It sucks a lot. The more invested you were in an event or project…the more it sucks. The higher your hopes…the more it sucks. The more pressure you felt to do well—if you’re team leading or head judging for the first time, for example—the more it sucks.
Pretending that it doesn’t suck, that the negative feedback doesn’t hurt—that isn’t going to help you. It isn’t going to help anyone.
Riki and I recently had a Slack conversation about a dichotomy that he sees around feedback. This is what he said:
Judges like feedback as coaching. They dislike feedback as evaluation.
I think that part of the reason for this distinction is that we’ve been conditioned to think that being hurt by feedback isn’t okay—we’re not supposed to take it personally. But sometimes it does hurt.
The intersection of these two things (assuming we should have super-thick skin and reacting to feedback emotionally) makes us feel even worse than the feedback itself. And then we have these negative conversations with ourselves: Why can’t I read this without feeling this way? I can’t even take criticism right!
This doubling-down of feel-bads doesn’t just affect how we receive feedback. It influences how we write reviews, too. We don’t want other judges, our friends and colleagues, to feel bad. Because it sucks.
So sometimes we overcompensate with what Riki referred to as coaching:
“I think A would have been more effective than B.”
“I think that if you prioritized C instead of D, the players would have had a better experience.”
“I think that you should try Z in the future.”
In some ways, coaching is great. Our attempts at self-improvement thrive when we can incorporate the perspective, expertise, and experience of other people into our own thoughts and processes. It’s an essential way to share information. So what’s wrong with it?
It can mask the underlying problem.
Take the first example above: I think A would have been more effective than B.
What if B, whatever it is, is actually just bad? That information gets lost. A judge who isn’t comfortable with your suggestion, maybe because it’s new or strange or different for them, might interpret that feedback to mean that A is just an alternative that you’re offering, rather than realizing that their previous approach was flawed in some way.
We tend to avoid evaluation of another judge’s performance. We try to avoid making value judgments about the work of others because we don’t want them to feel the hurt that we associate with a negative review—because we know how much that sucks.
But here’s the thing: That might not really be helping.
We’re giving them an out to internalizing what they’re saying by offering it up as an option or a choice instead of being clear about our thoughts.
What can we do instead?
Accept that criticism hurts.
Seriously. It’s okay. It can feel bad. It can feel completely and totally miserable. You have permission to curl up on the couch and eat ice cream with your cat until it doesn’t hurt anymore, but only if you return to that feedback once it stops being awful and try to learn something.
Getting there can take time. You might not be ready to deal with the feedback right away, and that’s also totally okay. You might have to start and stop a couple times before you can put aside your initial reaction completely and listen to what’s there. It might take more time than you’d like. It’s probably frustrating. I know it is for me. All of this is part of being human.
Don’t be afraid to feel hurt by constructive criticism.
Don’t feel bad that you’re taking it personally. It is personal. It’s about your work, and you’ve put time and effort and love into it. Learning that you didn’t do everything perfectly isn’t a great experience. Doing it better next time is. And it’s not just about accepting that criticism hurts when we’re receiving it.
Don’t let the fear that someone else will be hurt by your constructive criticism prevent you from telling them what you think.
Don’t let it muddle your message. Be diplomatic, but know that they can handle it. We all can. It might sting for a while, but we’ll all be better for it.The New England Patriots winning Super Bowl LI reminded us of something most of us knew and keep trying our best to repress: Boston has been the best place for sports teams since 2000 began.
The win is the Patriots’ fifth Super Bowl victory since 2001. The Red Sox won three times since 2004, the Celtics once in 2008, and the Bruins took the Stanley Cup championship in 2011.
Next season, the Patriots will be defending champions, the Red Sox enter the year ranked No. 2 in ESPN’s way-too-early power rankings, and the Bruins are at least a decent team in the NHL’s Eastern Conference. And then there’s the Celtics.
The Celtics are currently the Eastern Conference’s second best team, trailing the Cleveland Cavaliers by two games for the first seed. The Cavaliers have struggled of late, but we’re all expecting them to ultimately hang onto that top seed. Still, two games is clearly within reach with a little more than 30 games left in the season for most teams.
Boston also owns the rights to swap first-round picks with the Brooklyn Nets. Rest assured, they will swap picks with the Nets, who are far and away the worst team in the league this year. As of Monday, Brooklyn has nine wins, while the next-worst team (the Phoenix Suns) boast 16. It’s almost guaranteed they’ll have the best odds in the lottery at the top overall pick, although remember that’s only a 25 percent chance. The Celtics also own Brooklyn’s pick next season without any conditions.
For now, I assume Boston fans will be gloating about the Patriots for weeks. (If I were a Boston fan, I’m sure I would be insufferable, too.) But after the buzz winds down from Tom Brady’s record-setting fifth championship, they can seamlessly switch to bragging about the Celtics, and nobody can say anything.
Has a great NBA team ever drafted this high?
Yes. Unless the Celtics somehow win the championship and Brooklyn wins the lottery, they won’t top the 1982 Lakers. That season, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson led the Lakers to a championship against the Philadelphia 76ers while owning Cleveland’s pick, which ended up being the first overall selection. They selected James Worthy and went to six of the next seven NBA Finals, winning three of them.
The Celtics themselves also had a nearly identical situation a few years later: In 1984, Boston traded Gerald Henderson Sr. for Seattle’s 1986 draft pick, which ended up being the second overall selection. Sadly, they infamously picked Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose two days after the draft.
That’s the only time a championship team has ever picked first or second overall in the NBA, but there are other examples of good teams benefiting from high draft picks.
Famously, David Robinson was injured for most of the 1996-97 season, causing the Spurs’ playoff roster to fall into the lottery. Of course they won it, taking the top pick and selecting Tim Duncan in a franchise-altering move.
The Mavericks drafted in the top 10 (fourth, seventh and eighth) three straight years from 1984 to 1986 despite going to the playoffs all three years and the Western Conference semifinals twice. Like the 1982 Lakers pick, it came thanks to Cleveland, who traded away all their first-round selections chasing quick success and ended up bottoming out. (The Stepien rule, which prohibits teams from trading first-round picks in consecutive seasons, was created and is named after Cleveland’s general manager at the time, Ted Stepien.)
Last season, the Raptors finished second in the Eastern Conference and drafted No. 9 overall. They nabbed Jakob Poeltl, a center who has played sparingly thus far in his rookie season.
The Celtics will probably finish second in the East, and they’re almost guaranteed at this point to have a much better selection in a much deeper draft than Toronto did last year. Only a hugely successful push from Brooklyn during the final third of the season could conceivably stop that.
Wherever the pick lands, Boston will get better
The Celtics signed Al Horford this past offseason and their second-leading scorer is Avery Bradley. Isaiah Thomas is legitimately pushing himself into MVP considerations this year, but for Boston to meet their championship aspirations, you could see how they need a true second star on this roster.
Maybe that’s Markelle Fultz or Lonzo Ball, the top two projected picks in the coming NBA draft. Thomas is the Celtics’ point guard, but Fultz or Ball both have the size to play off the ball for long stretches of the game. It might not be the best way to use them, but Boston should select them anyway if they’re sold on their potential superstardom. You can always figure it out later.
Trading down a few spots might help the Celtics draft a Josh Jackson or Jayson Tatum, either of whom would potentially fit better on the roster. However, what would trading down net Boston, more draft picks? Their biggest problem this offseason was having too many assets and prospects, forcing them to draft prospects who could stay overseas in last year’s draft. They need star talent, not more solid role players.
Given that, you know the Celtics will be interested if a superstar enters the trade market. DeMarcus Cousins is the name that immediately jumps to mind, and what could be more enticing for Sacramento than the potential No. 1 pick? Cousins and the Kings have to reach the point where they’re trying to trade him, of course, and that doesn’t seem likely given the latest rumors that Cousins wants to sign a long-term extension. But if they did, the Celtics could offer a handsome package in return — probably a handsomer one than anyone else in the league.
Whatever happens with this pick, it’s bound to make the Celtics better in one way or another. If you’re a Boston fan, that just adds to your spoil of riches.RIO DOCE, Brazil (Reuters) - The collapse of two dams at a Brazilian mine has cut off drinking water for quarter of a million people and saturated waterways downstream with dense orange sediment that could wreck the ecosystem for years to come.
General view from above of a dam owned by Vale SA and BHP Billiton Ltd that burst, in Mariana, Brazil, November 10, 2015. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Nine people were killed, 19 are still listed as missing and 500 people were displaced from their homes when the dams burst at an iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil on Nov. 5.
The sheer volume of water disgorged by the dams and laden with mineral waste across nearly 500 km is staggering: 60 million cubic meters, the equivalent of 25,000 Olympic swimming pools or the volume carried by about 187 oil tankers.
President Dilma Rousseff compared the damage to the 2010 oil spill by BP PLC in the Gulf of Mexico and Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira called it an “environmental catastrophe.”
Scientists say the sediment, which may contain chemicals used by the mine to reduce iron ore impurities, could alter the course of streams as they harden, reduce oxygen levels in the water and diminish the fertility of riverbanks and farmland where floodwater passed.
Samarco Mineração SA, a joint venture between mining giants Vale SA and BHP Billiton and owner of the mine, has repeatedly said the mud is not toxic.
But biologists and environmental experts disagree. Local authorities have ordered families rescued from the flood to wash thoroughly and dispose of clothes that came in contact with the mud.
“It’s already clear wildlife is being killed by this mud,” said Klemens Laschesfki, professor of geosciences at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “To say the mud is not a health risk is overly simplistic.”
As the heavy mud hardens, Laschesfki says, it will make farming difficult. And so much silt will settle along the bottom of the Rio Doce and the tributaries that carried the mud there that the very course of watershed could change.
“Many regions will never be the same,” he says.
Researchers are testing the river water and results should be published over the coming weeks, giving a better idea of the contents of the mining waste.
One cause for concern is that compounds known as ether amines could have been used at the mine to separate silica from the iron ore, in order to produce a better quality product.
According to mining industry research and scientific literature published in recent years, the compounds are commonly used at Brazilian mines, including Samarco’s.
At least some of the compounds, according to the website of Air Products, a company that produces them, “are not readily biodegradable and have high toxicity to aquatic organisms.” They can also raise PH levels to a point that is environmentally harmful.
“There will be serious problems using the water from the river now,” says Pedro Antonio Molinas, a water resources engineer and mining industry consultant familiar with the region.
Samarco did not respond to questions about whether it used the compounds or whether they were in the so-called tailings pond whose contents burst through the broken dams.
‘SWEET RIVER’
The disaster is the latest assault on the Rio Doce, or “Sweet River”, one of the main routes connecting mineral-rich Minas Gerais state with the Atlantic Ocean.
Once lined with thick rainforest and populated by indigenous tribes, the waterway has long suffered because of ravenous demand for the minerals nearby.
So synonymous is it with the mining industry that Vale, which means “valley” in Portuguese, refers to the land through which the river runs. Before a name change in 2007, the miner was formally known as the Vale of the Rio Doce Company.
Its banks now barren, and bed full of silt, the river grew prone to flooding with heavy rains that over the years devastated communities along its more than 800 km course.
More recently it was plagued by drought.
On Thursday, the river running a reddish brown, farmhands moved livestock away from its banks, afraid to let cattle drink the water. At a picnic table, Nilo Candido da Silva, 74, said he never saw devastation on this scale during a life spent by the river.
“I don’t think I’ll ever see it go back to normal,” said Silva, gazing at thick mud and shredded trees where last week the river rose but now just a brown trickle flows. A fish lay dead in the mud.
As the mud flows toward the ocean, environmentalists fear its impact on the coast too.
“Who had the brilliant idea of opening the dams along the river?” asked marine biologist Andre Ruschi in a Facebook post, referring to the decision by authorities to open dams along the Rio Doce to allow the surge to dissipate and proceed toward the ocean.
The mouth of the Rio Doce is a nesting area for endangered sea turtles, an animal sensitive to chemical changes in the water. The beaches are expected to turn a deep red.
“It’s a huge shock for nature,” said Professor David Zee, an expert in oceanography and the environment at the State University in Rio de Janeiro.Dementia is the Most Costly Disease in America Dementia costs more to American society than heart disease and cancer – and is now the most expensive disease in the United States – according to an NIH-funded study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that with the aging of the baby boomers, the costs of dementia are expected to skyrocket. According to the Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report, in 2013, caring for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia will cost the Medicaid program an estimated $35 billion. Average, annual, per-person Medicaid spending on seniors with Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia is 19 times higher than average per-senior Medicaid spending on those without Alzheimer’s. With the aging of the baby boomer generation, the number of Americans aged 65 and over with Alzheimer’s is expected to dramatically escalate, and the costs to Medicaid are estimated to increase nearly 400 percent by 2050. The rising costs of Alzheimer’s disease are on a path that will cripple state budgets. A comprehensive strategy is needed. Every state needs to publish and implement a comprehensive state Alzheimer’s disease plan. State Alzheimer’s disease plans create the infrastructure and accountability necessary to confront the sweeping economic and social impact of this disease. To date, 28 states have published a state plan, 13 states and the District of Columbia are in the process of writing a state plan, and three states are considering legislation that would establish a task force to develop an Alzheimer’s state plan. Please click here to find copies of the state plans that have been published to date as well as state-by-state comparisons of the recommendations included in the published state plans. One in Eight Older Americans Experience Cognitive Decline; Most Do Not Talk to a Doctor One in eight Americans aged 60 and over – 12.7 percent – say they have experienced worsening confusion or memory loss in the previous 12 months, according to data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data come from the state Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey for 21 states that used the Cognitive Module in 2011. Of those experiencing worsening memory problems – known as “cognitive decline” - over 80 percent have not talked to a health provider it; and 1 in 3 says memory loss has interfered with household activities and/or work. For your state’s data, please visit alz.org/publichealth. Given the lack of communication with a health care professional about worsening memory problems – and given that as many as half of those living with Alzheimer’s or another dementia have not been diagnosed – states need to address the need for early detection and diagnosis of the disease. Early detection and diagnosis are the best ways to provide better medical care and outcomes – and allow for the better management of multiple chronic conditions to enhance the quality of life. Early detection also enables individuals affected by the disease to plan for their future and access community-based services, both of which can reduce the use of more costly health care services and lessen the burden of caregiving on their families. More than a dozen state Alzheimer’s plans include recommendations on early detection and diagnosis, and this latest data show how important it is to implement those recommendations. State Successes Highlighted at 25th Anniversary Advocacy Forum More than 900 advocates from across the nation gathered in Washington, DC April 22-24 for the Alzheimer’s Association’s Advocacy Forum. Actor, Alzheimer's champion and longtime advocate David Hyde Pierce, honorary chair of the 2013 Forum, led the annual Roll Call of the States. Advocates from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia - ranging from people living with Alzheimer's disease to Association volunteers and staff - delivered state policy accomplishments from the past year. Advocacy successes included implementation of state Alzheimer's disease plans, passage of the Uniform Adult Guardianship and Protective Proceedings Jurisdiction Act (UAGPPJA), dementia training for law enforcement, and Silver Alert legislation. As part of the Roll Call, Maryland State Senator Verna Jones-Rodwell, an Alzheimer's Association National Board member, spoke about her experience with the disease. Both of her parents had Alzheimer's.
Advocate Impact Spotlight
Jennifer Cook, Oregon
Oregon advocate Jennifer Cook knows what it means to be dedicated to a cause. After her father was diagnosed with mixed dementia, Jennifer shifted her career path to ensure she could be close to her father and help her mother care for him. Today, she helps other families too. Jennifer is the owner of a senior placement agency, which has provided her with an opportunity to understand the diverse needs of families affected by Alzheimer's. Jennifer’s desire to find a way to influence policy and improve care for the thousands of constituents in Oregon who are living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias has turned her into an advocate. Jennifer serves as a “State Ambassador” for the Alzheimer’s Association’s Oregon Chapter. Her frequent meetings with lawmakers, participation in town hall meetings, and outreach to local media have helped Oregon keep Alzheimer’s at the forefront of health care discussions. Jennifer was recently invited to provide testimony at a public hearing on long-term care issues before the Human Services Committee in Oregon’s House of Representatives. Her story helped Committee members understand that Alzheimer's affects the whole family. The strength and passion that comes from advocates like Jennifer Cook are the driving force behind the movement to end Alzheimer’s disease. Do you have a constituent who is part of the movement to end Alzheimer’s now? Would you like to honor an advocate in your state by sharing his/her story? If so, please email Jennifer Rosen at jrosen@alz.org to have your constituent’s story considered for the next “Advocate Impact Spotlight.”Introducing the latest machine to make its home in the expanding stable of adventure bikes at KTM; this is the KTM 1050 Adventure which is due to be officially unveiled at the Milan Motorcycle Trade Show (EICMA) at the beginning of November.
Just two weeks after the Austrian firm confirmed their 1290 Super Adventure at the Cologne Motorcycle Trade Show, we have a spy shot of the new, smaller, adventure bike for 2015. It will sit as the entry level to the four bike series underneath the aforementioned 1290 Super Adventure and the recently-revised 1190 Adventure and 1190 Adventure R.
It is thought the 1050 will use a revised version of KTM’s existing 1195cc, 4-stroke, liquid-cooled v-twin engine. The new bike will also use the same clever MSC (Motorcycle Stability Control) lean-sensitive cornering ABS system which can be found on the 1190 Adventure and 1290 Super Adventure.
So, what else can we see from the spy shot? The tubular space frame, spoked wheels, digital instrument cluster, switch-gear, rear-view mirror, two-piece adjustable seat, swing arm, twin-calliper Brembo brakes, exhaust and adjustable wind screen (although it seems to have been removed from the bike in the photograph) have all been lifted from the 1190 Adventure. The fairing and front mud guard bear a striking resemblance to its bigger brother but on closer inspection and despite the disguise attempts, the 1050’s fairing appears deeper like the 1290 and in one complete piece.
KTM refer to the 1290 Super Adventure as a ‘luxury touring machine’ while the 1190 Adventure is called a ‘Travel Enduro’, the new smaller bike will be targeted at the entry level into the hugely successful and ever-more competitive category which continues to capture high customer numbers.
Brand new competition for the brand new KTM will come from BMW’s soon-to-be announced S1000XR, Kawasaki’s new-for-2015 Versys 1000, Aprilia’s Caponord 1200 Rally and Honda’s new VFR800X Crossrunner.
KTM are keeping any official information about the 1050 Adventure under wraps until EICMA on 4th November but keep your eyes on Bike Social for all the information on the new-for-2015 bikes unveiled in Milan which will begin trickling through on 3rd November with the bulk coming on the 4th.
How about the price? It’s a guessing game at the moment but considering the 1190 Adventure will set you back £12,999, then there’s a fair chance the new 1050 will be sub-£12k.
What are your initial thoughts? Does KTM need another adventure bike meaning their four-bike range is only covered by less than 250cc?back to news News Italian ground vehicles in War Thunder! We are happy to introduce the first Italian tanks that will give Italian vehicle fans access to combined battles! Recently we announced the Italian aircraft research tree and many players asked us to introduce Italian ground vehicles that could participate in combined battles. The Italian ground vehicle tech tree is currently in development but in order to make it possible for Italian vehicles to participate in combined battles, we decided to add two tanks early in the upcoming major update. In War Thunder update 1.73 “Vive la France” we are introducing (along with the French aircraft tech tree) two premium Italian tanks: the medium P40 for earlier ranks and an Italian M26 “Pershing” for higher ranked battles. Both tank packs are now available in our online store. Before the introduction of the Italian ground forces tech tree, these additional vehicles will have 3 respawns in all modes. Let us tell you more about these machines. Advanced pack P40 Leoncello Advanced pack M26 Pershing Ariete This pack includes: Tank P40 Leoncello (rank 2, Italy) 7 days of premium account "Breda Mod. 38 machine gun" 3d decoration 1000 Golden Eagles This pack includes: M26 Pershing Ariete (rank 4, Italy); 7 days of premium account 1000 Golden Eagles 19.99 34.99 P40 Gruppo Corazzato "Leoncello" History▼ The P40 is an early 1940’s Italian heavy tank project that, due to a lack of resources and the limited capacities of the Italian industry, only a relatively small amount of these were built. Despite these severe problems that the vehicle had to face throughout its short life, it still managed to leave its mark in military history. Now, the P40 has firmly set its sights on War Thunder’s update 1.73, where it will form the vanguard of the upcoming Italian ground forces tree! Development of the P40 began as early as 1940, once Italian engineers started work on a heavy (by Italian national classification) tank project. Although the initial design called for a primary armament of three machine guns as well as a 47mm main gun, armour thickness of up to 40mm and a crew of five, most of these initial design specifications were changed in 1941, after the legendary T-34 made its first appearance on the Eastern Front. The effectiveness of the T-34 on the Eastern Front impressed the Italians, prompting them to quickly revise the P40’s design. After Italian engineers examined and assessed the performance of a captured T-34, the decision was made to increase the P40’s armour protection up to 50mm and equip the vehicle with a stronger 75mm anti-tank cannon, as well as getting rid of two machine guns and a crew member in the process. Development of the P40 was advancing with a rapid speed and nearing completion status, but by the time the aforementioned modifications were applied, the vehicle’s total mass of 26 tonnes was already grossly exceeding the 20 ton weight limit. However, the exceeded weight limit was by far the smallest issue designers of the P40 were faced with during its development. That honour goes to the powerplant choice for the vehicle. Namely, at the start of the project, it was decided to use a 300 horsepower engine for the tank. However, as an engine with such a power output was not available in Italy at the time, and the designers quarreling with the Italian military staff over which engine type to use, it took some time before an adequate solution was found and agreed upon. In the end, the decision was made to use a 330 horsepower diesel engine. With the last major problem solved, the P40 finally entered serial production in the summer of 1943. However, with Italian industry on its knees and resources dwindling, only about a hundred P40’s were constructed, some even without engines, by September 1943. After Italy’s surrender, some P40’s were captured and used by the German Wehrmacht under the designation Pz.Kpfw.P40 7,5cm KwK 34 in the Battle of Anzio, whilst some were also converted to static defence strong points In War Thunder, the P40 medium tank will be among the first Italian ground vehicles players will have the chance to get their hands on. The vehicle will take its place at the lower ranks of the newly formed Italian ground forces tree, as a premium vehicle. When looking at the general characteristics of the P40, one would be correct in assuming that this vehicle falls more under the medium tank classification. In fact, the only reason it was classified a heavy tank by the Italians was because of the vehicle’s intended support role. The performance of the P40 was, at the time of its introduction, quite comparable to that of the American M4 Sherman and later modifications of the German Panzer IV. The P40 was equipped with a 75mm anti-tank cannon, capable of penetrating 70mm of armour at a range of 500 meters, as well as a Breda 8mm coaxial machine gun. The armour protection of the P40 is also, unsurprisingly, relatively thin for a vehicle that was classified as a heavy tank. At its thickest, the armour protection on the P40 rises to 50mm on the turret. With the frontal hull plate being 50mm thick. Though this armour protection might seem a bit underwhelming at first, it may still prove itself effective against certain cannons found on lower ranked vehicles.
Download wallpaper: 1280x1024 | 1920x1080 | 2560x1440 Thankfully, the relatively thin armour doesn’t weigh the P40 down too much, the 330 horsepower diesel engine is entirely capable of getting the vehicle up to its maximum speed of 40 km/h in a relatively short time. As such, the P40 can keep up with the advance of lighter vehicles and effectively support them throughout the battle. Don’t get carried away though! As previously mentioned, the armour protection is good enough to stop only certain, usually lower calibre, anti-tank cannons. By being right out there in the heat of the battle, players may expose their tank to foes equipped with much more powerful primary armaments. As it happens, neither the tank nor its crew like the sound of that very much, especially the crew. The four man team operates in cramped conditions, meaning that a single successful penetration to the fighting compartment will likely take out all four crew members from the action in one go. To minimize the chances of this happening, make sure to take on a much more supportive role with the P40. Advance with your allies and stay close to them, focus on individual targets instead of engaging multiple and use your vehicle’s mobility to retreat to a safer position in time before the enemy |
the Rhapsodies, so he puts this passage of Porphyry among the Rhapsodic fragments. I would suggest that Porphyry’s allegorical understanding of the weaving of Kore as signifying the oversight of Persephone over the process of genesis may result from the exegesis of a scene of Kore’s weaving before her rape by Zeus in terms of an earlier (or later) Peplos poem that discussed the formation of material bodies (and perhaps the cosmos itself) in terms of the weaving of a garment, perhaps something like Pherecydes’ image fr. 2, of the robe that Zas gives to Chthonie as a wedding gift that makes her the physical manifestation of Earth. Cp. West 1983 p. 97.
While Casadio 1991 is quite right to note that often one lifetime seemed insufficient for theodicy, such concerns did not always entail the idea of reincarnation. Dio’s pessimist rules out reincarnation by allowing for the possibility that a man may beget a son to take over his spot in the gods’ prison camp and receive his share of the gods’ torments. Dio 30.17. By so many tortures and of such a kind, then, do men remain surrounded in this outpost and dungeon, each for his appointed time ; and most do not get out until they produce another person from their own selves and leave him as heir to the punishment in place of themselves, some leaving only one and others even more. τοιαῖσδε μὲν δὴ καὶ τοσαῖσδε βασάνοις ξυνεχομένους τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἐν τῇδε τῇ φρουρᾷ καὶ τῷδε τῷ δεσμωτηρίῳ μένειν τὸν τεταγμένον ἕκαστον χρόνον, καὶ μὴ πρὶν ἀπιέναι τοὺς πολλοὺς πρὶν ἂν ἐξ αὑτοῦ ποιησάμενος ἄλλον ἀνθ’ ἑαυτοῦ καταλίπῃ διάδοχον τῆς κολάσεως, οἱ μὲν ἕνα, οἱ δὲ καὶ πλείους.
I use the Latinate word ‘reincarnation’, rather than ‘metempsychosis’, because of the objections of certain ancient Platonists such as Proclus, who argued that metempsychosis should imply a body having a series of souls, rather than a soul having a series of bodies, the term for which would be metensomatosis (cp. Procl. In R. 2.322.28). While Pythagoras is usually credited with the origination of the idea of reincarnation, some sources make Pherecydes the one who gave Pythagoras the idea.
Often the notion is attributed to a foreign source. Herodotus claims that the idea of reincarnation is Egyptian, but, since the Egyptians did not, in fact, have any such notion for the fate of the deceased, Herodotus is presumably attributing Egyptian origin to something he knows from a Greek source. (Hdt. 2.123.1 = OF423.) Since he elsewhere (2.81) claims that practices thought to be Orphic and Bacchic are really Egyptian and Pythagorean, it seems plausible that he associates the idea of reincarnation with certain Orphica with which he was familiar. Diogenes Laertius, in his excursus on the sources of philosophy among the barbarians, says that Theopompus attributes the idea to the Persian magoi, another type of alien wisdom (Diogenes Laertius 1.1.9 = OF427ii).
Plato Phaedo 70c = OF428i. Cp. Olympiodorus in Plat. Phaed. 10.6 = OF428ii and Damascius in Plat. Phaed. 1.203 = OF428iii. The fragment of Diogenes of Oenoanda (fr. 40 Smith = OF 427i) is too heavily restored to help identify the source of the idea as Orphic, rather than Pythagorean, and even the nature of the idea at issue in the fragment depends heavily upon the speculations of the editors.
Plato Meno 81 = OF424, quoting Pindar fr. 133 = OF 443.
Cp. Obeyesekere 2002 on ethicization of the afterlife as a process of rationalizing and univIt’s hard to believe, but Mario Lopez swears that “I was a fat, fat baby. I looked like a sumo wrestler. My mom had to pull the fat folds apart when she bathed me!” He slimmed down in time for a whole generation to watch him sail through high school on Saved by the Bell, stumble through an ill-fated quickie marriage to Ali Landry and take second place in season 3 of Dancing with the Stars. Now starring on Broadway in A Chorus Line, the Extra weekend edition cohost and author of Mario Lopez’s Knockout Fitness has transformed himself into Hollywood’s sexiest specimen. For our ninth annual Bachelor issue, Lopez, currently hosting the second season of MTV’s Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Best Dance Crew, was game to re-create history’s hottest poses at the One&Only Palmilla resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. Later, Lopez, 34, sat down with PEOPLE’s Antoinette Coulton and Monica Rizzo to answer our burning questions.
Tell us about your first kiss.
I’m very proud of my first kiss! It was with Fergie! It’s very hard for me to call her Fergie; I call her Stacy [Ferguson]. I was 10. We were on Kids Incorporated together. She says there was no tongue! She has stayed just as sweet as when we were kids.
Was she officially your girlfriend?
Of course she was! She likes to point out that I was very smooth because I bought her perfume!
Did you ever hook up with anybody from Saved by the Bell?
All the girls were great. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen was my girlfriend for a while. Now she’s my friend. She’s happily married, and I love her.
Did anyone else hook up on the set?
Um, not to my knowledge. Everybody got along so well, it was boring. They did a True Hollywood Story on the show and it was the worst True Hollywood story ever.
Did you ever date Eva Longoria?
We never dated. Unfortunately. We met a long time ago, and she was always with somebody or I was with somebody. But we hit it off and I have the utmost respect for her. Tony Parker is a lucky guy. I was in her wedding. I walked her mom down the aisle!
What’s the status of your relationship with Karina Smirnoff?
Karina is a great girl. She’s smart, funny, talented, a good person. I’m not one to kiss and tell.
Are you seeing somebody now?
I’ll say that my girlfriend right now is Knockout Fitness, A Chorus Line, Extra and my new show on Lifetime [Salsa and the City, a reality show pilot]. It’s not fair to anyone I’m dating. That’s why I’m not in a serious relationship.
So you’re not looking for love?
I used to think I fell in love every week. But I think it turned out to be lust or deep like.
Do you think about having a family?
Right now I get to live through my sister and all my cousins and my nieces and nephews. I’m very much a kid myself. I don’t even have a pet.
What’s your idea of the perfect first date?
I like to go to a place in Koreatown in L.A. where they have private karaoke. It stays open until 6 in the morning. Everybody’s Korean except me. It’s a great place to bring a girl and see how she reacts. If she rolls with the punches and has a good time, then I’m like, “All right, this girl is cool!”
Do you always make the approach?
Not really. I like to get introduced. I’ll see a girl and say, “Who is that? Does anybody know her?” I won’t just have my buddy go up to her randomly. There has to be some sort of connection.
Are you completely honest in your relationships?
Now I am. Before, I wasn’t. When you’re honest from the get-go you don’t have to use your memory as much!
What do you look for in a woman?
I like a girl who’s from a modest sort of upbringing, because it’s more relatable. I’m a first-generation American. My parents [Elvia and Mario Sr.] emigrated from Mexico and live in the same house I grew up in in Chula Vista, Calif. I’d feel weird if the girl was a little too uppity or affluent, because I’m a very down-home kind of guy.
How soon does your family meet the girl?
As soon as possible because there are always family get-togethers. It’s always somebody’s birthday or somebody’s wedding. If my family doesn’t like the girl they will not fake it. They will not go out of their way to be nice. But if they like her, she’s in good. My dad likes them all. He’s useless in that sense! But my mom and my sister are very particular.
Do you like older women?
I really don’t have any age preference. I have generally been attracted to older women because there aren’t as many games. I’ve gone out with women at least 10 years older.
What kind of women throw themselves at you?
It’s usually the women who are like my mom’s age who are the most aggressive!
Ever been hit on by a man?
All the time. I’m very flattered being popular in the gay community, because they are a hip, cool community. They’re very cutting edge, so they like me and I think that’s great.
Might there be a sex tape out there?
No. One hundred percent, absolutely positive, no one could say that. Trust me.
What are your vices?
Everything I do is intense. If I work, I’m working hard. When I party, I party hard.
Do you smoke?
I’ll have an occasional cigar.
What’s your drink of choice?
When in Rome—or Mexico—I love margaritas. I tend to lean more toward vodka.
What’s your favorite nightclub city?
Las Vegas. I’ll give the Palms a shoutout because my friends own it.
Do you gamble?
A little bit.
Do you have any tattoos or piercings?
It’s funny, in my generation everybody got their left ear pierced, but I never did. And I never got a tattoo.
What do you wear to bed?
I sleep naked. I love to sleep. I have to take a shower before I go to sleep, even if I took a shower a few hours before.
What’s your grooming routine?
I don’t necessarily get manicures and pedicures. I do my own deal. It takes me 15 minutes to get ready if I don’t have to shave, 20 to 25 minutes if I do. I only shave if I have to.
Do you manscape?
Not at all. That’s the Latin Indian blood in me. My dad has a hairy chest, but I don’t.
What kind of car do you drive?
A Toyota Land Cruiser and an Audi. I’ve never been one to have to have the new car or the new phone or the new gadget.
What was your craziest splurge ever?
I bought an expensive barbecue for myself. It’s the Lamborghini of barbecues. I like to grill. My big thing is to host parties at my house. I have barbecues all the time.
What’s the most amazing gift you’ve ever given a woman?
A beautiful diamond cross. I had it blessed by my priest!
Where’s the most unusual place you’ve ever had sex?
On the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. That’s a long ride, by the way. It’s very dark. I’ve never told anybody that. Hopefully I’ll get the raft named after me!
Is there anything your mom doesn’t know about you that would surprise her?
Probably the Disneyland thing!
For more of our sexy shoot with Mario Lopez go to PEOPLE.COM/BACHELORSAs France’s polls closed in the first round of presidential voting on Sunday, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron were projected by multiple news agencies to advance to a May 7 runoff.The projections, based on vote totals in certain constituencies that were then extrapolated nationwide, were reported by The Associated Press, Reuters and AFP.With 50 percent of the vote counted, Le Pen had 24 percent and Macron had 22 percent.A little more than an hour after polls closed, Le Pen declared victory to a crowd of her supporters, proclaiming herself “the great alternative” in the race.”It is time to liberate the French nation from arrogant elites who want to dictate how it must behave,” Le Pen said.
Source: French presidential election: Le Pen, Macron projected as winners in first round | Fox Newsminio/dsync: a distributed locking and syncing package for Go
Introduction
Frank Wessels Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 14, 2016
minio/dsync is a package for doing distributed locks over a network of n nodes. It is designed with simplicity in mind and offers limited scalability (n <= 16). Each node is connected to all other nodes and lock requests from any node will be broadcast to all connected nodes. A node will succeed in getting the lock if n/2 + 1 nodes respond positively. If the lock is acquired it can be held for as long as the client desires and it needs to be released afterwards. This will cause an unlock message to be broadcast to all nodes after which the lock becomes available again.
Motivation
This package was developed for the distributed server version of the Minio Object Storage. For this we needed a simple and reliable distributed locking mechanism for up to 16 servers that each would be running minio server. The locking mechanism itself should be a reader/writer mutual exclusion lock meaning that it can be held by a single writer or by an arbitrary number of readers.
For minio the distributed version is started as follows (eg for a 6-server system):
$ minio server server1/disk server2/disk server3/disk server4/disk server5/disk server6/disk
(note that the same identical command should be run on servers server1 through to server6)
Design goals
Simple design: by keeping the design simple, many tricky edge cases can be avoided.
No master node: there is no concept of a master node which, if this would be used and the master would be down, causes locking to come to a complete stop. (Unless you have a design with a slave node but this adds yet more complexity.)
Resilient: if one or more nodes go down, the other nodes should not be affected and can continue to acquire locks (provided not more than n/2–1 nodes are down).
Drop-in replacement for sync.RWMutex and support for sync.Locker interface.
Automatically reconnect to (restarted) nodes.
Example usage
Below is a simple example showing how to protect a single resource using dsync:
import (
"github.com/minio/dsync"
)
func lockSameResource() {
// Create distributed mutex to protect resource 'test'
dm := dsync.NewDRWMutex("test")
dm.Lock()
log.Println("first lock granted")
// Release 1st lock after 5 seconds
go func() {
time.Sleep(5 * time.Second)
log.Println("first lock unlocked")
dm.Unlock()
}()
// Acquire lock again, will block until initial lock is released
log.Println("about to lock same resource again...")
dm.Lock()
log.Println("second lock granted")
time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)
dm.Unlock()
}
which would give the following output when run:
2016/09/02 14:50:00 first lock granted
2016/09/02 14:50:00 about to lock same resource again...
2016/09/02 14:50:05 first lock unlocked
2016/09/02 14:50:05 second lock granted
(note that it is more fun to run this distributed over multiple machines).
In addition to a write lock, dsync also has support for multiple read locks. See here for an example.
Performance
For a syncing package performance is of course of paramount importance since it is typically a quite frequent operation. As dsync naturally involves network communications the performance will be bound by the number of messages (or so called Remote Procedure Calls or RPCs) that can be exchanged every second.
Depending on the number of nodes participating in the distributed locking process, more messages need to be sent. For instance on an 8 server system, a total of 16 messages are exchanged for every lock and subsequent unlock operation whereas on a 16 server system this is a total of 32 messages.
Also, as the syncing mechanism is a supplementary operation to the actual function of the (distributed) system, it should not consume too much CPU power.
minio/dsync supports up to:
7500 locks/sec for 16 nodes (at 10% CPU usage/server) on moderately powerful server hardware
More performance numbers can be found here.
Stale locks and known deficiences
In a distributed system, a stale lock is a lock at a node that is in fact no longer active. This can happen due to eg a server crashing or the network becoming temporarily unavailable (partial network outage) so that for instance an unlock message cannot be delivered anymore.
Stale locks are normally not easy to detect and they can cause problems by preventing new locks on a resource. minio/dsync has a stale lock detection mechanism that automatically removes stale locks under certain conditions (see here for more details).
Another potential issue is allowing more than one exclusive (write) lock on a resource (as multiple concurrent writes could lead to corruption of data). By default minio/dsync requires a minimum quorum of n/2+1 underlying locks in order to grant a lock (and typically it is much more or all servers that are up and running under normal conditions).
However even when a lock is just supported by the minimum quorum of n/2+1 nodes, it is required for two of the nodes to go down in order to allow another lock on the same resource to be granted (provided all down nodes are restarted again). Depending on the number of nodes the chances of this happening become smaller and smaller, so while not being impossible it is very unlikely to happen.
This is a more elaborate example that also includes a table that lists the total number of nodes that needs to be down or crashed for such an undesired effect to happen.
More to tell
Of course there is more to tell concerning implementation details, extensions and other potential use cases, comparison to other techniques and solutions, restrictions, etc. Head over to minio/dsync on github to find out more.
If you have any comments we like hear from you and we also welcome any improvements.
Happy Distributed Locking!Lavrov: Peacekeepers will never be in the Donbas Wednesday, June 1, 2016 3:30:00 PM
During an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that he categorically rejects Ukraine’s condition that security in eastern Ukraine be a precondition for elections in the Donbas.
"Now, security has suddenly become the main issue for Poroshenko, not only the ceasefire but also ensuring the presence of some security forces in the entire territory of the Donbas. I’d like to say: the Donbas will never agree to that," Lavrov stated.
According to the Russian Foreign Minister, Moscow objects to the establishment of a peacekeeping mission in the Donbas, though the Kremlin would allow the strengthening of the current OSCE monitoring mission.
Lavrov also demanded that the process of granting special status to the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine begin before there is any talk of security guarantees.
"Ukrainians are saying that political reform will be initiated only when security is guaranteed 100% for several weeks or months. But it is impossible, it’s not real,” he emphasized.
Russian Foreign Minister outlined the steps that he believes Ukraine should take before security in the region can be considered.
"Everyone is on Ukraine’s side when it comes to political issues. It concerns the status of the Donbas which was agreed in the Minsk Agreements and should be enshrined in the Constitution. It’s about amnesty... But now they say that it will be adopted on the basis of the Law from 1996. It’s an extreme measure which should be enshrined in the Constitution, elections. And the Minsk Agreements expressly state that such measures should be agreed to with the Donbas, but we don’t see anything like that,” Lavrov explained.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The month of September has been bombarded with health care bills. This week alone, Democrat and Republican senators introduced both a single-payer plan and an Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal and replacement plan. But the most important bill has yet to be released. Language to the only health bill that’ll immediately secure the ACA marketplace and relieve nearly 22 million people of stress next year — and a host of coverage providers — will be released soon.
The last of four hearings held by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) concluded Thursday. After listening to testimonies from governors, insurance commissioners, and health care stakeholders more broadly, the HELP committee is writing legislation, slated to be released next week.
The bill — as promised by HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) — will be slim, per passing legislation without political game. Lawmakers are pressed against a hard deadline of September 27, when insurers have to sign final contracts for selling on the 2018 ACA marketplaces.
The bill will likely include three legislative items:
Committing to pay cost-sharing reduction subsidies to insurance companies for at least a year Letting older people on the marketplace buy catastrophic plans, which are cheap premium plans with high out-of-pocket costs. Changes to state innovation waivers
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The first policy is largely uncontroversial, and every expert that has testified before the Senate HELP committee over the last two weeks has said the federal government should commit to paying these CSR payments. CSR payments are important because they’re one of two subsidies available to low-income people who receive coverage through the ACA. The other is tax credits, which everyone isn’t eligible for. President Donald Trump has been deciding whether or not to make CSR payments to insurers on a month-to-month basis, which has ridden stakeholders with anxiety. Without payments, premiums on average would increase about 20 percent. (However, most ACA enrollees will be safeguarded due to subsidies.)
But the first point will only pass if Democrats swallow a few Republican ideas. That includes the second point: making catastrophic plans available to older people on the marketplace.
Through committee hearings, Sen. Alexander has said members cannot just “throw money” at the ACA because there are structural problems with how the marketplace operates. In some states, the marketplace is in bad shape. Currently, 63 Virginia counties do not have any insurers signed up to sell plans next year. Additionally, about 28 percent of ACA enrollees live in counties that are projected to have only one participating insurer next year — that’s about 2.6 million consumers, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Health experts have largely said that so-called copper plans, or catastrophic plans, would do little — if nothing — to shore up the marketplace. GOP members continue to argue that people just need more low cost options to enroll in the marketplace. A similar plan, with low premiums and high out-of-pocket costs, already exists on the marketplace.
The last big thing to watch for next week is changes made to state innovation waivers. Depending on how the language is changed to the existing waiver, consumer protections could take a hit at the expense of state flexibility.
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What is clear is that lawmakers, for the most part, are just happy that hearings on health care are happening. As such, members in the House are trying to prompt their own ACA hearings.
“I think the Republicans — the serious ones — know that you got to create market stability or we will have repercussions across the market,” Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) told ThinkProgress when asked if this week’s bill dump would distract from ACA stabilization talks. “And everyone will see premiums go up.”
Thirty-eight House members of the New Democrat Coalition, including Rep. Bera, sent a letter to Sen. Alexander and HELP committee ranking member Patty Murray Friday, thanking them for holding hearings. In the letter, House members listed some of their own ideas, one of which is sure to make it in the Senate bill: paying CSR payments to insurance companies. When asked if New Democrat Coalition members could sign off on a Senate bill that includes Republican ideas like copper plans, Bera said there’s “openness.”
Alexander told reporters Thursday that after this bill is passed, his committee will not be turning to long-term bipartisan ACA reform, but instead look at health care costs more broadly. The ACA only accounts for about 7 percent of the total health care market.In the nearer term, the government’s action may increase the political pressure on Mr. Najib, who has held on to power by halting investigations into the investment fund and by removing officials in his governing party who criticized him.
The 1MDB fund was created in 2009 as a “strategic development company” to invest the Malaysian public’s money, primarily its oil wealth, in projects to benefit the country. Mr. Low helped set up an earlier version of the fund.
Image One of the targeted properties is the Montalban House in Los Angeles.
The Times reported last year that Mr. Low was secretly involved in major transactions with a small oil company called PetroSaudi International and Malaysia’s public fund, which was led by Mr. Najib in his position as prime minister. Mr. Low then helped the prime minister’s stepson buy property in the United States using shell companies and finance his movie company.
The Times investigation documented property transfers between Mr. Low and Mr. Aziz, including one on Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills that was done behind the veil of a shell company, with no property transfer filed in public records, as well as the role that Mr. Low played in helping to finance Mr. Aziz’ movie business.
That transaction was one of several using shell companies that were detailed in the Justice Department complaint.
The complaint minutely chronicled an odyssey of embezzlement, global money flow and lavish spending in the United States.
Prosecutors described several crucial transactions involving 1MDB, including the one with PetroSaudi. In that transaction, the complaint said, 1MDB officials and their associates stole about $1 billion that was supposed to be used for oil exploration. In addition, more than $2.5 billion was stolen through bond offerings for 1MDB in 2012 and 2013 that were managed by Goldman Sachs, the complaint said.Share
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If you’re a fan of Ferrari, you know it became a luxury automaker begrudgingly.
Founder Enzo Ferrari just wanted to build race cars. In fact, the only reason he branched out to road cars was to support the financial demands of his business. And even then, Ferrari-built cars only went to a select few.
Many decades later, building superb road cars is status quo for the brand, but Ferrari cars are still — first and foremost — made for racing. Ferrari still races, it hasn’t stopped racing, and it most likely never will.
You might think that, save for the customer racing teams and Formula 1 superstars, all this heritage adds up to little more than a chance for those with Ferraris to romanticize about their purchase at the next “Cars and Coffee” event. That may be true for some, but there are other customers who want to better understand that heritage.
For the past 11 years, Ferrari has offered more of its customers a chance to see just what a Ferrari is capable of with the Corso Pilota driving course. Don’t mistake this for a simple track day to placate lead-foot thrill seekers, though: Ferrari wants to make a race car driver out of you.
How to drive a Ferrari, for real
Congrats, you managed to buy yourself a Ferrari, and you’ve spent a pretty penny on it, too (many pretty pennies). You know all about its engine output, its control, the willful soul of racing that it embodies … yadda yadda yadda. You could either gingerly drive up to Starbucks and dry-rev the engine so that everyone notices your expensive sunglasses, or you could, y’know, learn what it’s actually capable of.
Ferrari offered to show me how to drive its sports cars. I wasn’t about to say no.
Held at either Austin’s Circuit of the Americas or Circuit Mont-Tremblant in Canada, Corso Pilota is a Ferrari owner’s opportunity to take the two day course that teaches the basics of racing through a regimented series of on-track exercises. “Sport” is the initial rung of four instruction levels, which include “Advanced,” “Evolution,” and “Challenge.” As you might expect, each tier steps up the skill-set and those who push on to “Challenge” are basically trained race car drivers at that point.
Ferrari offered me an opportunity to join the club and learn how to drive its sports cars. I wasn’t about to say no.
The track
It’s about as nice as weather gets as I arrive at Mont-Tremblant’s 2.65-mile circuit, nestled in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains. The track has been here since 1964 and has hosted numerous racing events, including the F1 Canadian Gran Prix a couple of times. Totaling 15 turns in all, the circuit is made up of two loops: the original north loop, which is tight and technical, and the south loop, which is the track’s higher speed section. Listen to the guys who have driven here, and you’ll hear the word “soul” a lot. It’s not without warrant, either. Famed Ferrari F1 legend Michael Schumacher drove the track and dubbed it “a little Nurburgring,” which is high praise that is proudly repeated by the instructors. “This track was built by drivers, for drivers,” says Pierre Savoy, who speaks passionately about the tempo of the corners. Hearing him talk about going into turn 7 is like listening to someone recall their first kiss.
Back to school
At the event, I sat in a makeshift classroom by the track, surrounded by eager Ferrari owners of various ages. Some have brought their families along, while others are driving solo. All are exchanging personal Ferrari stories as I sit quietly as an interloping fraudster.
We were greeted by the roster of instructors who will showed us the ropes, including Anthony Lazzaro, Pierre Savoy, Jeffery Segal, and more. This process took some time since all of them individually have a list of credentials as long as my arm, including NASCAR, Touring Car championship, Indy car, and endurance racing in the U.S. and at Le Mans.
According to Corso Pilota chief instructor Nick Longhi, the method each team member has proven their racing qualifications was simple: They win. Longhi joked that he should have all the instructors show up wearing their Rolexes, the ones you only get from winning at the eponymous race series, and just let the amount of bling sink in.
With this established, it was time for class to begin.
The humbling begins
Over the years, I’ve had the great fortune to drive my fair share of tracks, enough to be really comfortable when presented with one. I’m also an automotive journalist so by default, I think I’m a better driver than I actually am, so I’m never one to turn down instruction from a professional whenever possible, even if it’s stuff I presume to know already. In this case, I did my best to go through the lessons as if I was starting from scratch.
I decided that I had played along enough, and showed him just how fast I can go.
A class session going over the fundamentals of driving preceded our track time. Going over everything from seating position, to weight distribution, to wheel dynamics, we were instructed on everything we need to look out for before we headed to our first track activities.
Day one consisted of braking exercises and orientation around the north loop in the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta. It was a stunning front engine coupe that housed a 731 Horsepower 6.3-liter V12, which was a bit much for what we were taking on, but rest only a fraction of its capabilities were being tapped. We were guided very gingerly through the track, being told how to determine the best driving line and braking points, and we increased speed as we progressed through our many laps around the course. After playing around for a while I decide to show my instructor, two-time GT Championship winner Jeff Segal, just how fast I can go.
Segal was … less than impressed. I hobbled over to the next classroom session with a laundry list of feedback points that echoed through my head for the rest of the day.
Day 2
After the first day, my dreams were full of repeating corners and directions. Determined to do better, I endeavored to be less hard-headed (easier said than done) on day two.
The Ferrari California T is the automaker’s less aggressive front engine tourer, with a 3.9-liter turbo V8 giving it 553 horsepower, and a retractable hard top. It seems like an odd choice for a skid pad session, but that’s kind of the point.
On the skid pad, we have varying exercises intended to teach us control during a slide. The first trick was to manage at least one drift around a circle of cones, then we moved on to the more advanced figure eight.
It doesn’t take much to get the back wheels of the Cali T to break traction, particularly when the turbo boost kicks in, so the majority of the sessions were spent pirouetting in a very expensive convertible, repeatedly until we got it right. I manage to get into a decent rhythm by the time we got to the figure eights, learning to eyeball where I wanted to go, feeling when the car’s about to slip, and how it should be controlled through some quick steering. I walked away from this task with better understanding, but far from having it mastered.
Putting it to the test
The majority of day two was spent doing laps of both the north loop and south loop in the Ferrari 488 GTB, the mid-engined sports car that packs a 3.9-liter twin turbo V8. It was about as perfect as a sports car gets, and we used them as trainers.
“I felt pretty good about it … I just forgot to breathe.”
At this point in the course, we really hammered in concepts that we’ve been laid the foundation for over the course of the trip. Everything we did repeatedly on separate occasions was combined here.
Being handed off from instructor to instructor was frustrating at the beginning, since each have their own methods of conveying instruction. Some listen more than talk, and vice versa. It comes down to the learner, too. Some people absorb whatever they’re told while others learn more by practical application, and I fall into the latter.
The courses used to be more intimate, but the soaring popularity of the program has been a double-edged sword, and classes are slightly larger than before. Once I was in my own car, alone, I felt more comfortable and keen to apply all that instruction I had taken in.
By the middle of day two, we were doing laps of the full combined course, and every bit of information from each the instructors swirled through my mind. “The car goes where you look,” said Anthony Lazzaro. “Remember to breathe,” said Pierre Savoy.
With each round of laps, I got feedback, and it was less biting than the first day, so I guess I cleaned up my line. Now conversations were centered more around fine-tuning.
“Line looked good, but you were a little stiff,” remarked Savoy. “I felt pretty good about it … I just forgot to breathe,” I replied, to Savoy’s amusement.
The men, not the machines
Later in the day, after I had a hefty number of sessions under my belt, I sat down with Lazzaro and Segal to get their perspective on what this program means to them. Its very clear first of all that the team is a very tight knit group. For the 11 years that Corso Pilota has been in practice, there’s been hardly any turnover in their ranks. Each member comes back year after year because they believe in what they’re doing, if its either coaching someone to perform or just showing Ferrari owners a good time.
After you’ve been trained by Ferrari to drive a Ferrari, you can drive just about anything.
Lazzaro imparts that he believes the brand is being very responsible in showing customers what their recently purchased 500+ hp supercars are capable of. If not for safety, then they’re giving them the opportunity to tap the potential of their sports cars in a controlled setting. Ferrari isn’t the only sports car manufacturer to do this, but they’re few and far between. It’s a concept, coincidentally, that seems to be gaining traction. Just recently, Fiat announced its partnership with Bondurant driving school to give lessons to 124 Abarth buyers. Same goes for Cadillac, which is offering driver training along with its CTS-V and ATS-V performance cars. This trend of on-track performance training becoming more accessible is certainly a good thing for everyone.
Segal backed this up with an interesting point concerning car technology. In the years that the program has running, the cars and the underlying tech has improved. However, it’s the untrained who shun it while the skilled embrace it. While most driver assists like traction and stability control are banned throughout different racing series, teams attempt to bend the rules as much as they can to include them. So if the professionals want it, why do the amateurs want to switch them all off?
It circles back to the first lesson of leaving your ego by the door. Winning is what’s impressive and what matters, and the rest is just control. Having tools for control on hand and ignoring them just doesn’t make sense. A Ferrari is one of the most powerful, precession engineered performance cars on the planet, and Corso Pilota is there to make sure you know how to control it when you return home.
Aftermath
After I returned home, I found myself behind the wheel again, thinking about how much weight is transferred on the rear as my ordinary car accelerates |
his family instigated a murderous trail that decimated his male descendants.
When Jehoram ascended the throne after Jehoshaphat’s death, Athaliah clearly had his ear. Jehoram had his six brothers murdered. When Jehoram died, Ahaziah, son of Jehoram and Athaliah, took the throne. As in Jehoram’s reign, Ahaziah’s wickedness was directly attributed to Athaliah’s role as his counselor (2 Chronicles 22:3). When Ahaziah died, Athaliah assassinated all of her grandchildren (except for one infant who was hidden) so that she could rule Judah on her own (2 Chronicles 22:10–12). All that horrific bloodshed was the direct result of Jehoshaphat’s naiveté.
And that naiveté was the result of not applying his good theology (2 Chronicles 17:3–4) when it came to his associations.
It would seem that many Christians today are afflicted with the same blind spot. We see Jehoshaphat’s error repeated continually in the evangelical world: every time a good theologian endorses a book with overtly bad theology, signs onto a statement that contradicts his biblical teaching, or shares the stage with a prosperity heretic. The church hasn’t learned anything from Jehoshaphat’s naiveté—if anything, believers seem determined to repeat his grave mistake, as they continue to forge bad friendships with the world and with false teachers.
There is no shortage of Christians whose love for others includes a naive tolerance of the Athaliahs in their homes and churches. Because they don’t directly feel the danger, they carry on as if there is no danger for anyone else—allowing evil influences to gain a foothold in their families and among their fellow believers.
But we need to heed the apostle Paul’s counsel and recognize our responsibilities as not only advocates for God’s truth but guardians of it as well.
Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,” says the Lord. “And do not touch what is unclean.” (2 Corinthians 6:14–17)
In particular, from a parenting perspective, we need to be wise gatekeepers of our homes. That will invariably involve stopping threats at the gate. No matter how well we’ve instructed our children in righteousness, those lessons can be undone if we allow unrighteous influences to vie for their attention and affection. We must maintain a healthy hostility for any invasion of false doctrine—whether through social media, the Internet, bad friendships, or education with an anti-Christian agenda. Jehoshaphat didn’t become an unbeliever, but he allowed unbelief to take root and flourish right under his nose.
I’m not suggesting a legalistic and isolationist approach to parenting. But I am saying that pacifism and poor discernment have no place in our parenting. We must take an active interest and involvement in our children’s lives.
The tragedy of Jehoshaphat is that he was a righteous man who made a naive friendship that ended up destroying his family. But his story lives on in Scripture, reminding us to avoid the same devilish trap.$\begingroup$
I have in my presence a mathematics teacher, who asserts that
$$ \frac{a}{b} = \frac{c}{d} $$
Implies:
$$ a = c, \space b=d $$
She has been shown in multiple ways why this is not true:
$$ \frac{1}{2} = \frac{4}{8} $$
$$ \frac{0}{5} = \frac{0}{657} $$
For me, these seem like valid (dis)proofs by contradiction, but she isn't satisfied. She wants a'more mathematical' proof, and I can't think of any.
I'm worried that if she isn't convinced, it may be detrimental to some students. Is there another way to systematically demonstrate the untruth of her conjecture?
EDIT: Since the answer which worked was from a comment, but each answer is also very good, I'm upvoting all of them instead of accepting a specific one. Feel free to close this question for being too open if so a moderator desires.Despite the previously fixed deadline, 9 September 2015, investigation of the defunct bitcoin exchange continues. Japanese Bankruptcy Trustee looks for bitcoins hidden or lost, verifies creditors’ claims and considers whether bitcoins would be distributed to the creditors.
The investigation goes on, states the report submitted to the Tokyo District Court by the Bankruptcy Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi and distributed at the fourth Mt. Gox’s creditors’ meeting, held yesterday. The deadline is extended until the fifth meeting, scheduled for 17 February 2016.
The total amount of claims made by 24,704 creditors exceeds ¥2.66 trillion which is equivalent to more than $22 billion (By way of comparison, the market cap of bitcoin is at present a little under $3.5 billion.) Of this sum, 95% is claimed by the three largest creditors. However, some claims may prove fraudulent. Kobayashi says he has not approved or disproved any of the claims yet because he is still investigating the disappearance of bitcoins and the balances of every user.
The funds controlled by the Bankruptship Trustee include 202,159 BTC (though he is looking for more bitcoins that could have been hidden or lost by Mt.Gox) and ¥1.2 billion ($9.9 million). Since last April, ¥130 million ($1 million) have been spent on investigation. It is still unclear whether the creditors will see some of this money. According to Kobayashi, " the probability of distribution and the timing and method thereof, etc. have not yet been determined."
Mark Karpeles stays under detention on suspicion of corporate embezzlement, says the report. The reason is the evidence found by Kobayashi that ¥136 million of Mt.Gox’s funds have been transferred to Mark Karpeles’s personal account.
Redditors suspected those who filled the claims of trolling: 650,000 BTC that went missing during the Mt. Gox’s crash, were worth 300 million at that time, much less than $22 billion claimed. Putting it in words of a Reddit user, “I deposited 2 million Bitcoin, I swear! Mark must have changed the database and stolen it!”.
In August, Tokyo District Court stated that bitcoin is not “subject to ownership” responding to a claimant who sought to get his bitcoins back after Mt. Gox bankruptcy. This means that the other victims of Mt.Gox crush have a very small chance to receive compensation.
In June 2011, Mt. Gox, the most popular bitcoin exchange in the world, had at least 424,242 BTC, as was demonstrated by a bitcoin transaction made by Karpeles. However, after this date the funds started to leak out. According to an investigation by Wizsec, more than 400,000 BTC were stolen from Mt. Gox between June 2011 and May 2012 and probably sold for less than $20 apiece.
Alexey TereshchenkoSAN ANTONIO - A lovers triangle end with one man dead and another on the run Sunday. Police said a man died trying to protect his girlfriend from an ex-boyfriend.
The deadly shooting happened just before 2:30 p.m. on Carson Street just outside Fort Sam Houston.
"I didn't know what to think – I didn't” said Brianna Castro said. “Then to see all the police and all the yellow caution tape, it was just crazy."
Family and friends identified the victim as Pedro Leal. The man who fired the shots has not been identified but police say he was an ex-boyfriend.
Castro also identified Leal as her stepfather.
"He was just an amazing person and he always knew how to put a smile on your face. No matter what your mood was," Castro said.
Castro said Leal was staying with the family because the suspect had begun making threats to her mom.
"It was just like him showing up at the house and him sending threatening messages to my mom saying that's he going to come do this and come do that. He was just scary, to be honest," said Castro.
Police said that is when woman’s ex-boyfriend and her son showed up to the home.
Gunfire rang out and Leal was shot. He was able to run a block away to Sandmeyer Street where he collapsed and died.
San Antonio police are looking for the two men who they believe left in a silver Mitsubishi Galant.
No one else was injured.
Copyright 2016 by KSAT - All rights reserved.A MAN found in Islington with a gunshot wound to his back may have accidentally shot himself on his way to committing a robbery, the Evening Standard reports.
Yesterday the Daily Mail reported that the victim had been "gunned down" in a drive-by shooting, but a new report today suggests the victim may in fact have injured himself when the gun he had in his backpack went off while he was riding a moped. A man riding another scooter is believed to have stopped and picked up the weapon after it went off.
Detectives now believe that the two men may have been on their way to commit a robbery, says the Standard.
Sumaira Naeem, a woman who works in a dry cleaner on Essex Road, where the incident took place, said that the victim walked into her shop to ask her for help after he had been shot.
"He showed me a hole in his back but there wasn't a lot of blood everywhere like you would think. He was using very bad language about some other person, and I asked him to stop... I asked him to sit down and phoned 999, then a few minutes into the conversation he grabbed the phone off me and started begging the ambulance to come quickly."
The incident came just days after an 18-year-old man almost lost his hand in an axe attack two streets away from the shooting, but police "played down" suggestions that the events were linked.
Councillor Paul Convery, Islington council's cabinet member for community safety, told the Standard: "Islington is a safe borough, and we're determined to keep it that way. However, two recent incidents have caused a considerable amount of public unease... We work closely with Islington police and are meeting with the borough commander to agree further action against suspected criminals in the borough."Franz Beckenbauer once described Mario Götze as "the next Lionel Messi", and three short years ago it looked like the mercurial midfielder would make good on that promise after scoring the winning goal for Germany in the 2014 FIFA World Cup final.
But a series of injuries halted the 25-year-old's progress, and after three seasons with Bayern Munich he returned to boyhood club Borussia Dortmund in 2016. In spite of making just 17 Bundesliga appearances since then, the former Wunderkind insists he's finally back at "100 per cent", a claim bundesliga.com was keen to investigate...
When it comes to Dortmund there are two Götzes. There was the Super Mario of 2010-2013, who burst into Jürgen Klopp's first team squad in 2010/11 and dazzled the Bundesliga with his pace and trickery, scoring six goals and providing 15 assists as the Black-and-Yellows claimed their first league title since 2002.
Watch: Mario Götze is back in business
He only played 17 games of the following campaign but still provided six goals and five assists as Dortmund made it back-to-back titles, throwing in the DFB Cup for measure. It seemed BVB's Wunderkind could do no wrong and a sensational 2012/13 followed: 16 goals and 20 assists in all competitions for Götze, as Klopp's side were agonisingly beaten by Bayern in the UEFA Champions League final.
By then, of course, Götze had already announced his shock move to Bavaria, and as it turned out he would play no part in the Wembley showpiece due to injury. The anger and disappointment of the BVB faithful was in direct proportion to the German international's unique talent, but even the most hard-hearted among them were forced into begrudging celebrations when his sensational left-foot volley sealed Germany's World Cup victory in Brazil the following summer.
And then there was Götze 2.0, the prodigal son returning to the Signal Iduna Park in 2016 after an injury-hit final season with Bayern. Unfortunately his body continued to let him down, and a series of niggles restricted him to just 11 Bundesliga games in the first half of the campaign, before a rare metabolic disorder kept him out of action between January and July 2017.
- © gettyimages / Robert Cianflone
Slowly but surely, he has clawed his way back to fitness and has now featured in nine games this term. "I'm finally 100 per cent now," he told Sport Bild this week. "October is going really well for me and I feel really good out on the pitch."
Götze is certainly playing with plenty of energy and enthusiasm. Coach Peter Bosz will be pleased to see that the attacking midfielder is covering roughly the same amount of ground in his second stint with Dortmund - just over 11.5 kilometres per game - as he did in the first. However, there remains a sizeable difference between the two when it comes to his impact in the final third of the pitch.
In 83 Bundesliga outings for Dortmund before his move to Bayern, Götze had a hand in 56 goals, scoring 22 and laying on another 34. Since returning in the summer of 2016, he has netted just once and provided only three assists, two of them this season against Wolfsburg and Frankfurt. Whilst his confidence is running high, he acknowledges there is still room for improvement.
Watch: Götze's Top 3 goals for Borussia Dortmund
"I knew it would take a long time for me to get back to my best level, and there may still be a couple of kinks to iron out. I think the games in Nicosia and Frankfurt were simply a taste of what's to come. It's true that it's time for me to start scoring goals again - but most importantly, we need to get the team back on track."
While Götze seems to have put his injury demons behind him, he is yet to rediscover the swagger and insouciance that defined his successful first spell at BVB. Bosz will be hoping to draw out the natural attacking tendencies of a player who has had just 14 shots on goal in his 17 appearances since last summer, and only makes around 15 sprints per game compared to 21 back in the day.
In some ways, given what he has already achieved, it is easy to forget that Götze is still only 25-years old. But in spite of having lifted five Bundesliga titles, four DFB Cups, the FIFA Club World Cup and the World Cup itself, he remains as hungry for success as ever, and is determined to worm his way into Joachim Löw's plans for the 2018 World Cup in Russia next summer.
"I still need to do a bit more to return to the national side," he admitted. "But of course I would like to be a part of it. Ultimately the decision will be made by the coach."
The next couple of months will therefore be crucial for Götze as he looks to light up the Bundesliga like he did so spectacularly between 2010 and 2013. Fitness will play a huge part, and Bosz will have to be wary of how he employs a player who hasn't strung together five consecutive Bundesliga appearances in 18 months. Promisingly, though, the man who joined BVB as an eight-year-old in 2001 is ready to step up and become one of the squad's leaders.
"I realise that I want to take responsibility and I feel capable of doing so," he insisted. "The team gives me confidence."
Confidence that he would be only too happy to pay back with another trophy-inspiring season.
Andy Smith
Click here for more Borussia Dortmund news, views and features!ORLANDO, Fla. – Some Chick-fil-A restaurants in Orlando opened their doors to help those in need following Sunday’s tragedy.
It’s not known how many stores took part, but at least two confirmed their actions by phone to 11Alive Monday evening.
Lindsey Maynard, store director at a restaurant on University Blvd. at Rouse Road, said that team members volunteered their time. According to Maynard, team members prepared food for those who were waiting in line to donate blood.
Another restaurant on S. Semoran Blvd. posted that some of its team members did the same.
Back in 2012, the Atlanta-based restaurant chain, which is normally closed on Sundays, found itself in the center of controversy after CEO Dan Cathy made comments supporting "traditional marriage." After hearing from unhappy customers -- as well as some store operators and employees -- Cathy later said, "I'm going to leave it to politicians and others to discuss social issues."George Zimmerman's estranged wife says the infamous neighborhood watch guard is now acting "like a monster."
In an interview with Katie Couric, Shellie Zimmerman described how she hopes there are "no more casualties" caused by her husband's erratic behavior. She also remembers how the couple was very much in love when they first married.
"We were great friends and I thought he was a wonderful person -- that's why I married him," she said Thursday on "Katie."
But Shellie, who who filed for divorce on Tuesday says she hasn't seen her husband in a few months, and it now seems like something has "snapped in his spirit."
"I hope that there's no violence, but he does seem like a ticking time bomb," said of her husband, who was acquitted in the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin. "I know I'm certainly afraid. I just hope that he can get, maybe, the help that he needs to deal with his situation, and the no one else will be hurt."
Shellie's TV appearance comes just three days after authorities arrested her husband for allegedly threatening his girlfriend with a shotgun and smashing a glass table during a domestic dispute.SingularityNet, the decentralized marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI), is reporting their ICO raised $36 million in just 60 seconds. While I am not certain if this is a record but it is probably one of fastest ever. Tokens recently sold out in a minute but at last look they were raising slightly less money.
The Singularity team reports the crowdfunding was capped after receiving $361 million in investor interest on its white list from more than 20,000 erstwhile investors. The company noted that all applicants were carefully screened using layers of algorithms, in addition to manual review, to comply with global KYC/AML regulations. Adhering to compliance hurdles is an importance step in the legitimization of the global ICO market. This reduced the pool of contributors to 5,000, but also set a new standard for fundraising via blockchain with respect to global legislation, said the team.
“Today’s results are powerful evidence that SingularityNET is an idea whose time has come,” said Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET. “In discussing the SingularityNET project all around the world, I’ve found that it resonates remarkably with people from all walks of life, and the enthusiasm we’ve seen in our community is awe-inspiring.”
SingularityNet co-founder Simone Giacomelli said it was responsible not to over capitalize the project.
“We believe this decision sets in practice a good example for all token sales going forward, and will be healthy for the decentralized and blockchain community over the long run.”
SingularityNET’s vision is to combine AI and blockchain to create a decentralized marketplace for different types of AI. Powered by the AGI or Artificial General Intelligence token, SingularityNET lets companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI, hopefully lowering costs and increasing output.
SingularityNET’s “AI-as-a-service” aims to become the key open-source protocol for networking AI on the internet. A long term goal is to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence within the market network. It is an ambitious mission but the whole AI field is in its infancy. While it is easy to throw out big numbers the fact is AI will quickly become ubiquitous and the next phase of must have tech making our smartphones meaningless.
“We will invite developers from around the world to insert their AI code into the SingularityNET, to monetize their work and to contribute to the emerging AGI global brain. We will invite users of AI-as-a-service to choose SingularityNET as an alternative to big, corporate AI. This is the start of the decentralized AGI revolution!” added Goertzel.So, how do you turn it on, and what else is it good for?
My variant on this complaint was a little bit different. I like to dance in my bedroom, in the dark. Totally in the dark, I will turn on Google Play Music, and I will have a little dance party. And every time I raised my wrist, every time my watch brushed my skin, it would light up and totally kill the mood. Then came the Android Wear 5.0 update and with it came the end of those bright screens with the arrival of Theater mode.
Theater mode in Android Wear is easy to activate on any watch with a power button: double-press the power button to activate/deactivate Theater mode. If you don't have a power button, you'll have to turn Theater mode on through the mode settings, which you'll find by pulling down from the top of the screen on your watch face. The notification mode is the first setting you'll see, and one swipe right to left will pull over Theater mode, which you can tap to enable Theater mode.
While Theater mode is on, the screen won't wake up when you tilt it or touch it once, and your watch will not vibrate for incoming notifications. To turn the screen back on, you'll have to press the power button, or if you don't have one, you'll double-tap the screen. If you want to briefly turn the screen back on but keep Theater mode enabled, you can do so by hitting the power button once.
So, why would you want to use Theater mode? Well, outside of being a courteous movie-goer, Theater mode is also quite useful during the following times/tasks:China's efforts to clean up the Internet have resulted in 15,000 arrests related to cybercrimes, authorities revealed on Tuesday.
The country's Ministry of Public Security has been cracking down on illegal Internet activities, and plans to increase enforcement even more, it said in an online post.
The ministry has so far investigated 7,400 Internet crimes, resulting in the large number of arrests. It's unclear during what period the investigations took place, but the ministry cited a case that went as far back as last December.
The alleged crimes include hacking attacks, cyber fraud, and the promotion of gambling.
In one such case, the arrested suspects took control of a company's website and filled its pages with online gambling content. Seven people were eventually arrested, and found to have allegedly hacked into 2,000 company websites.
In another instance, the suspects sent SMS messages to mobile phone users that contained a link to download malware. The malware could then control the user's phone, and steal personal information, including bank card numbers, loaded inside.
China has the world's largest Internet population at 668 million Internet users. But as the Internet grows, so has the potential for cybercrime. SMS messages containing links to malware have been particularly on the rise, according to the country's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team. One such piece of malware, called "xxShenqi" managed to infect 110,000 users across the country last year.
Besides cracking down on Internet crimes, China is also deleting what it finds to be offensive and harmful content found on the Web. This includes gun-related violence, pornography and gambling, resulting in the Ministry of Public Security investigating 66,000 websites and Internet posts, it said Tuesday.
China is well-known for its online censorship, and the country has made it a priority to step up regulation of the Internet's content, especially on social media platforms.© unk
Retail giant Walmart has added a new range of anti-aging make-up to its shelves - aimed at young children.The new 'Geo-Girl' beauty line is said to be aimed at the 'tween' market of 8-12 year olds, and will include blusher, mascara, face shimmer and lipstick that is'mother approved', as well as anti aging products.According to the marketing team behind the line the formulas are designed for 'young skin' and contain natural ingredients like white willow bark, chamomile, lavender and calendula, as well as anti-oxidants which are said to prevent aging.Joel Carden, executive vice president of Pacific World, the brand's manufacturer, says the line is designed for young children who want to use'real cosmetics, but with natural ingredients.'All 69 products in the range will be paraben, phthalates and sulfate free, a strategy that is designed to attract parents worried about the excess chemicals in make-up.Synthetic colours and fragrances are also avoided to reduce the risk of skin allergies.Walmart's divisional merchandise manager Carmen Bauza has told beauty magazines across America which are featuring the new range that the Geo-Girl make-up line is also eco-friendly.To keep the young eco-minded generation happy, packaging will be recyclable, says Bauza.The range will be on the shelves from February 21 and has been developed to replace the Mary-Kate and Ashley cosmetics range which was previously sold through the store.Walmart says the targetted sector has an estimated 2 billion dollars buying power.Last year there was widespread condemnation when Jordan announced that she planned to launch a kiddie makeup line which would include edible lipstick, blusher, mascara and nail varnishes for little girls to stop them stealing their mother's makeup.Jordan's daughter, Princess Tiaamii was pictured on the internet after a'makeover', drawing criticisms of the over-sexualisation of children.Websites across the world have reacted to news of Walmart's planned launch next month, with many children's experts expressing horror at the move.One well-known website asked: 'What next for kids? In store Botox?'This story was published July 7, 2013.
MONTREAL — As investigators begin to sift through the wreckage of downtown Lac-Mégantic, family and friends of the 40 people still missing after the spectacular blaze early Saturday morning might have to accept the grim reality that it could be days, months or even years before some of their loved ones are positively identified amid the ashes.
Given the intensity of the fire and the heat — which razed 30 buildings and, according to some witnesses, could be felt kilometres away — it’s possible people were completely vapourized in the explosions, said Geneviève Guilbault, a spokesperson for the Quebec coroner’s office who was on site Sunday.
“We can deduce that many of the bodies are severely burned,” Guilbault said. “That complicates identification, but all necessary means at our disposal will be used to identify them.”
She said the five bodies recovered so far will be sent to Montreal for forensic identification.
But it’s possible some of the bodies will never be found.
“Right now, we’re working on those we are able to recover,” Guilbault said.
It is a long, grim process.
Identifying human remains from a disaster site typically means getting as much information from the families of the missing individuals as possible: dental records, X-rays, photographs or descriptions of tattoos, clothing and jewelry, as well as blood-type information and objects that might contain the deceased’s DNA, such as hair or a toothbrush.
Forensic anthropologists working with fire investigators can help differentiate human remains from other components of the debris. Then the remains are compared with the biographical information and DNA to try to find a match.
Kathy Reichs, a best-selling author and forensic anthropologist who works at the Quebec government’s Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, said the central forensic lab in Montreal was put on notice to expect multiple deaths from Lac-Mégantic.
She said it would probably be a very difficult task to recover human remains from the debris, given the intensity and duration of the fire.
“Anyone caught in that, the remains will be extremely compromised,” Reichs said. “Primarily, they will try to go with dental IDs — it’s so hard to say unless you know what they’re going to recover. But a fire that burned that hot and that long, it’s pretty devastating.”
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., Reichs was deployed to Ground Zero in New York, with one of the “DMORTs” or Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, to try to identify human remains — a job that is still not finished.
Last week, on July 5, the remains of another firefighter killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center were identified, more than 11 years later. He was the third to be identified since April.
In Lac-Mégantic, townfolk are still holding out hope their missing loved ones will be found alive.
On a Facebook Support Group for Lac-Mégantic, with 17,756 members as of Sunday afternoon, members asked for information about loved ones — Gilles, Yves, Geneviève. They offered help, a free apartment or donations, and occasionally, they reported that a loved one had been found, safe and sound.
csolyom@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: csolyomTHE US Air Force's top secret X-37B space plane will return to Earth sometime next month after spending over a year in orbit.
The X-37B, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle 2, or OTV-2, was launched in March 2011 atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It is due to land at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base sometime in early- to mid-June, with the exact date dependent on technical and weather conditions, the military said.
"The men and women of Team Vandenberg are ready to execute safe landing operations anytime and at a moment's notice," Colonel Nina Armagno, 30th Space Wing commander, said in a statement.
The military originally said the 8.8-meter-long, 2.4-meter-wide craft, which is shaped like a small space shuttle, was only supposed to spend up to 270 days in space.
The Boeing-build OTV-2, funded through the Pentagon's budget, was performing classified experiments for the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office.
Its landing will mark the third automated runway landing for a space plane - the first was achieved by the former Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle, and the second was completed by the OTV-2's sister vehicle, the OTV-1, which was launched in April 2010 and landed later that year.
Originally published as US's secret space plane to return to EarthTravis DA: Perry wanted secret entrance to grand jury room
Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is handcuffed after pleading guilty to drunken driving on Friday, April 19, 2013, in court in Austin, Texas. Lehmberg was sentenced to 45 days in jail. Lehmberg, 63, was arrested last weekend and later issued a formal apology and said she would plead guilty to whatever charge the county prosecutor thought appropriate. (AP Photo/Austin American-Statesman, Ricardo B. Brazziell) AUSTIN CHRONICLE OUT, COMMUNITY IMPACT OUT, MAGS OUT; NO SALES; INTERNET AND TV MUST CREDIT PHOTOGRAPHER AND STATESMAN.COM less Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is handcuffed after pleading guilty to drunken driving on Friday, April 19, 2013, in court in Austin, Texas. Lehmberg was sentenced to 45 days in jail.... more Photo: RICARDO B. BRAZZIELL, Associated Press Photo: RICARDO B. BRAZZIELL, Associated Press Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Travis DA: Perry wanted secret entrance to grand jury room 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
AUSTIN — Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg said Thursday that a judge asked her staff whether there was a way for Gov. Rick Perry's aides to avoid a public entrance if they appear before a grand jury.
The grand jury is looking into whether Perry acted improperly by promising last year to kill funding for the public corruption division overseen by Lehmberg unless she resigned after a messy drunken-driving arrest.
She stayed and Perry carried out the threat. His staff said his veto was proper use of his power.
The inquiry about avoiding the public entrance came from Senior Judge Bert Richardson of San Antonio, who is presiding over the case, Lehmberg said. The question was posed “apparently at the request of” Perry attorney David Botsford, she said.
“I guess I don't understand why they feel the need to enter the grand jury room other than the way everybody else does — which is through the front door, and through the lobby, and into the grand jury room,” Lehmberg said in an interview.
Avoiding that public route — which typically is staked out by reporters — would involve taking a circuitous path through her own secure office, she said.
But Lehmberg said if the judge wants it to be handled that way, she would have one of her investigators facilitate it.
“The irony of course is that all of that — I don't own it, but it's all my offices,” Lehmberg said of the non-public route.
Botsford didn't immediately return a telephone call. He was hired by Perry's office at state expense to ensure, his staff has said, that the facts were given to the special prosecutor in the case, San Antonio attorney Michael McCrum.
“We respect the longstanding legal principle of grand jury confidentiality and therefore it would be inappropriate to comment on the proceedings,” Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said Thursday. “The veto in question was made in accordance with the veto power afforded to every governor under the Texas Constitution, and we remain ready and willing to assist with this inquiry.”
Richardson declined comment.At least seven dead after white van plows into crowd on London Bridge
Shots fired at scene and victims suffering from knife wounds
Three suspects, possibly armed, killed by police
Theresa May to hold COBRA meeting early this morning
Political party's have suspended election campaigning
PM holds emotional press conference outside Downing Street
Police arrest at least 12 people in Barking, east London, after raid on suspect's home The vehicle sped across the bridge at about 10pm last night, mounting the pavement and smashing into the Saturday evening crowds. Three men then leapt out of the van and began attacking passers-by with 12-inch knives, witnesses have said. Armed police shot and killed three suspects within eight minutes of the original incident on the bridge. The Met have confirmed the incident is being treated as an act of terrorism and that so far seven people have died.
NHS England said 21 people injured in the attack are in a critical condition. Police this morning have arrested 12 people in east London in connection with the attacks. Heavily armed officers stormed the Elizabeth Fry flats in Barking shortly after 7am, inlcuding the home of one the men believed to be responsible for yessterday's atrocities.
Prime Minister Theresa May chaired a COBRA meeting this morning, before makiing a statement outside Number 10 calling for Britain to become a "United Kingdom" against terrorism. "This is, as we all know, the third terrorist attack Britain has experienced in the last three months," she said. "In March a similar attack took place just around the corner on Westminster Bridge. "Two weeks ago the Manchester Arena was attacked by a suicide bomber and now London has been struck once more. "And at the same time the security and intelligence agencies and police have disrupted five credible plots since the Westminster attack in March. "In terms of their planning and execution, the recent attacks are not connected but we believe we are experiencing a new trend in the threat we face."
Morning after London attack: Heightened police presence at Borough Market & Bridge Sun, June 4, 2017 SIX people have been killed after a horrific terror attack targeted London Bridge and Borough Market on Saturday night. These are the pictures are London wakes up to the tragic scenes Play slideshow 1 of 23
The Prime Minister said the country could not "pretend that things can continue as they are" and said all three UK attacks were connected by an "evil Islamist extremism which was a perversion of Islam and the truth". She added that the extremists should not be allowed by a "safe space" for its ideology to flourish in both the online and real worlds. She said: "There has been far too much tolerance of extremism across society," adding that the country needed to come together for a "one truly United Kingdom". She also confirmed that the General Election would still go ahead as planned on Thursday.
SKY NEWS Theresa May address the nation after the London terror attacks
SKY / TWITTER A vehicle is said to have'mowed into people' on London Bridge
Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan police, said in statement: “You will understand that our knowledge of the incident is still growing but what we understand at the present time is. “At 22:08hrs yesterday evening we began to receive reports that a vehicle had struck pedestrians on London Bridge. “The suspects then left the vehicle and a number of people were stabbed, including an on-duty British Transport Police officer who was responding to the incident at London Bridge. He received serious but not life-threatening injuries. His family has been informed. “Armed officers responded very quickly and bravely, confronting three male suspects who were shot and killed in Borough Market. “The suspects had been confronted and shot by the police within eight minutes of the first call. The suspects were wearing what looked like explosive vests but these were later established to be hoaxes. “The ongoing operation is led by the Met, working closely with British Transport Police, City of London Police, the London Ambulance Service and the London Fire Brigade. “At this stage, we believe that six people have died in addition to the three attackers shot dead by police. And at least 20 casualties have been taken to six hospitals across London. “I'd like to repeat our request for the public to avoid the following areas: London Bridge and Borough Market. This is to allow emergency services to deal with this incident.”
The whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism, and we need |
batters are usually thicker than wheat-based flours as well as other gluten-free flours. Resist adding more liquid to the mixture or you’ll likely end up with a final product that won’t bake through. You’ll also waste precious flour.
If you’re making a cake, then almond flour is the best choice for a light texture. However, if your recipe is more forgiving (like brownies or cookies) then it really doesn’t matter if you choose almond meal or flour.
If you think that you can just substitute almond flour for coconut flour or vice versa, you should know that coconut flour sucks up a lot more moisture than almond flour. So when you use coconut flour, the recipe needs more wet ingredients overall to prevent a dry end product. While coconut flour has a more neutral, slightly sweet flavor, almond flour and almond meal taste exactly like what they both are: almonds. This almond flavor can make a tasty and interesting addition to all kinds of recipes.
It’s best to keep almond flour in the refrigerator to preserve freshness between uses.
Almond Flour Recipes
Almond flour is great for making cookies, cakes and other baked goods. It’s also useful in different meals or even coating for things like chicken tenders. One of my favorite ways to use almond flour is in my nutrient-dense Almond Flour Pancakes Recipe.
Other great ways to use almond flour include:
The healthy dessert options go on and on, but you can also use almond flour as the gluten-free flour in main courses, like my Bacon-Crusted Chicken Tenders Recipe.
Almond Flour Nutrition Facts and Origin
An almond is the seed of the fruit that grows on almond trees, a deciduous tree that has fragrant white to pale pink flowers. The seed of the almond fruit is what we refer to as the almond nut, but in botanical terms, it’s actually considered a drupe.
The terms almond flour and almond meal are often used interchangeably. However, the nut’s flour is typically much more finely ground and has a more uniform consistency compared to almond meal.
What is almond meal? Almond meal is pretty much a courser version of almond flour that’s almost always made from almonds with their skins intact, which results in flecks of the almond skins in the meal. Products labeled almond flour are made from blanched almonds, which means that the skins are removed.
A quarter cup (28 grams) of a typical almond flour contains about: (9, 10)
160 calories
6 grams carbohydrates
6 grams protein
14 grams fat
3 grams fiber
13.6 milligrams vitamin E (45.3 percent DV)
65.2 milligrams magnesium (16.3 percent DV)
1.1 milligrams iron (6 percent DV)
57.4 milligrams calcium (6 percent DV)
160.4 milligrams potassium (4.6 percent DV)
Almond flour also contains significant amounts of manganese, riboflavin, phosphorus and copper.
Almond Flour Potential Side Effects
If your body is not used to processing large amounts of fiber, almond flour may lead to an upset and/or bloated stomach. If you’re following a low-FODMAP diet, almond flour contains a moderate amount of FODMAPs so it’s recommended to limit serving sizes.
If you’re allergic to almonds, you should certainly avoid almond meal and flour and any products containing either one. An almond allergy is typically part of a general tree nut allergy, which includes cashews, walnuts, Brazil nuts and others.
Almond Flour Final Thoughts
Almond flour is a healthy as well as versatile baking ingredient. Whether you’re following a paleo diet, low-carb diet, diabetic diet, gluten-free diet or you’re just looking for more nutrition in your flour, almond flour is definitely worth trying. It’s great in cookies, cakes and breads, but it can also be used in place of bread crumbs for fish, chicken and more.
Almond flour isn’t low in calories, but its nutrition profile makes it well worth the caloric intake. Consumed in moderation, almond flour provides you with all of the incredible health benefits of almonds, like boosting hearth health and energy levels while warding off cancer and extra pounds on your waistline. I highly recommend trying almond flour and using it in combination with other nutritious, gluten-free flours like coconut.
From the sound of it, you might think leaky gut only affects the digestive system, but in reality it can affect more. Because Leaky Gut is so common, and such an enigma, I’m offering a free webinar on all things leaky gut. Click here to learn more about the webinar.Acting in Faith (www.afsc.org/friends) is an AFSC blog published with Quakers as the primary audience. The goal of the blog is to engage readers (particularly Quaker and faith-based readers) in inspiring personal stories and other formats that can excite them to act and get involved.
In Acting in Faith, we explore the spiritual basis for AFSC’s work. We also include reflections on engagement between AFSC and the Religious Society of Friends, and Quaker perspectives on undoing racism and building peace and social justice.
The main issue areas we invite Quakers to engage with AFSC on are:
Healing justice (especially working to end mass incarceration)
Immigrant justice
Just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine
Undoing racism
Countering the narrative of militarism
We include posts about other AFSC issues, but especially want to reinforce messages around the above issue areas and inspire involvement.
Audience: The primary audience is Quaker and faith-based, though others pay attention when we have strong posts. Speaking in a language that is appreciated by a faith-based audience is important. Quaker language, faith-based language, or language in which the transforming power of love is foregrounded is best. The more we are focused on this audience, the more successful we have been, especially when posting content that speaks to current events in a distinctly AFSC voice.
Advice for writing: Posts on the page tend to be most successful when the focus is on a story told about an encounter, a change, a shift in understanding. Take the reader’s hand and invite them to walk with you, show them what you have seen. Posts that are about experience are more successful than analysis posts. People can certainly gain policy advice from experiential posts, but they are more likely to read a post if the writer focuses on their experience. Posts that aren’t very personal tend not to be as successful.
AFSC is in the business of social change. Though we often document injustice on the way to social change, at Acting in Faith we are trying to share stories of how change happens, spiritually and at the community and societal level. It's important to be clear-eyed and honest about injustice, but also to give the reader some sense of how to shift systems and relationships to create peace with justice. We try to do that with the stories we tell at Acting in Faith.
We are interested in including multiple voices and styles. For example a recent series of posts on Ferguson included a post by a Quaker ally inviting more Quakers to engage, a post by a Palestinian activist on the ground talking about how Ferguson reminded him of Palestine, and a post by Joshua Saleem (AFSC staff) talking about his understanding of Jesus and how the protestors were exemplifying his understanding of Jesus’ life. The set of posts offered very different perspectives, but also resonated with one another. They were some of our most successful and popular posts.
If you can answer the following questions, the posts will more likely be strong.
Is this blog post helping further the already ongoing dialogue among AFSC and Friends? In what ways yes? In what ways no?
Is this post sharing something that Quakers will use and share with others?
Does this post explore AFSC and Friends working together for social change?
Likely the best advice is to read some posts, discover the range of what we publish and try out your voice.
If you’d like to write a guest post for Acting in Faith, send Lucy Duncan (lduncan@afsc.org) or Greg Elliott (gelliott@afsc.org) an email letting us know your idea for a post, read these guidelines, and once you hear back from Greg and/or Lucy regarding whether to go ahead with a possible deadline, write a draft.
Lucy and Greg usually plan posts about four weeks in advance, so please allow some time for publishing. We do seek out posts to address timely events or topics and occasionally adjust our schedule to make space for these.
Background on AFSC’s Friends Relations Work
The Friends Relations Program offers many ways for Friends to engage on issues (www.afsc.org/friends/resources), particularly through a small group justice ministry model that invites mystics and activists to work together in their congregations. We also offer substantive ways to engage with AFSC through the meeting/church liaison program, through our Calls for Spirted Action, through our program offerings at the FGC Gathering, and through yearly meeting visitation.The average price for the inaugural College Football Playoffs semi-final at the Rose Bowl is currently $472, while the second semi-final game at the Mercedes Benz Superdome has an average price of $500. That’s 27% and 29% of the price for the College Football Championship Game which takes place 11 days later at AT&T Stadium. By that measure, Florida State tickets for their match-up Saturday against Clemson could be the deal of the season.
At an average price of $132, the game is only the third most expensive game at Doak Campbell this year. It’s also $1 less expensive than average price across all the games on the Florida State Football schedule. At an average price of $266, the Notre Dame vs. Florida State game on October 18th is almost exactly twice as expensive as the game this weekend. Florida versus Florida State is also almost $100 more expensive than the game Saturday. While the game against Notre Dame may very well impact who makes the inaugural College Football Playoffs, after last weekend’s set of unexpected ACC outcomes, the game Saturday could go a long way toward determining the ACC champion. In that regard, the game could be viewed as the inaugural college football quarterfinal, and fans looking to witness it live can be there for as little as $61.
Over the last several years, there have been several games billed as a potential semi-final game to the eventual BCS championship. Most of those took place in the SEC, and several were on the Alabama football schedule. The most hyped of these was the ‘Game of the Century’, which took place on November 5th, 2011 when No. 1 LSU visited No. 2 Alabama. The average price for that game was a whopping $697, making it significantly higher than either of 2014 semi-final games. Two years later, there was another Century-hyped game that was even more expensive, this one between Alabama and Texas A&M. That game was on the Texas A&M football schedule, and had an average price of $716. With a combined 91 total points, the game may have been worth the money, especially for Alabama fans who made the trip to Kyle Field at College Station to see their team win. In both 2011 and 2013, Alabama went on to win the national championship, however, they won only one of the high profile regular season games. The fact that they lost the 2011 game, only to end up in a rematch with LSU in the Sugar Bowl, made the in-season hype seem overblown, especially considering the price tag on the secondary market.
Prior to last weekend’s slate of ACC upsets, very few had circled the week four match-up between the Florida and Clemson as must-win for either team's respective national title hopes. However, with Louisville and Virginia Tech both losing, the battle for the ACC title and a possible berth the inaugural College Football Playoffs could very well be on the line. In the post BCS-era of college football, though, no one is calling this one a game of the century. Based on the average price, in fact, it’s not even the most expensive game of the week. There are five games with a higher average price than the Florida State-Clemson game Saturday. The most expensive of those is between Nebraska and Miami, and a rematch of the 2001 BCS championship game. Miami vs. Nebraska football tickets currently have an average ticket price of $267. There are also three games with SEC teams playing Sunday that have a higher average price than the Florida State game. Visit the TiqIQ blog for a full list of the top five most expensive games of the week.Latitude 360 is still under construction in Crossgates Mall on Thursday, March 19, 2015 in Guilderland, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) ORG XMIT: MER2015071016562080 Latitude 360 is still under construction in Crossgates Mall on Thursday, March 19, 2015 in Guilderland, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) ORG XMIT: MER2015071016562080 Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy photo Photo: Lori Van Buren Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Crossgates sued by Latitude 360 contractor 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
Crossgates Mall and Latitude 360 are being sued by a contractor who said it was not fully paid for work on the now-abandoned entertainment venue.
The fiscally troubled high-end bowling center business says it spent $10.4 million — $6 million of it on the Crossgates space and the rest on another abandoned venue in Massachusetts.
Earlier this month, Latitude 360 said it had reached a mutual decision with Crossgates to abandon the half-built project.
In its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the fiscally troubled company — which offers "luxury bowling," a restaurant, bar and performing space in its other locations — said it received a notice from Crossgates July 23 that its lease was being terminated July 23. The decision came a little more than a year and a half after it was signed and after repeated delays of the scheduled opening.
At the same time, both the mall and the owners of Latitude 360 are being sued by a concrete contractor who says it is owed $40,826 for work done there.
Structural Preservation Systems LLC is suing 360 Builders Group LLC, Latitude 360 Albany and Crossgates Mall. The suit in state Supreme Court says the firm did $339,174 worth of concrete and related work for the project. It has not been paid $40,826.
Juda Engelmayer, a public relations spokesman for Latitude 360, said it owes the contractor nothing.
"The landlord funded all construction," he said in an email. "Latitude owes no money to any contractor that has done work on this site. The landlord paid the contractors directly."
Neither Crossgates' spokesman, Jennifer Smith, nor its general manager, Michael Patounas, returned calls for comment.
On Aug. 12, Crossgates served a notice of eviction on Latitude 360.
"The landlord and the Company are in discussions to resolve the dispute," the firm wrote in the SEC filing.
Crossgates is one of three planned sites that fell apart.
The firm was planning a Minneapolis location. It signed a lease there, got into a dispute with the landlord, and was told its lease was terminated June 26. That property has been returned to the landlord.
In Kingston, Mass., Latitude 360 is in default on an intended location, and the firm reports it is in discussions to resolve the dispute.
"Should the landlords and the Company not come to a mutually acceptable agreement regarding these leases as described above, the Company's operations may be materially impacted, including potentially incurring impairment charges, as well as cash, fees and expenses," Latitude 360 wrote in its report.
The SEC filing paints a dismal portrait of what was once hoped to be a successful entertainment business.
"The Company has incurred significant losses from operations during the six months ended June 30, 2015, and the year ended December 31, 2014, and as of June 30, 2015, has a retained deficit of $174,628,145," the report said.
Latitude 360 was delinquent in paying and filing some of its 2013, 2014 and 2015 payroll tax liabilities with the Internal Revenue Service and other state and local taxing authorities.
"As of June 30, 2015, unpaid payroll taxes total approximately $4,870,462 and related penalties and interest total approximately $821,428," the firm said.WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Republican senators agreed not to deal with a needed fix for young immigrants in must-pass year-end spending legislation, according to some GOP lawmakers who visited the White House on Thursday.
Instead, they said, a solution would likely wait until next year for some 800,000 immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children. Those immigrants, known by supporters as Dreamers, are in limbo after Trump announced he was ending temporary deportation protections granted by the Obama administration and giving Congress until March to come up with a fix.
Democrats have indicated they want to use a year-end spending bill to force action on Dreamers. Their votes will likely be needed to pass spending legislation to keep the government running, so the Trump-GOP stance may not end up prevailing.
“No immigration bill on the omnibus or any other must-pass piece of legislation in 2017,” said GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas after exiting the meeting with Trump. “He agreed to that, as does the Senate leadership, and I think the vast majority of Republican senators.”
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said using the so-called “omnibus” spending bill to resolve the status of Dreamers was “the pipe dream of some Democrats.”
“It’s more likely than not to be part of a January-February time frame,” Cornyn said of dealing with immigration legislation.
Immigrant advocates have been pushing for action. In September, Democratic leaders said they had a deal with Trump to enshrine protections for the immigrants in exchange for border security measures short of a border wall. But the supposed deal immediately came into dispute and now appears to have totally unraveled if it existed at all.
Still, the Senate’s top Democrat voiced optimism.
“There’s good Republican support for DACA and I think we can get it done,” said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, using the shorthand for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., reminded Republicans that they need Democratic votes to pass the spending bill that expires in December or face a shutdown.
“Unless Republicans can keep the government open without Democratic votes, this is not their decision to make,” Crowley said. “I have yet to see any evidence that they will be able to do that.”
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said Republicans are trying to take away something that Democrats secured and trade for border security and other items they couldn’t get otherwise.
“I’ve been at this a long time and I’m not going to allow you to trade against a gain and something that we have accomplished as Americans. It took a lot of work to get,” Gutierrez said. “We got it done. And we should fight for it.”
Cotton said helping those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program needs to come with measures designed to enhance enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws as well as ending what he called “chain migration,” where American citizens or lawful permanent residents sponsor family members to join them in the U.S. Cotton said that under the change he seeks, sponsors would only be able to get green cards for their spouse and their minor children.
“Ending chain migration is essential to a DACA compromise, in my opinion,” Cotton said.
The president tweeted on the topic of immigration shortly after the meeting, but didn’t mention the DACA program. Instead, he focused on Cotton’s concern.
“Congress must end chain migration so that we can have a system that is SECURITY BASED! We need to make AMERICA SAFE!” Trump tweeted.NASHVILLE, TN—A rousing T-shirt cannon party at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena was repeatedly marred by men coming out to play hockey Thursday, despite jeers and pleading from the crowd. "Everyone was excited to see free shirts fired into the stands by a 6-foot blue cat-man wielding a cannon, but they didn’t do that for more than a couple minutes at a time," said T-shirt fan Darren Chapman, adding that crowd members were turned away by security when they tried to follow the T-shirt squad into a tunnel. "If you have T-shirt cannons at a three-hour event, there should be three hours of T-shirt cannons. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they had been planning on playing that hockey in here all along." The arena’s public address announcer later declared there would be exciting "playoff" T-shirt cannon parties in the next few weeks, but sources said hockey-playing men are expected to ruin those too.
AdvertisementWhen immigration agents arrested Edgar Vargas Arzate on Aug. 18, he was driving to a court hearing in which the facts of a savage beating by Santa Ana, California, police would begin to unfold. A formal complaint filed last week by the Orange County Public Defender's office alleges that the timing of Arzate's arrest was "no coincidence" and that he was picked up last month to silence his testimony about the horrific assault he had allegedly suffered at the hands of Santa Ana officers during an earlier arrest.
The Aug. 28 complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Justice, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, states that Arzate had been out on bond for over a month on charges related to that earlier arrest, but he wasn't "whisked away" until the day of the hearing.
"The conclusion that this ICE arrest is purely coincidental and is part of a normal course of their investigation is not believable. The Office of the Orange County Public Defender has never heard of a situation where ICE removes defendants before answering to their charges. Why now? The only rational conclusion is that someone did not wish to allow Mr. Arzate to have his day in court," the complaint read. "Had he been allowed to do so, he would have exposed a horrific civil rights violation perpetrated by rogue police officers."
Frank Bittar, a senior deputy public defender in Orange County, filed the complaint requesting a Justice Department investigation on behalf of Arzate, a 27-year-old undocumented immigrant who was beaten by police in mid-June according to surveillance video of the incident and interviews with Bittar.
In his complaint, which was sent to the local FBI office, Bittar contends that Santa Ana police officers acted brutally in their arrest of Arzate and then falsified police reports that resulted in false charges against his client.
"I would like the district attorney's office or any responsible agency to investigate this case in hopes of seeking justice for a voiceless, undocumented brown man. The plight of the undocumented on our streets is more precarious than any other minority group because they are always at risk of being removed from the country," Bittar later told The Huffington Post.
Bittar also said that he has met with an FBI agent regarding an inquiry into the actions of ICE and Santa Ana police. The public defender said the Mexican Consulate has become involved in the case -- Arzate is a native of Mexico.
On the evening of June 19, Arzate, who has struggled with drug addiction and mental health issues, went to visit a friend at his home in Santa Ana, apparently not realizing that the friend no longer lived there, according to Bittar. The residents saw Arzate mumbling incoherently outside their house and called police.
Arzate ran when he saw the officers, leading them on a roughly four-block chase before he surrendered in the front yard of another home. In the video, Arzate can be seen lying facedown on the ground. The officers then began to beat him, punching, kicking and swinging a flashlight.
Once he was taken into custody, Arzate was charged with assaulting a police officer, among other counts. That charge was later raised to a higher-level felony when police accused him of having "personally inflicted great bodily injury" on one particular officer, who claimed that his hand had been broken during the beating, according to the charging document.
Last month, Arzate was riding with family members to a preliminary court hearing to face those charges when three unmarked cars pulled the family over. ICE agents took Arzate into custody.
"They stopped them and made everyone get out of the car and then arrested my brother," said Araceli Vargas, Arzate's younger sister. "My mom told me that the ICE agents made her feel less than human," Vargas continued. "My dad was so disappointed in the system. My grandpa was so scared. My aunt started crying. Nothing had happened since June, he was just living his normal life, but we have cameras here and we saw the cars that stopped my brother -- it was a gray Chevy Impala -- they didn't have markings, but they had been spying on us. They passed by the house at least four times that morning, so they knew what they were doing. Why did they wait until we were leaving the house and going to court?"
Bittar alleges that the ICE officers who arrested Arzate and caused him to miss his court hearing were "most likely" acting on a tip from the Santa Ana Police Department.
"[T]he timing of the ICE arrest was unusual and irregular," the complaint reads. "Usually defendants answer to their charges first and it is only then that removal proceedings are initiated. What a windfall it would be for a criminal defendant to be removed to his native country prior to answering to his charges first. But that is exactly what is taking place here."
But Cpl. Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police told HuffPost that ICE had acted on its own. "We don't tip off ICE. We didn't know he had a court date," Bertagna said. "Last I heard, he was still in custody. Obviously if we wanted him arrested, we'd arrest him ourselves. When it comes to ICE and their jurisdiction and the laws they enforce, when we're asked to assist, we assist. We were not involved in ICE's action."
Bertagna had earlier told Voice of OC, a nonprofit investigative site that covers Santa Ana, that the ICE arrest seemed unusual. "I've never heard of ICE making car stops like that before," he said.
According to ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice, "Mr. Vargas was targeted for arrest Aug. 18 by officers assigned to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Criminal Alien Program based solely upon his case history, which includes two prior deportations and multiple felony convictions."
Kice told HuffPost that once the agency learned about the beating allegations, a decision was made not to fast-track his deportation.
"At the time of [the] arrest, ICE officers were unaware of Mr. Vargas’ involvement in a high-profile investigation," Kice said. "Once ICE became aware of the matter, the agency elected to place Mr. Vargas in immigration proceedings, rather than reinstating his prior removal order and repatriating him to Mexico immediately. The action will afford Mr. Vargas and his legal representatives additional time to pursue his case in immigration court and address the other outstanding issues stemming from his recent criminal arrest."
In the complaint, Bittar argues that a federal investigation is Arzate's only hope of a fair inquiry into the incident.
"Local law enforcement cannot be trusted to investigate this matter," the complaint concludes. "Santa Ana police officers beat Mr. Arzate. The Orange County District Attorney’s office filed serious charges against him despite the overwhelming evidence that he did not assault nor injure anyone. Indeed, Mr. Arzate was victimized by these officers and yet the charges against him are still pending."After a few years of dormancy, the Skidmore College Republican Club is back and active on campus. A small group of first year students and myself have acquired the leadership of the organization and we are excited to be bringing a new outlet for political activism to campus.
During the current election season, it is the most vital time for college-age students to engage in the issues that our country is facing, so we can be motivated to incite political dialogue on campus and increase participation overall. One of our main goals for this semester is to become formally affiliated with the College Republican National Committee. This organization is a registered 527 Political Action Committee based in Washington D.C. that focuses on bringing young conservatives into the political scene. Another one of our objectives is to bring a civically stimulating speaker to campus at some point this spring or in the coming fall semester. We are also working with The Saratoga Republican Committee to see how we can get young people involved at the local level.
As a campus, we may not always agree on every issue, but most would agree that a two-sided political dialogue is much more useful and exciting than a one-sided monologue. In April, the Skidmore Democrats and Skidmore Republicans plan to co-host a debate where a few of our members discuss current and controversial issues. We want this debate to be interactive with the Skidmore community, so we have created a discussion forum on SkidSync, where anyone at the college can comment with a topic that they want to see discussed or with a question for any of the debaters. The exact date of this debate is to be determined, but we hope that students will be eager to attend and think about current issues and where they stand. Follow this link to get involved in the conversation: https://orgsync.com/117504/forums/23536/topics/116598
Currently we have around fifteen active members and we welcome and value anyone who wishes to get involved, no matter your political stance. If you are interested in joining the College Republicans, please visit our SkidSync page and join the group!Starting in mid-November 2016, at least 16 American diplomats in Cuba started to feel ill. They complained of hearing loss, nausea, loss of balance, and headaches. An American doctor traveled to Havana in the spring to evaluate them, and other doctors have since reviewed their cases.
After months of investigation, US officials have a theory for what happened: The diplomats were attacked with some sort of secret Cuban sonic weapon. Making a strange and scary story even stranger and scarier, the Americans, along with one Canadian diplomat, were hit while inside the homes where they lived with their spouses and children — homes that had been provided by the Cuban government itself.
Today, some of the diplomats suffer from mild brain damage and blood disorders, and two may have completely and permanently lost their hearing. A few of them had to return to the US because of their injuries. And while the attacks appear to have stopped last spring, questions remain about why they occurred in the first place. Experts — including current and former officials who are intimately familiar with US-Cuba relations — are shocked and confused by the events.
“The unique nature of the incidents has been a complicating factor in answering definitively many of the questions that have arisen,” a State Department spokesperson told me. “We do not know who or what is causing these incidents.”
The probe is still underway to figure out the cause of what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called “health attacks.” The Cuban government denies any involvement in the supposed attack.
“I have never heard of anything like this, and it’s a little hard to understand,” a senior US diplomat told me. “Why would this happen now?”
Here’s one possibility. After 50 years of tensions, US-Cuba relations improved dramatically under former President Barack Obama. The Cuban government knew that Donald Trump opposed Obama’s overtures and was far more hostile to their government, and they may have been using the sonic devices to try to listen in on American diplomats as part of an effort to learn more about the new administration. The injuries, in other words, could have come from a Cuban espionage operation gone awry.
Cuba has a history of harassing US diplomats. But not like this.
For years, American diplomats traveling to Cuba expected — and received — harassment from local spies.
“It was pretty low-tech and juvenile,” the senior US diplomat said in an interview. “We were always surveilled and followed. Our people would always know they got into our homes because they moved furniture and turned books around to make sure we knew they were there.”
“They would even leave feces on people’s toothbrushes and in people’s drinking glasses,” the diplomat continued.
Experts and former officials I spoke with detailed other incidents. Cuban spies would empty water tanks diplomats kept at their homes in case the water shut off in Havana, which happened frequently. They also partially blinded American drivers by turning car lights on very brightly behind them. But in these cases, Cuban officials were trying to inconvenience American diplomats — not hurt them.
That all happened during a low point in US-Cuba relations. For nearly five decades, the US government maintained a strict embargo on Cuba because of the Castro government’s alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
That began to change in 2013, when the Obama administration, with the help of the Vatican, opened secret talks with Havana. During that time, but especially by the end of 2014, Havana spies effectively stopped harassing American diplomats. That’s because Cuba didn’t want to jeopardize the negotiations. “The Cubans did not want to create an incident with us while talks began,” John Caulfield, chief of mission at the US Interests Section in Havana from 2011 to 2014, told me. “It would’ve been quite easy for an incident to send things back to zero.”
In 2014, Obama announced he wanted to open a US embassy in Cuba and increase travel and commerce with the country. He got his wish: The Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC, opened on July 20, 2015 — formally reestablishing ties between the two countries — and the US opened its embassy in Havana on August 14, 2015. Obama also lifted some travel restrictions to Cuba, allowing Americans to more easily visit the country.
But then Donald Trump won the election. Throughout the campaign, he promised to reverse the deal Obama made with Havana. Cubans legitimately wondered whether some of the improvements they’d seen — like more foreign hotels opening on the island — would go away. Cuban spies, then, may have taken extra measures to find out what Trump would do once in office. They had every incentive to want to keep close tabs on Trump’s plans.
To do that, Cuba may have turned to a sonic weapon. But it appears something went horribly wrong.
There are many theories about what happened, including the sonic weapon
One thing is for sure: Americans were under surveillance while the supposed attacks took place.
“Even if relations were getting better, Cubans are still obsessively interested in the activities of US diplomats in Cuba, and the fact that relations had improved did not remove those concerns,” Caulfield told me.
And they were definitely interested in Trump. Recall the timing: The attacks started in mid-November 2016 and ended around this spring. That coincides very neatly with Trump’s election and the first months of his administration. It’s possible Cuba turned to this weapon specifically to listen in on his transition plans and learn what they could about the new White House.
A sonic device used for spying would be hard to hear. That’s because they usually operate at the ultrasonic level — above audible range — or the infrasonic level, below audible range. Some doctors believe infrasound was more likely used in an attack like this because it travels farther than ultrasound, which means Cuban spies could use it from farther away.
However, CNN reports that some attacks were audible. Two US officials said the sonic attacks made a “deafeningly loud sound similar to the buzzing created by insects or metal scraping across a floor.”
Infrasound can cause some of the psychological effects the American and Canadian diplomats experienced. For example, a November 2001 study by the National Institutes of Health noted that one of the symptoms of exposure to infrasound is hearing loss.
It’s also possible that Cuba wasn’t behind this at all. It could’ve been another country that wanted to harm Americans or drive a wedge between the US and Cuba. But because Cuban spies surveil American officials so closely, Caulfield believes they would’ve known what was happening. Actions by another country “would’ve been immediately obvious to the Cubans,” he told me.
Another theory is that some elements of the Cuban intelligence services want US-Cuba relations to stay frosty. Attacking American diplomats would be a good way to do that. William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University, told me that Cuba’s closer ties with the US led to some greater economic and political freedoms on the island. That’s made some Cuban officials fear they are losing grip on power, especially as the country slowly makes market-based reforms.
And while the why for what happened remains unclear, the US knew American diplomats got hurt. That was enough for the US to take action.
In May, America expelled two Cuban foreign service officers in retaliation for Havana’s failure to protect the US diplomats. The expulsions were done in secret and just became public this month.
“We requested their departure as a reciprocal measure,” Heather Nauert, the State Department’s top spokesperson, told reporters in August. “Under the Vienna Convention, Cuba has an obligation to take measures to protect diplomats.”
That provision says a host country must ensure for the safety of foreign diplomats.
Although action was taken, blame has yet to be assigned. Did Cuba use a sonic weapon or not? And if a device was used, was it meant to physically harm US and Canadian diplomats? Was it a spying tool that failed, or was it something else? It’s still unclear — but surely the diplomats and their families want answers.
In the meantime, Caulfield doesn’t expect something like this to happen again. “If it does, it would be a much more serious event because [the Cubans] would know the impact of using this technology,” he told me.Vaccines, "beauty products" loaded with chemicals made from unborn babies murdered via legalized genocide
(NaturalNews) Every time you purchase mass-produced processed "food" from the likes of Kraft, PepsiCo, or Nestle, you're choosing, whether you realize it or not, to feed your family not only genetically engineered poisons and chemical additives, but also various flavoring agents manufactured using the tissue of aborted human babies.It's true: A company based out of California, known as Senomyx, is in the business of using aborted embryonic cells to test fake flavoring chemicals, both savory and sweet, which are then added to things like soft drinks, candy and cookies. And Senomyx has admittedly partnered with a number of major food manufacturers to lace its cannibalistic additives into all sorts of factory foods scarfed down by millions of American consumers every single day.Known as "HEK-293," the aborted human fetal cell line used by Senomyx is manipulated to evaluate how the human palate will react to synthetic flavors used in the production of processed foods. Since most processed foods on the market today are hardly food to begin with, and typically lack any real flavor or appeal on their own, chemical companies like Senomyx are hired to develop artificial ones ( which are often deceptively labeled as "natural flavors" ) in order to make them taste like real food.But because these ingredients can be legally disguised with vague descriptors like " |
something similar to this:
This is generally all you need for this tutorial. But for more MMPs, check out Marsh's extensive list of MMPs, which touches on all kinds of Mayor Mode Ploppables.
To do this, you'll need the following content, so you can try it out. These are a great selection of MMPs made by some really awesome BATers. The following is listed below:
Hey everyone! Yes, I felt like making a tutorial for anyone who wants to try out MMP scenes, but may not no exactly how. So this step by step tutorial consisting of 30 pictures should be able to get you well over to doing some highly detailed scenes such as this River Scene, and hopefully, help you make other scenes with the same level of detail!
Now let's get started...
Step 1
: Now not to state the obvious, but let's start by picking out an empty tile, preferably a medium sized tile.
Step 2
: Begin with selecting one of the
RFR Water ploppables
and carefully laying it out in the form of a typical winding river.
Step 3
: Your river should turn out as something like this, or close.
Step 4
: Now that you have a beautifully set out river, close in on a section of the river and raise the terrain on the right side slightly higher, but not too high as to make it noticable. Raise the land on the right side and insure that it's subtle and untracable to the eye.
Step 5
:
Once you've completed STEP 4, you can refill the areas of the river affected by heightening the land and replacing it with the same water ploppable by RFR.
LOOKS LIKE WE'RE READY TO ADD THE BRIDGE, ANOTHER IMPORTANT ELEMENT TO THE PICTURE.
Step 6
: Now add Glenni's metal suspension bridge on the site of where your terrain was heightened in the previous STEP. Heightening the terrain will allow you to build the bridge higher above the plopped as to avoid any texture related glitches.
Step 7
:
Ignore the fact that the highlighted item is the bike, that'll be added later.
Instead, select the small pebble-like Rock'n'Stones that you see in this image and spread them on the edges/boundary of the river like so.
Step 8
: By completing STEP 7, the result you should get should be something like this. Ugly huh? Well not to worry, cause we aren't done yet!
Step 9
: Now with the above highlighted Gray Rock from the Rock'n'Stones pack, use it and spread it around the same areas in which you plopped the small stone pebble rocks. They'll be an addition to make the edges of the river look more realistic and akin to those really rocky rivers you see in real-life, depending on what you're expecting. It also help to cover up the the base terrain on the area and fill empty space and better defining the river's edge.
Step 10
: By adding the gray rocks, you should come up with something like this...Still ugly you say? Well...I guess your right. So let's keep going!
Step 11
: There is another set of gray rock that you can use. Use the rock ploppable highlighted in this image above, to fill in more of the gaps you can see, preferably over exposed terrain to add more variety to the rocks on the river's edge. Also place them on the center part of the river to create the illusion of a small waterfall/current flowing.
Step 12
: Starting to look more interesting right? And when I mean interesting, I mean interesting - good! Right?...Right? Oh well, let's move on.
Step 13
: Now that we've got rocks covered, let's add some flora! The Cattails made by the VIP Team would be a perfect plant to add first. Use the Cattails, seasonal since we're making a more fall/autumn styled river scene and place them alongside the rocks, whether it's a little bit on the outside, or on and alongside the river and rocks. GO NUTS!
(You won't see the Cattails in the following images cause it seems like I mixed the order of the images. They will be in the end images so don't worry, add the cattails first and refer to the top completed image to see how you can place them)
Step 14
: Now that you've placed your cattails (I forgot to add them at this point, but you should've placed them unlike me
) We can add some more flora and some larger trees in particular. More specifically, select the Seasonal Norway Maples by Girafe and place them around the river scene.
Step 15
: The result should be something like this. Now it's starting to pick up!
Step 16
: Next, use another of Girafe's MMPs, the Conifer Trees
and place them alongside the maples to cover some of the exposed terrain and add variety to the flora around the river.
Step 17:
After STEP 16, it should look similar to this. Now it's really looking more natural and realistic! If you're image looks similar, good, it's time for you to add the road! Be careful not to demolish anything you've added this far. If it does affect any MMP around it, just replace them.
Step 18
: Now search for the green rye grass included in the RRP Pasture flora pack
and spread it around the river alongside the maples and conifers. This will just fill in exposed terrain and give it a more 3D feel, rather than looking plain and flat.
Step 19
: It should now look something a little like this. A lot less plain and empty than before. That's a good sign.
Step 20
: Like in STEP 18, instead you'll use the Green Grass ploppable and just place it with the green grass to diversify the look and eliminate the empty feel of the clearer spaces.
Step 21
: Now this time, search for the HBS Gray Sand. You can place this alongside the rocks on the river, alongside the road (continuing from the suspension bridge) and anywhere along the clear grass pastures and trees to create the illusion of empty patches of dirt and stone.
Step 22
: Look what we have here! This is really looking beautiful eh? I'm betting that yours isn't so different, so if you made it this far, keep on going!
Now we can get to the nitty gritty details in the image...
Step 23
: Start by adding old broken rowboats alongside the river. You can place it just about anywhere. Preferably, you should add it on the edges of the river though, rather than in the middle.
Step 23
: Now look for the signposts and add them on the edge of the road to make the picture a little more alive. This is totally optional, but suggested.
Step 24
: Now look for the Kayaks made by the VIP Team and place them on the river. They can also be place anywhere on the river. If you want them on land, be my guest!
But fair warning, do avoid overlapping them during placement!
Step 25
: Now adding cars are really more of an optional thing, but if you want, add them just about anywhere on land. You can create a scene of a picnic or Kayakers about to get onto the river. Add them at a place where there's a clear amount of grass pasture, so it makes sense that they're there.
And there you have it! A finished River scene. Now if you'd like, add some photoshopping to make it a little more compelling!
CONGRATULATIONS! You've just completed a Natural river scene! Now that you've completed it, you can try making more fascinatning scenes and blending other variaties of MMPs to create your own original river scene or another type of scene of your choice, like the one below!
DOMINICA ~ Jâvais RiverALVERONA ~ Illusit RiverWikipedia
First it was Foursquare. And then Apple. Now, it's Wikipedia's turn to switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap.
Wikipedia's decision, announced in a blog post, is likely to raise more questions about the company's decision to charge so-called high-volume users of its Maps APIs, which formerly were free. In March, Google started charging between $4 to $10 per additional 1,000 loads to any site pulling over 25,000 daily loads.
Explaining its decision for the switch to the community-created mapping project, Wikipedia's Yuvi Panda wrote:
Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap -- an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as "Wikipedia for Maps." This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.
The announcement was held in conjunction with the debut of Wikipedia's iOS app as well as the next incarnation of its Android version.
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In late February, Foursquare announced it was ditching the Google Maps API in favor of OpenStreetMap. Soon after, Apple switched over to using OpenStreetMap data for iPhoto on the iPad and iPhone.Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang believes the US Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Intel could "completely transform the computer industry."
On Wednesday, the FTC sued the world's largest chip maker over alleged anticompetitive practices. Among other things, the consumer watchdog accused Intel of illegally attempting to smother the makers of rival graphic chips.
"These products have lessened the need for CPUs, and therefore pose a threat to Intel’s monopoly power," the complaint reads. "Intel has responded to this competitive challenge by embarking on a similar anticompetitive strategy, which aims to preserve its CPU monopoly by smothering potential competition from GPU chips such as those made by Nvidia."
After the release of the complaint, Jen Hsan Huang addressed the suit in an internal Nvidia memo, shared with Cnet. "This is an action the industry needs and one that consumers deserve. And it's one that can completely transform the computer industry," he writes. "Intel is fully aware that great graphics have become one of the most important features for consumer PCs, the fastest-growing segment of the PC market. Even more alarming to Intel is the revolutionary parallel computing technology in our GPUs that is being adopted by software developers across the world.
"The more successful we became, the bigger threat we were to Intel's monopoly. Instead of creating competitive GPU solutions and competing on the merits of their products, Intel has resorted to unlawful acts to stop us."
What's more, Huang sees the suit as a ringing endorsement for the graphics-chip industry - Intel aside. "Today's FTC announcement highlights the industry-changing impact of the GPU and the importance of our work," he says. "Our innovation is making the PC magical and amazing again. I can now imagine the day when Intel can no longer block consumers from enjoying our creation and experience computing in a way we know is possible." ®3,033 migrant deaths happened across three main sea routes in the Mediterranean
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Geneva (AFP)
More than 3,000 migrants and refugees have died crossing the Mediterranean in a desperate bid to reach Europe's shores since the start of the year, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday.
The figure so far represents a 40 percent drop compared to last year's record of 5,000 known or suspected drownings.
"That mark (was) probably passed sometime over last weekend," when more than 30 migrants died off the coast of Libya, IOM spokesman Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva.
The 3,033 deaths happened across three main sea routes in the Mediterranean.
"We've been saying this for years and we'll keep on saying it: It's no longer enough to simply count these tragic statistics. We must also act," IOM director general William Lacy Swing said in a statement.
The number of migrants and refugees who have arrived in Europe this year -- nearly 164,000 -- is less than half of last year's total of 348,000.
Three-quarters of the arrivals in 2017 have been in Italy, the remainder in Greece, Cyprus and Spain.
The flow has been stemmed by controversial deals between the EU, Turkey and Libya.
The EU has been desperate to slow the migrant influx via Libya and Turkey, the two main routes, with more than 1.5 million people reaching Europe since 2015.
The UN has condemned as "inhuman" the EU's cooperation with Libya, where migrants are being held in "horrific" prisons and have even been auctioned off as slaves.
© 2017 AFPFor months, the political media have had nothing to talk about but polls and expectations. Yesterday reality crashed the party in Iowa, revealing the vacuity of the polls and the “expectations game.” Let’s examine how poll/expectations-based “analysis” differs from reality-based analysis.
The polls were totally off
Let’s compare two recent Iowa polls, the Quinnipiac poll done Sunday and the Des Moines Register poll just before that, with what actually happened.
Quinnipiac Republican Poll: Trump 31%, Cruz 24%, Rubio 17%.
Quinnipiac Democrat Poll: Sanders 49%, Clinton 46%
Des Moines Register Republican Poll: Trump 28%, Cruz 23%, Rubio 15%
Des Moines Register Democrat Poll: Clinton 45%, Sanders 42%.
Actual Republican Caucuses: Cruz 28%, Trump 24%, Rubio 23%
Actual Democratic Caucuses: Clinton 50%, Sanders 50%
The polls accurately predicted that Trump, Cruz, and Rubio would be the top three Republicans with the rest far behind. They overestimated Trump by 4-7%, underestimated Cruz by 4-5%, and underestimated Rubio by 6-8%. The polls differed by 6% on the Democratic result, each of them off in opposite directions from the actual result (a virtual tie).
Nate Silver explains that Iowa is hard to poll. But since polls are the only horserace information that the media has, there’s endless dissection of who is surging or receding. In fact, we were only looking at a pale shadow of the truth. The polls were bullshit.
Expectations are irrelevant, let’s analyze reality
Before the election, there were many articles that projected the future based on exceeding or falling short of expectations. Expectations come from media, which come from polls. So that’s a bullshit narrative. My news search today revealed hardly anyone talking about expectations — what happened to all that supposedly significant analysis?
Compare the expectations narrative with the reality-based narrative based on what happened yesterday.
Expectations: Donald Trump underperformed in Iowa, which hurts him.
Reality: Donald Trump lost Iowa. Even if he wins New Hampshire, his issue is that so many people hate him. This caps his chances. Expectations are irrelevant.
Expectations: Ted Cruz did better than expected, which boosts his candidacy.
Reality: Ted Cruz did great with religious conservatives in Iowa. He’s about to get a lot scrutiny on his views, for example, that God comes before country. That won’t play in New Hampshire. With Trump and Rubio splitting Republican votes, there might be enough religious conservatives to get Cruz the nomination, but they won’t win him the general election.
Expectations: Marco Rubio did better than expected, which boosts his candidacy.
Reality: Marco Rubio consolidated the votes of people scared of Cruz and Trump. If he can keep doing that, he’s got a path to the nomination.
Expectations: The rest of the Republican field did poorly, which will hurt them.
Reality: The rest of the Republican field spent an awful lot of money for minuscule vote totals. It looks doubtful any of them will change that any time soon.
Expectations: Bernie Sanders did better than expected, earning a tie in the first state to vote.
Reality: Bernie Sanders has to win in southern states to have a shot.
Expectations: Hillary Clinton didn’t decisively win Iowa. She was a loser there in 2008. This is her Waterloo.
Reality: Hillary Clinton now faces an actual challenge, but is still the most likely to win the nomination because of her appeal across racial lines.
Reality-based predictions
Here are predictions based, not on polls, but on what actually happened.
The other Republican pretenders will drop out. Bush spent $2800 per vote in Iowa and came in sixth with 3%. Ben Carson is tanking after putting the electorate to sleep. Rand Paul’s issues aren’t what people are worried about right now. Kasich has little appeal with Southerners and must fight with Trump for Northeastern Republicans. It’s now about Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. The nomination depends on whether Rubio can roll up all the support from Republicans horrified by Trump and Cruz.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has proven he can excite white people in Iowa. And he will win New Hampshire. The race depends on whether he can excite non-white people in the rest of the country. Fivethirtyeight.com now projects a 96% chance that Clinton will win South Carolina. That’s not a good sign for Bernie.
Final note for all the polemicists who may comment: my analysis is based on reality, not who I like. If you disagree, cite evidence, not passion. Vote based on passion; analyze based on facts.MMA legend Urijah Faber recently recalled a story about Paige VanZant getting into a fight on one of her first days training at Team Alpha Male.
“She got into a heated fistfight with a kid that we had on the team” Faber told MMA Junkie. “He was a little Brazilian kid. He was just right about to be 13 or 14 and was a stud kickboxer. And those two went at it, like a war. He pissed her off, and she pissed him off, and next thing I know, she’s dropping knees on his head, and we had to break it up.”
VanZant has since become one of the top strawweight fighters in the world. She is coming off a knockout win over Bec Rawlings back in August.
On Saturday December 17th, VanZant will headline a UFC on FOX event against Michelle Waterson at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, California. The main card begins from 8PM/5PM ETPT.Over the past few days I have carried around the OnePlus X, LeTV Le1S and Xiaomi Mi4c to perform a camera shootout between these mid-range power houses. The results surprised me, but will they surprise you?
As soon as the OnePlus X was announced people around the world started to compare the mid-range OnePlus with other Chinese smartphones of a similar price. The Xiaomi Mi4c and the LeTV Le1s were the two favourites to take on the OPX with many people asking which of the 3 has the better camera performance? To get an answer to that question I’ve been carrying these three phones around all week taking shots during the day and night to see which is best. Check out my findings below.
OnePlus X vs LeTV Le1S vs Xiaomi Mi4c – Camera Specifications
Before we take a look at the photographs each phone is capable of capturing lets take a look at the camera hardware of each phone. The table below shows the camera hardware specifications for the rear cameras on the OnePlus X, LeTV Le1s and Xiaomi Mi4C.
OnePlus X LeTV Le1s Xiaomi Mi4C Sensor 13 mega-pixel 13 mega-pixel 13 mega-pixel Aperture F2.2 F2.0 F2.0 Other PDAF PDAF
OnePlus X vs LeTV Le1S vs Xiaomi Mi4c – My expectations
Having owned the Xiaomi Mi4c and OnePlus X for a few weeks I was fairly confident that these phones would perform well, but between the two I expected I really couldn’t be sure which would come out on top. The LeTV Le 1S arrived with me after the OPX, but having owned the LeTV Le 1, I was fairly confident that the Le1S would be capable of at least equal photography performance to the older model, if not better.
When all 3 phones were out in the field testing the cameras back to back I was pretty shocked by the results.
OnePlus X vs LeTV Le1S vs Xiaomi Mi4c – Day Photo Samples
The following photos were all shot within a few seconds of each other in bright sunny conditions. I have labeled each photo with the phone it was taken with, but you should find that they are listed in the following order: OnePlus X / LeTV Le1 / Xiaomi Mi4C.
OnePlus X vs LeTV Le1S vs Xiaomi Mi4c – Night Photo Samples
The night photos were all again taken back to back within a few seconds of each other. I used the automatic mode of each phone’s camera application and did not use the flash for any of the photos. Again the photos are labeled and follow the order: OnePlus X / LeTV Le1 / Xiaomi Mi4C.
OnePlus X vs LeTV Le1S vs Xiaomi Mi4c – Conclusion
I believe that like me many of you are really shocked by the outcome of this camera shootout. I went in to this photo challenge believing that each phone would be capable of fairly similar photo quality, but the results speak for themselves.
In last place is the LeTV Le1S. This is a real surprise as the Le1 had such a capable camera and great optimisation. The LeTV Le1S really has difficult when there is a lot of light to deal with in daylight shots, but then again on the other hand it also struggles the most in low light situations. The performance of the LeTV’s camera was so bad I kept checking the lens wasn’t dirty!
The OnePlus X offers great camera performance in all conditions. In daylight the OnePlus X does a great job of picking out colours and in particular the deep blue colour of the sky. The OPX also handles low light photography well too. One issue on the OnePlus X is details, taking a closer look at foliage gives an oil painting effect. This isn’t an issues unless you tend to blow your images up very big.
The Xiaomi Mi4C is the real shock of the test. I knew it was a great camera, but I really didn’t expect the Xiaomi to come out on top. In daylight tests I find the Xiaomi Mi4C handles shadows better than the OPX, and in night test the sensor can handle lower light situations better than the other phones.
So those are our results of the camera shoot out and in our opinion the Xiaomi Mi4C comes out on top, the OnePlus X a close 2nd and the LeTV Le1S lags behind in 3rd. Are you surprised by our findings? Let us know what you think of these photos samples and results in the comments below.Nate Montana is attempting to follow his father's footsteps into the NFL... however improbable that might be.
2013 NFL Draft: Position rankings With the draft right around the corner, NFL.com ranks the top prospects available at every position on offense and defense.
With the draft right around the corner, NFL.com ranks the top prospects available at every position on offense and defense. More...
Nate, the son of Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, participated in the NFL Super Regional Combine at Cowboys Stadium on Monday. Around The League spoke with NFL.com analyst Bucky Brooks, who was in attendance.
Brooks called Montana, 23, a "long shot" who will be held back by a weak throwing arm.
"It's going to be hard for him to transition to the next level," Brooks said. "His passes don't have zip. He has difficulty making pro throws."
Montana had a rambling college career that spanned four different schools, including two stops at his father's alma mater, Notre Dame. He finished at Division II West Virginia Wesleyan, where he led his conference with 2,480 passing yards and 19 touchdowns last season.
Airing each Friday on NFL.com (1 p.m. ET):
Former NFL scouts Daniel Jeremiah and Bucky Brooks join former NFL defensive end Akbar Gbajabiamila and host Matt "Money" Smith, with each unveiling their latest mock draft each week. More...
Still, the leap from D-II to the NFL is massive. Montana's chances appear slim.
"He's a great kid, his measurables are fine, but in terms of playing at the next level, his performance here was not very good," Brooks said.
Montana left a better impression on NFL.com senior analyst Gil Brandt, who also was in attendance. Brandt believes Montana's size (6-foot-4, 215 pounds) and pedigree should be enough to secure a camp invite. Time will tell.
Follow Dan Hanzus on Twitter @DanHanzus.UPDATE:
NEWAYGO COUNTY, MI -- A Newaygo County man killed himself Tuesday after shooting at his wife, sheriff's officials said. A 30-year-old woman escaped to a neighbor's house after her husband fired at least two rounds at her while she sat in a car outside their Brohman home, authorities said. Deputies were called to the home in the 300 block of West Pierce Drive about 12:46 p.m. A bullet struck the vehicle, but the woman was not injured. Deputies surrounded the home. The domestic assault suspect, a 30-year-old man, was spotted walking to the garage. An emergency response team used an armored vehicle to approach the garage, where the man was found unresponsive from a gunshot wound that appeared to be self-inflicted. Detectives continue to investigate. Police have not released identities pending notification of next of kin. Michigan State Police assisted at the scene.
Angie Jackson covers public safety and breaking news for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her at ajackso3@mlive.com, and follow her on Twitter.An open letter to Chris Rock…
In an effort to try to prove there’s rampant racism among the police force in the county we both live in (Bergen County, New Jersey), you posted three selfies of yourself on Twitter sitting in your car upon being pulled over. Of course, you don’t bother to explain if you deserved to be pulled over… you just let an impossibly lazy and complacent media run with the narrative you intended to create: just a black man minding his business behind the wheel until getting harassed by white cops racially profiling.
You shared the number of times you’ve been pulled over in the past two months: three. It’s interesting because that’s also the number of times you’ve been arrested–according to you–for driving violations during your storied career behind the wheel. You also were charged for driving with a suspended license and even arrested once for vehicular assault.
Now, I have no idea why you’ve been pulled over three times this year. But given your driving record in the past, and the fact you own cars made not to go slow, is it possible you would have been pulled over regardless of your color? Were you speeding and/or driving recklessly?
Does racism exist in this country? Of course. Do voices like yours–the kind that reach 3.2 million Twitter followers–help improve matters when sending out tweets like the ones you sent yesterday that include almost little to no information outside of “Stop by the cops again wish me luck”? Because asking your fans to wish you luck implies that you may be running into a problem by those evil cops, right?
So maybe you should tell the full story behind why you’ve been pulled over in each instance, what your experience was with each officer, and what the result was (a ticket? a warning?).
If you’re not willing to do so, then kindly go back to making Grown-Ups 3. Because whatever narrative you’re trying to push here only pollutes the water even more. Some in the media, of course, will help you do that…because those breathlessly running with your selfie story couldn’t bother to simply Google your biography to see your driving record and the arrests that came as a result in the past.
Because if the race-baiting fits…
Sincerely,
Joe Concha
Frequent Route 208 and Route 4 Traveler
— —
>>Follow Joe Concha on Twitter @JoeConchaTV
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comAug 15, 2013 This week's theme
There's a word for it
This week's words
snowbroth
anatopism
quaternary
elflock
allochthonous
Surprise me!
Get a There's a word for itGet a random word from A.Word.A.Day archives A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
elflock PRONUNCIATION: (ELF-lok)
MEANING: noun: A tangled lock of hair.
ETYMOLOGY: An elflock is a mass of hair supposedly tangled by elves, as a mother might explain to her daughter while untangling her snarled locks after a slumber. From Old English aelf. Ultimately from the Indo-European root albho- (white), which is also the source of oaf, albino, album, albumen, and albedo. Earliest documented use: 1596.
USAGE: "Rowling's stories hurtle along like an out-of-control broomstick; her plots are as tangled as elflocks."
Harry Potter and the Magic Brew-haha; Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Dec 19, 1999.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: A sneer is the weapon of the weak. -James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)
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Help us continue to spread the magic of words to readers everywhere
DonateAdd the Miami Heat to the list of those affected by Hurricane Irma.
On Sunday morning, the Heat’s practice facility at AmericanAirlines Arena sustained exterior membrane damage, according to WPLG Channel 10. There was, however, no harm done to the actual roof, the station’s sports director Will Manso reported.
The storm, which has torn through the Caribbean throughout the week, retained its 130 mph strength late Sunday morning as its eye crossed the Florida Keys and headed toward the Gulf Coast.
The Heat open the preseason at home Oct. 1 against the Atlanta Hawks. After consecutive road games at Brooklyn and Orlando, they return home again for games against the Charlotte Hornets (Oct. 9) and Washington Wizards (Oct. 11).
The Heat do not host a regular season game until Oct. 21 against the Indiana Pacers. They will have less time to make the necessary repairs because the NBA moved the start of the season up two weeks. The league made the switch in effort to prevent teams from playing four games in five nights, with hopes of reducing injuries and fatigue.
srichardson@sun-sentinel.com; On Twitter @shandelrichThe Russian military suffered a setback in Syria when fires destroyed four Mi-24 attack helicopters last week, but U.S. officials tell Fox News the intelligence community believes it was an "accident," not an Islamic State terror attack.
The fires also destroyed more than a dozen trucks at an air base in Tiyas, roughly halfway between Homs and Palmyra.
On May 14, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack on the Russian base, known locally as 'T4.' Fighter jets belonging to the Syrian regime were also destroyed.
On Tuesday, the U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor published satellite images showing the destruction to part of the base including the charred remains of the Russian attack helicopters and a supply depot. Stratfor analysts said they believed the ISIS claims were valid.
U.S. officials told Fox News that intel teams more strongly believed an accidental fuel tank explosion caused the damage. It was unclear what could have triggered the blast, which set off secondary explosions on the runway.
"The Stratfor analysis is wrong," one U.S. official told Fox News. Another official said, "There is no indication that an ISIS attack took place."
When asked about the cause, another official said, "Refueling can be dangerous."
A spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry Tuesday said all of Russia's helicopters were accounted for and the images of the scorched runway wereover a month old, the product of previous attacks by the Syrian regime and "terrorist groupings."
Major-General Igor Konashenkov added, "The rumors about the destruction of a group of Russian helicopters and two dozen trucks were created by the propagandists of [ISIS] who unsuccessfully tried to'sell' this alleged piece of news about ten days ago," according to TASS, a Russian news agency.
Bombings claimed by ISIS in Latakia and Tartus, Assad regime strongholds along the Mediterranean coast, killed more than 190 Syrians this week.Having abandoned his job as a store keeper at the court of the governor of Sultanpur Lodhi, Nanak returned to Rai Bhoi di Talwindi. His father, Mehta Kalu, who had shown much annoyance at the spiritual inclination of his only son at an early age, must have been disappointed once again. Unlike earlier, however, he, perhaps, did not verbally express his frustration. Nanak was no longer the teenager he had slapped when he had spent all the money given to him for business to feed hungry ascetics – an incident immortalised in the story of Sacha Sauda, the true bargain.
Nanak was now a grown man, with two sons of his own. Mehta Kalu had felt the responsibility of a household would distract his son from his pursuit of spirituality. He could not understand that Nanak’s search for truth was not a distraction but a lifelong goal, one that would take him all over the world, in a journey spanning well over two decades. At Sultanpur Lodhi, he had done his job diligently but his quest for spirituality had caught up with him. His close friend from Rai Bhoi di Talwindi, a Muslim Mirasi (from a community of traditional singers and dancers) called Mardana, had followed his guru and together they had started singing Nanak’s verses every night, laying the foundation of kirtan in the Sikh tradition. Nanak realised he could no longer perform his duties for the governor with enthusiasm, hence decided to quit and return to his hometown.
Inclusive approach
Perhaps it was also his provocation of the other employees of the governor that hastened Nanak’s decision to abandon the city. His preaching of his message had unruffled the feathers of many powerful people. “There is no Hindu, no Muslim,” he reiterated. These were Nanak’s initial steps towards an inclusive religious approach. In an environment where religious identities and distinct traditions were a source of major conflict, Nanak was preaching the message of shedding away these narrow identities, the source of the conflict. Years later, he would advise his Muslim and Hindu companions to be a good Muslim if one is born Muslim and a good Hindu if one is born Hindu and that is how they will become devotees (Sikh) of Nanak.
This lack of distinct identity influenced his decision when he took on a religious garb to traverse the world in search of spirituality. Harsh Dhillion, in his book on Nanak, describes how he wore a long cloak similar to what the Muslim dervishes wore. However, unlike their green cloak, his was red. There was a belt around his waist similar to those donned by fakirs, while there was a cap on his head covered by a turban. Diffusion of identity was an important consideration for Nanak in adopting this eclectic attire.
His journeys led him to prominent Hindu and Muslim pilgrimages where he criticised dogmatic rituals in both places. True to his Bhakti and Sufi inspirations, his was a spirituality focused on individuality, to search for the truth not in rituals and pilgrimages but within.
After his death, such was the devotion of his assorted group towards him that Muslims wanted to bury him while Hindus wanted to cremate him. There is now at Kartarpur Sahib close to Narowal, Pakistan, both a grave and a smadh attributed to Nanak.
Path of the gurus
One hundred and sixty years and eight spiritual successors later, Guru Gobind Singh, addressing a large gathering of his followers, exhorted them to sacrifice for the right cause. Nanak, too, had asked for sacrifice. But that was a sacrifice of one’s ego to attain access to a higher spirituality. Guru Gobind Singh was asking for a physical sacrifice. The devotees were asked if they would be willing to lay down their lives for their guru. The first five devotees, the Panj Pyare, volunteered. No physical harm was brought to them but the guru, exhorting their example, told his devotees to be ready for a physical sacrifice if the need be.
On the first of Vaisakh (the second month in the Nanakshahi calendar), on that fateful day, the guru also introduced the 5 Ks of Sikhism – Kesh (uncut hair), Kara (bracelet), Kanga (wooden comb), Kaccha (cotton underwear) and Kirpan (sword) – giving his devotees distinct attire that continues to distinguish Sikhs from members of other religious traditions of South Asia. The time of obscurity was over. There was no more room for the dilution of religious identities. The social and political realities facing the followers of the guru at the time of Guru Gobind Singh were drastically different from that during Guru Nanak’s time.
While Nanak lived a life of political obscurity, besides his brief encounter with Babur, the Sikh gurus after the fifth guru, Arjun, found themselves at the centre of Mughal politics. Guru Arjun was assassinated on the orders of Emperor Jahangir and his son, Guru Hargobind, subsequently incarcerated. While Guru Harkrishan, the eighth Sikh guru was summoned to the court of Emperor Aurangzeb, his spiritual successor, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was assassinated on the orders of the Mughal king, pitting his son, Guru Gobind Singh, in a battle with Aurangzeb. The guru wanted all his devotees under one umbrella, of the Khalsa. Muslim and Hindu devotees of the guru needed to enter the folk of Khalsa. Those who didn’t were rebuked.
Guru Tegh Bahadur was assassinated on Aurangzeb's (above) orders, pitting his son, Guru Gobind Singh, in a battle with the Mughal emperor.
Sikhism under Guru Gobind Singh emerged as a distinct religion of South Asia. He said both Hindus and Muslims had strayed from the right path and only the passage shown by the gurus could lead them to truth. Once, Nanak told his followers they could access god through any path, Hindu or Muslim, if one followed it earnestly. Now, Guru Gobind Singh |
sure if it can help with some developers fear of OpenGL, but it's usefulness will still be limited to AMD cards until they properly open up the API.It's not exactly likely we will see Mantle picked up by either Intel or Nvidia anytime soon either, so again the usefulness is limited even if it does come to Linux.PC World spoke to Richard Huddy of AMD about it:At least they are thinking about it right now.It's nice of AMD to say that, but without them committing to supporting Linux it is just words of course and it still isn't confirmation they actually will.I imagine right now AMD are waiting to see what happens with Steam Machines to see if they want to put the effort of porting Mantle to Linux.I seriously hope they do bring it to Linux just to have OpenGL have competition, as competition is healthy for all of us when it comes to getting the best performance.Greg Sandoval/CNET
A court ruling has put the kibosh on reselling digital media.
In a lawsuit between Universal Music Group's Capitol Records and MP3 reseller ReDigi, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan has sided with the record label and said that reselling songs bought on iTunes, Amazon, or other digital music venues is akin to copyright infringement.
"The court grants Capitol's motion for summary judgment on its claims for ReDigi's direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement of its distribution and reproduction rights," Judge Sullivan wrote in a summary judgment filed Saturday. "The court also denies ReDigi's motion in its entirety."
ReDigi calls itself "the world's first online marketplace for used digital music." The company argued that it was operating under the "first sale doctrine," which says that people can resell or rent goods. This legal doctrine is what Netflix uses for its business model. ReDigi also noted that it's legal for people to sell used CDs and DVDs.
However, Judge Sullivan ultimately concluded that digital media can only be resold if permission is granted by the copyright owner.
"Courts have consistently held that the unauthorized duplication of digital music files over the Internet infringes a copyright owner's exclusive right to reproduce," Judge Sullivan wrote. "However, courts have not previously addressed whether the unauthorized transfer of a digital music file over the Internet -- where only one file exists before and after the transfer -- constitutes reproduction within the meaning of the Copyright Act. The court holds that it does."
A ReDigi spokesperson told CNET that the judge's ruling mainly affects the service's 1.0 technology. Further iterations of its service, including 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, were not considered by Judge Sullivan in his summary judgment and could ultimately be deemed to comply with copyright law.
"The case has wide ranging, disturbing implications that affect how we as a society will be able to use digital goods," the ReDigi spokesperson told CNET. "The Order is surprising in light of last month's United States Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons, which reaffirmed the importance and applicability of the First Sale Doctrine in the United States of America."
Capitol Records first filed its copyright complaint against ReDigi in January 2012. At first, Judge Sullivan denied the record company's motion to shutdown ReDigi. However, after putting more thought into the matter, he seems to have changed his mind.
"ReDigi will continue to keep its ReDigi 2.0 service running and will appeal the ReDigi 1.0 decision, while supporting the fundamental rights of lawful digital consumers," the ReDigi spokesperson told CNET.
Both Capitol Records and ReDigi are to file a joint letter to the court by April 12 on what they expect the next steps in the case to be.Two solar storms are pushing the aurora borealis into southern parts of Canada that rarely get to enjoy the northern light shows in their skies.
Unfortunately for people in Eastern Canada, the current storm peaked before nightfall.
Source of the aurora The solar wind launched by the sun contains clouds of plasma, full of particles that include electrons and positive ions. When they reach the Earth, they interact with the Earth's magnetic field, exciting oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The aurora is usually best seen in the Arctic and Antarctic because that is the location of the poles of the Earth's magnetic field.
Stargazers "hopefully anywhere across Canada as far south as the 49th parallel … should be able to catch a glimpse" Tuesday night, said Johanna Wagstaffe, a meteorologist for CBC News. The shows could stretch as far south as Toronto, she said, but their visibility will depend partly on how clear the sky is.
Normally, the dancing red and green curtains of light can only be seen north of Edmonton in the west and north of James Bay in the east, said Lorne McKee, space weather forecaster for Natural Resources Canada.
However, four coronal mass ejections — bubbles of plasma — were launched by the sun over the weekend, including as many as two headed toward the Earth.
One arrived Tuesday, but as of 3:30 p.m. ET, "the most significant part of this storm [was] past its peak," McKee said. "I don't think in the southern part of Canada there will be significant aurora."
Major storm possible
YOUR VOICE Submit your photos of the aurora borealis.
A second was ejected out the side of the sun on Sunday. The U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., said there was a slight chance of a major storm on Wednesday or Thursday. However, due to the angle of the flare's launch, McKee said it might miss the Earth altogether.
The first coronal mass ejection has had small effect on satellite communications so far, McKee said. It was also measurable on the ground using magnetometers, which means it could also affect pipelines and power systems. McKee added that officials in charge of that infrastructure are constantly monitoring space weather to prepare for possible effects.
According to Space Weather Canada, the Natural Resources Canada service that monitors solar storms, there have been four events similar to Tuesday's in the past year.
McKee said the sun is now moving from a quiet period in its 11-year solar cycle to a more active phase, when more solar storms can be expected.At this point, it’s not even controversial to say that the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay are a sham. The current chief judge there has written that the military tribunals have âcredibility problems.” And the former chief prosecutor, after resigning, publicly criticized the system as “deeply politicized.”
Now that former prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, has given more evidence of that politicization in an interview with The Nation after the six Gitmo detainees were charged. Davis says that in an August, 2005 meeting with William Haynes, then the Pentagon’s general counsel, Haynes seemed to completely discount the possibility of the military tribunals acquitting any of the detainees. Now, of course, Haynes has been installed as the official overseeing the whole process, both the prosecutors and the defense. From The Nation:
“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings. “I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.'” Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”
Back in December, the Defense Department blocked Davis from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s becoming increasingly clear why.CB Richard Marshall has agreed to terms with the Chargers on a one-year deal, per league source. — ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) August 23, 2013
Hey, something actually happened with that! Richard Marshall will now join Johnny Patrick and a bunch of other guys to fight for the nickel cornerback spot in the defense, which will be a valuable position because of the past frailty of Shareece Wright and Derek Cox.
I like this move. It's not going to change the team drastically in any way, but it's solid depth added to a position that was lacking in solid depth. Also, after playing under Secondary Coach Ron Milus in Carolina, Marshall should be very familiar with what Milus is trying to do in San Diego with the Chargers.
In seven seasons in the NFL, Marshall has playing in 100 games, starting in 59 of them. He's collected 18 interceptions, 7 sacks, forced 3 fumbles and scored 2 touchdowns. He's also racked up 423 tackles. Those are exactly the type of numbers you want in a guy that's playing nickel corner.
More from Bolts From The Blue:The Doughnut Vault, known for its long lines and off-the-wall flavors, is branching out from its River North home to feed the masses.
Chicago restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff said he plans to open eight to 12 more gourmet doughnut locations in Chicago, starting later this year.
Mr. Sodikoff confirmed he is close to finalizing leases in technology-centric office buildings at 111 N. Canal St. and 1000 W. Fulton Market, both of which are owned by Chicago-based Sterling Bay Cos. The latter, the former Fulton Market Cold Storage Building, is being redeveloped as the future Chicago office of Google Inc.
Expansion plans come a few months after national food website the Daily Meal proclaimed the Doughnut Vault's plain glazed America's best doughnut.
Mr. Sodikoff is branching out from the original location at 401 N. Franklin St., in a side room of his Gilt Bar, at a time when higher-end doughnut shops are proliferating in Chicago. Do-Rite Donuts, from Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises Inc. chefs Jeff Mahin and Francis Brennan, and Glazed & Infused, from Francesca's Restaurants co-founder Scott Harris, are among the competitors that have sprung up in multiple locations since the Doughnut Vault made its debut in 2011.
'EXPANDING MARKET'
“They all do a great job,” Mr. Sodikoff said in an email. “It's an expanding market with lots of growth. Our wedding cake doughnuts are expanding to their own business brand.”
Related:
• Do-Rite Donuts expands to Streeterville
• Heart-stopper gourmet doughnuts come to Chicago
• Inside Dunkin' Donuts' biggest doughnut bakery
Nationally, there are still fewer than 100 gourmet, upscale doughnut stores, primarily in major cities, estimated Darren Tristano, an executive vice president at Chicago-based food industry consultant Technomic Inc. National sales within the niche are likely to be about $50 million or so this year, compared with less than $10 million in 2011, the year the Doughnut Vault opened, Mr. Tristano said.
Still in the growth phase, fancy doughnuts have branched out from purely breakfast fare to snacks enjoyed throughout the day, including at some weddings and other catered events, Mr. Tristano said. Yet it remains to be seen whether the doughnut has staying power or will become, like the cupcake before it, a fad that fizzles, he said.
'VERY GOOD POSITION'
“The right brand might be able to build enough stores and sustain it,” Mr. Tristano said. “The success he's had, the way he brands his restaurants, he's in a very good position to be successful.
“When somebody like Sodikoff opens a concept, it gets a lot of attention. It's an industry where, if you see something that works, it gets replicated. By being early to market, the advantage he has is that you're able to develop a cult following. He had an early entry, he's got a good product, and there are opportunities to grow it.”
Other potential locations were not disclosed by Mr. Sodikoff, who said some new stores will include a boutique espresso program. Special flavors — which have included Dreamsicle, carrot cake and eggnog — will be location-specific, with some made on-site at the new stores and others created in the original shop, Mr. Sodikoff said.
Mr. Sodikoff, whose restaurants include Au Cheval, Bavette's Bar & Boeuf, Green St. Smoked Meats and Cocello, said he is unsure how many doughnuts he's sold in River North. “We hit the millionth-doughnut mark and stopped counting.”PAC dares Colbert to tractor pull
A super PAC that’s become the target of satirical teasing by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert is pushing back, challenging the late night television host to a tractor pull – no kidding, apparently – on Saturday at the site of the GOP straw poll in Ames, Iowa.
Jobs for Iowa, an independent group that paid $40,000 to air an ad touting Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a “ better option for president,” issued the challenge in a cheeky Friday afternoon news release that mocks the blow-hard conservative personae Colbert adopts on his nightly program, The Colbert Report – which he pronounces by dropping the ‘t’s at the end of both words.
Story Continued Below
“Mr. Colbert, the only thing in Iowa that can stake claim to a silent letter is Des Moines, so you need to take your ‘t’ back to France. It’s time to put up or shut up,” reads the release.
The move comes as another pro-Perry super PAC, Make Us Great Again, has emerged with the blessing of close Perry allies and appears poised to marginalize other outside groups competing for big donor cash to boost Perry’s presidential bid, which he plans to announce Saturday in South Carolina.
But a source familiar with Jobs for Iowa, which is believed to have been created at the behest of major donors who support Perry’s presidential ambitions, said no decisions had been made about the super PAC’s future. The source, who requested anonymity to talk about tentative plans, said the challenge to Colbert is legit and that the group has already arranged to have tractors at the ready if Colbert accepts.
Neither Colbert’s publicist nor his lawyer responded to messages Friday afternoon.
Colbert's running gag highlights what the comedian seems to view as the absurdities of campaign finance laws.
"A storm is gathering over Iowa, a money storm,” Colbert intoned in an ad aired Wednesday in Iowa. “Out-of-state groups like Grow PAC and Jobs for Iowa PAC are flooding the Iowa airwaves, telling you to vote Rick Perry at the Ames Straw Poll. They think they can buy your vote with their unlimited super PAC money. But Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow asks – what about our unlimited super PAC money?”
The ad urges viewers to write-in Rick Perry’s name at Saturday’s poll – for which Perry will not appear on the ballot – except, Colbert tells viewers in the ad “not their Rick Perry. Our Rick Parry. On August 13th, write in Rick Parry – that’s Parry with an A for America, with an A for Iowa.”
A follow-up ad aired Thursday by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow excerpted a clip from Jobs for Iowa’s ad featuring a farmer husking corn, asserting “outside groups like Jobs for Iowa super PAC are trying to pander to Iowans with pro-Perry ads featuring cheap cornography that your kids could see, just so you’ll vote for Rick Perry in the Ames straw poll.”
Jobs for Iowa’s Friday release proclaims: “Forget the airwaves. It’s time to settle this like the Iowans none of us are in the ultimate competition for super PAC dominance. An old-fashioned tractor pull … to be held August 13 at the Ames Fairgrounds.”
Read the full Jobs for Iowa statement.
This article tagged under: Stephen Colbert
PoliticsThe Trump administration switched sides Wednesday in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could retroactively nullify tens of thousands of agency decisions.
The case, Lucia v. SEC, has major implications for the process by which federal agencies try or punish those in violation of laws or regulations.
The litigation concerns an agency’s decision to allow career bureaucrats to preside as the functional equivalent of judges during enforcement proceedings. These officials, called administrative law judges (ALJs), are hired by career bureaucrats. They are not appointed by the president, a court or an agency head, but they exercise significant authority on behalf of the U.S. government in official proceedings.
ALJs can, among other things, issue subpoenas, make decisions about the credibility of witnesses or the admissibility of evidence, and issues provisional rulings that are generally upheld on final review — if a final review occurs at all.
The Constitution requires that the president, the courts, or the head of an executive department appoint all “inferior officers” of the United States.
A group of investment managers challenged the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) use of ALJs in an enforcement proceeding convened against them for alleged violations of securities law. The managers argue these proceedings are unlawful, because the ALJs are exactly the sort of “inferior officer” who must be appointed by the president, the court, or the head of an agency, since they exercise meaningful discretion on behalf of the federal government.
A lower federal court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, found in favor of the SEC. A three-judge panel found for the SEC, and the full court affirmed that decision on a five to five vote. The investment managers then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Obama Justice Department sided with the SEC in the dispute, but Trump’s new solicitor general, Noel Francisco, changed positions Wednesday, and backed the money managers.
“Upon further consideration, and in light of the implications for the exercise of executive power under Article II, the government is now of the view that such ALJs are officers because they exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,'” Francisco wrote in a new brief at the Supreme Court.
A Supreme Court ruling against the SEC could have important implications for similarly-situated officials in other agencies. ALJs often preside in actions brought by a whole host of federal agencies. A finding against the SEC would potentially jeopardize, and perhaps invalidate, the legal status of thousands of other agency proceedings.
The Justice Department generally represents federal agencies before the high court. Accordingly, the solicitor general asked the justices to appoint another lawyer to represent the SEC as the litigation continues.
The high court could decide to take the case as soon as January.
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Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis will be in Kiel, Germany, on Wednesday, where he will receive the Hermann-Ehlers 2016 prize for “special merits in supporting the rule of law and fight against corruption,” said Presidency spokesperson Mădălina Dobrovolschi.
Iohannis will receive the award from the Hermann-Ehlers foundation.
“It is a prestigious award, one of the most important German prizes,” Dobrovolschi said.
The foundation is named after Hermann Ehlers, who was the President of the German Parliament, from October 1950 to October 1954. The award was granted to several top politicians over the years, because they promoted the values of freedom and democracy. Two of the personalities who received this award are German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (in 2003), and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (in 2013).
The Hermann-Ehlers award has been granted annually since 1975.
President: Germany is Romania’s number one trade partner
Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.comThere are two sets of packages for MongoDB; the standard Ubuntu packages, and a set published by 10gen themselves. The standard packages are out of date, especially for older releases of Ubuntu, so it is probably a good idea to set yourself up to install from the 10gen repositories.
The error message you quote suggests that you might have already tried this, since version 2.0.1 is not a standard Ubuntu package. I suggest that first of all, you completely uninstall Mongo and clean up your system. If you have existing data that you want to keep, you could take a backup of it. By default, it is stored in /var/lib/mongodb. So if you want to take a backup, take a copy of the files from there and keep them in a safe place.
Uninstalling existing MongoDB packages
Since I'm not 100% what you've got installed, I suggest the following to make sure everything is uninstalled:
sudo apt-get purge mongodb mongodb-clients mongodb-server mongodb-dev sudo apt-get purge mongodb-10gen sudo apt-get autoremove
Some of those commands may fail, depending on what packages you actually have installed, but that's okay.
This should also remove your config from /etc/mongodb.conf. If you want to completely clean up, you might also want to remove the data directory /var/lib/mongodb, so long as you backed it up or don't want it any more.
If you've installed by building from source or using the 10gen binary distributions, then you'll need to manually uninstall and clean up from wherever you put the binary files, config and data files.
Installing the 10gen MongoDB packages
Follow the 10gen instructions for adding their repository:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10
Edit /etc/apt/sources.list, delete any lines you have already added for Mongo, and add the following single line (since 11.10 uses upstart) at the end:
deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen
Note that if you add this repository using the Software Center, it will automatically add a deb-src entry, which will break apt-get. So you will need to edit your sources list by hand to add only the above line.
Then to install, run:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mongodb-10gen
Checking your install
Installing the packages should automatically start up the MongoDB server. So you should be able to run the client from the command line:
mongo
which should successfully connect to the test database. You can quit by typing exit.If there had ever been any dispute about why Airbnb refuses to support simple measures that would enforce the city’s laws, we now know the answer:
A report from the American Hospitality and Lodging Association (which was covered today in the Examiner), concludes that the relatively small number of Airbnb hosts who are breaking the law in SF and other cites account for a disproportionate amount of the company’s revenue.
Multiple-unit operators – that is, people who rent out more than one place on the site — account for 40 percent of Airbnb’s revenue nationwide, the study, done by Penn State University researchers, concluded.
In San Francisco, full-time rentals – units that are never occupied by the owner but are available as hotel rooms 365 days a year – accounted for 22.4 percent of the company’s local revenue, or $43.5 million, during the 12-month period from September 2014 to September 2015.
If you add the full-time rentals in SF and the operators with two or more units – all of which are illegal under existing law – it comes to 54 percent of Airbnb’s revenue in the city.
The report shows that the company made $194 million in SF during that one-year period, and $105 million was from illegal units.
(Now: Most of the multi-unit buildings may also be full-time rentals, so there’s probably some crossover. But the report shows only 24 full-time two-unit operators and more than 1,000 two-unit hosts, so if the numbers are off, it’s not by a whole lot.)
If the city simply banned Airbnb from listing units that aren’t registered, the 1,884 units that the study shows are illegally rented would be gone from the site – along with more than half the company’s revenue.
The pattern is similar in other cities. So if cities around the nation followed SF’s lead, limited rentals to the single unit a host occupies, required registration, and prevented these hosting platforms from listing illegal units, Airbnb’s $1.3 billion in annual revenue would plummet by more than half.
The company argues that most of its hosts are simply middle-class people making a little money on the side – and in terms of the numbers of hosts, that may be true. But in terms of the company’s revenue, most of it comes from what in San Francisco are illegal rentals.
And it’s interesting that the company (while it disputes the study) has taken a new tack in its PR. Here’s what spokesman Nick Pappas told the Ex:
“The overwhelming majority of Airbnb hosts are middle class people who occasionally share only the home in which they live and while Airbnb hosts keep 97 percent of the price they charge for their listings, hotels take most of the money they earn out of the community,” Papas said.
Even if the overwhelming majority of the hosts are small-time operators, the study suggests that they aren’t the ones making Airbnb most of its money. If the company had been content to be a site that connects people who want to rent out rooms, a lot of the political battles would never have happened (in large part because Airbnb listings wouldn’t be cannibalizing the city’s housing stock).
Instead, Airbnb is going for the big time, with a huge valuation and investors like Ron Conway who want to make huge returns when the company goes public. And that requires, well, allowing people (or maybe encouraging people) to break the law.
I emailed Papas to ask if he disputes the real conclusion of the study, which is that the big money is in rentals that are, at least in San Francisco, illegal.
But look at the second part of his statement. Airbnb now seems to be saying: Hey, so what if we are a de-facto hotel company. Traditional hotels are bad for the local economy and we keep the money in town.
That’s a far, far cry from the way the company has defended its actions in the past, and suggests that Airbnb is moving closer to admitting that it’s not just a tech company – and that this whole “sharing economy” thing is a lie.
The supervisors who sided with Airbnb and refused reasonable law enforcement ought to be embarrassed. The city will never be able to control its housing stock if we allow these companies to make such huge sums of money with illegal rentals.
It’s so easy to fix – but I suspect Airbnb’s not going to voluntarily give up half its revenue to do it. So I guess at some point the city has to stop asking nicely.Imagine that the battery of your iPhone suddenly conks off. Imagine this happens in a remote city like Vellore. Finding an Apple repair shop in most non-metro cities is a challenge in itself. So towns like Vellore are obviously out of the picture. In such a scenario, instead of running to ten different shops and having to sweat it out to get your beloved device running, it would be a lot easier if, in this age, we could submit the mobile to be repaired with all specifications, to a standardised store. How is this not obvious?
Fortunately, people have begun to wake up to this obvious problem. And suddenly, we’re seeing a bit of a boom in the organised mobile repair industry in India. Ajit Panigrahi and his XLRI batchmate Rahul were one of the early ones to the game – with JustLikeNew.in. Now, others like Quik-e and Cashify too have joined in bringing a standardised set of mobile repair services to India.
Paradigm Shift
The startups are bringing a host of services to consumers which were hitherto a rarity. Genuine parts, accurate estimation of costs and repair time, and even limited warranty. Compare this to the unorganised sector – where spare authenticity is questionable, repair time estimations continue to prolong, and warranty is unheard of.
What’s worse – go in for fixing one issue, and you’re likely to discover a dozen new ones within a few months. There’s a lack of trust amongst consumers with the current arrangement, and so the organised repair industry is poised for multi-fold growth in the near future.
Ahmedabad based Quik-e catching up quickly. It offers to repair the device under its own brand, with multiple price points depending upon the extent of damage.
The Benefits
Cashify on the other hand, works more like an aggregator. Choose your device, your area, and the type of damage. Cashify will then list out multiple vendors, along with their service ratings and price for repair. Enter your details, and Cashify will even have the device picked up. There’s an attempt to completely eliminate all the stress that follows a damaged phone – even the trip to the repair center.
It is obviously difficult for an individual consumer to continue checking on their smartphone, trusting it in the hands of local repairmen who might not have all the skills necessary. Secondly, taking multiple trips to the same shop to get a tiny aspect of your mobile fixed seems a little cumbersome. This industry has just been waiting for some disruption.
The Road Ahead
Analysts expect the mobile repair industry to get a lot more crowded in the near future. Multiple startups have managed to raise money in the tens of millions of dollars already – a clear sign of investor confidence in the industry.
With tech literacy (and incomes) continuing to rise, expect consumers to be willing to shell out premiums for the added ease of organised mobile repair services, and lack of stress.HSBC faces a massive fine for failing to properly implement anti-money laundering controls in the US, following an explosive hearing in which the bank's head of compliance for around a decade, David Bagley, resigned in front of the Senate.
The Senate's subcommittee on investigates had focused on five areas of abuse by the bank:
"Servicing High Risk Affiliates". HSBC’s US subsidiary, HBUS, took some responsibilities from its Mexican one, and "treated it as a low risk client, despite its location in a country facing money laundering and drug trafficking challenges", as the Senate put it. As just one example of a red flag which ought to have been raised, the Mexican bank shipped $7bn in physical U.S. dollars to HBUS from 2007 to 2008, outstripping banks even twice its size. The Senate alleges that HSBC should have known that this money was likely to come from drug sales.
"Circumventing OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] Safeguards". Non-American HSBC subsidiaries actively circumvented government-imposed safeguards "designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords, and rogue regimes", by, for example, sending "nearly 25,000 transactions involving $19.4 billion" through HBUS accounts over seven years without disclosing those transactions’ links to Iran.
"Disregarding Terrorist Financing Links". The Senate argues that HBUS shouldn't have been banking in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh due to the high volume of terrorism-related financing that occurs there.
"Clearing Suspicious Bulk Travelers Checks". Over four years, HSBC cleared $29m in "obviously suspicious" travelers cheques for an unnamed Japanese bank, for the aid of Russians "who claimed to be in the used car business".
"Offering Bearer Share Accounts". HSBC offered thousands of accounts to companies which practice "bearer share dealing", where the equity in the company is legally owned by whoever holds ("bears") the share certificate. For obvious reasons, these stocks are hugely useful for money laundering because their ownership can be transferred without creating any sort of trail.
On the one hand, it is impossible to actually say whether or not HSBC engaged in money laundering themselves. The circumstantial evidence makes it seem highly likely that customers of theirs did, and their failure to perform proper checks means that those customers got away with it for much longer than they ought to, but it remains unclear if HSBC actually knew that they were doing it.
Of course, what HSBC did know is that they weren't properly checking. And if you want to allow something without actually allowing it, the best way to do so is loudly announce "I'll just be closing my eyes and sticking my fingers in my ears for the next five minutes, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to do anything illegal in that time".
Just like the Libor scandal, most of what HSBC is in trouble for actually happened half a decade ago. The bank itself was aware of problems with its Mexican subsidiary in 2007, when it sent in a high-level executive, Paul Thurston, to clear up the mess, but its taken a full decade for the Senate's investigations to bear fruit. Now that they have broken cover, though, HSBC is in for a rough ride indeed.Invalid quantity. Please enter a quantity of 1 or more.
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Care Bears and Care Bear Cousins
Adulthood Intuitive 1 Self-Taught 2 Trained 3 100 years +4d6 years
(104 - 124 years) +6d6 years
(106 – 136 years) +10d6 years
(110 - 160 years)
1 This category includes barbarians, oracles, rogues, and sorcerers.
2 This category includes bards, cavaliers, fighters, gunslingers, paladins, rangers, summoners, and witches.
3 This category includes alchemists, clerics, druids, inquisitors, magi, monks, and wizards.
Table: Random Height and Weight for Care Bears and Care Bear Cousins
Gender Base Height Height Modifier Base Weight Weight Modifier Male 2 ft. 8 in. +2d4 in.
(2 ft. 10 in. - 3 ft. 4 in.) 30 lbs. +(2d4 lbs.)
(32 - 38 lbs.) Female 2 ft. 6 in. +2d4 in.
(2 ft. 8 in. - 3 ft. 2 in.) 25 lbs. +(2d4 lbs.)
(27 - 33 lbs.)
Care Bears in the World
Relationships with other races:
Elves
Elves attitudes towards Care Bear like their attitude towards other races is somewhat dismissive and have in first encounters considered Care Bears as nothing more than magical animals, a bemusing curiousity but nothing more. While recognising the Care Bears innate magical abilities they are often view as little more than parlour tricks by Elven Wizards, it is only the Care Bear Stare that is worth some praise and respect in their eyes.
Similarly active and impulsive nature of the Care Bears way of life is admired for its energy but regarded more nothing more than just fun and games, in spite of this in the rare case of Care Bears/Cousins settling down nearby they are often welcome as due to their similar lifespans and are consi der excellent nursemaids and child carers.
Care Bears often have a hard enough time understanding when one of their own kind needs time alone so when faced with the naturally private and reserved nature of Elves they find it overly suspicious and stand offish.
Dwarves
Dwarves tend to find Care Bears frivolous and flighty, too easy to celebrate and at a glance unable to endure the hardships of life outside of their own realm, while the dwarves find the Care Bears ability to craft cloud unique it is viewed as impractical and delicate compared to their own prefer crafts and frowned upon for relying more on magic than actual crafting skill.
Care Bears meanwhile find dwarves rather dour, too ready to focus on the negative aspects of events around them and disprove of their habit of holding grudges. Often though if a individual Dwarf and a Care Bear spend some time together curious friendships may arise due their mutual focus upon loyalty, bravery and greater understanding, a Dwarf may realise that the Care Bears routine is in fact dedicated training while a Care Bear may to appreciate the work hard, play hard ethic of many Dwarfs.
Dwarves are more likely to get along with Care Bears of the adventuring variety because of their determination and dedication to their cause which commands respect and to Dwarves is a sign of the Care Bears growing up to face the hard realities of life.
Gnomes
Gnomes the curious and whimsical creatures they are often find Care Bears fascinating due to their vast differences from the other civilised races both physically and socially, the two races share common ground in their activity and drive making it easy for them to get along though they do have their differences.
When faced with a Gnomes reckless behaviour or a seemingly malicious prank Care Bears will often chastise the Gnome like an older sibling talking to a child and if the pair are together long enough a Care Bear will often place themselves in a guardian (though some would use the term babysitter) role for the gnome. For their part most Gnomes are both delighted and frustrated by this strange relationship, enjoying the friendship and companionship but feeling the Care Bears need to lighten up and be less of a stick in the mud.
Half Elves
Half Elves are natural diplomats but tend to be more subtle than a Care Bears method. On the whole they find Care Bears brash and impulsive, lacking subtlety and seemingly never being able to see the bigger picture being so focused on their smaller goals. Care Bears see the half elves as outcasts and wish to share camaraderie and kindness but only occasionally does this turn out well, many Half Elves feel that the offer of friendship while not unwelcome is insincere at its core and more the product of the the Care Bears social beliefs than a actual personal desire to be friends.
This can lead to a difficult personal relationship between a Half Elf and a Care Bear as the Half Elf attempts to push the Care Bear away the Care Bear sees the Half Elf more in need than ever redoubling their efforts.
Half Orcs
Half Orcs raised in Orc society may scorn Care Bears finding small and weak, however they seems to pose no threat and may be tolerated at first even kept around because they are entertaining at the very least. Half Orcs raised in human society may appreciate a Care Bears genuine friendship and ability to look past their differences. This is something the Half Orc rarely finds in human society so if they find a good friend in a Care Bear they may become protective of the little ones until the care bear or cousin proves their strength against foes.
Halflings
There's much a gentle Halfling society and Care Bears have in common. Care Bears appreciate Halfling cooking and music as well as their strong family bonds. They even recognise the need for stealth and secrecy in both races, though Halflings tendancy to do what ever is required to survive including stealing and dishonesty can cause some friction between the two races. Care Bears can sometimes mistake a halfling for a human child something which a halfling may find annoying or use to their advantage.
Humans
Care Bears understand how different humans can be, as they believe that within the human race can be found the biggest of hearts but also the greatest depths of evil. As a result they are drawn to humans more than any other race, sometimes acting as protectors for them hoping to sway their hearts to the side of good rather than the evil they can become.
Ponies from PonyFinder
Care Bears get along with ponies as they share many of the same core beliefs in love, friendship and harmony. They are both magical races and have much to learn from one another. However they differ slightly in their system of marking. A care bear can sometimes wrongly assume that a blank flanked pony is very very young and treat them as such, much to a filly or foals annoyance.
Likewise ponies sometimes assume a bear or cousin with a belly badge must have mastered the ability to earn it, not understanding that a bear will gain powers some time after the badge appears. Some unicorn scholars have tried to understand and master the art of a care bear stare, legend has it that the stare and the powers of harmony can be combined however there is no solid evidence beyond old tales.
4. Belly Badges, Feats and Class Archetypes
Belly Badges
Care Bears and Cousins in Care-a-Lot are usually born with Belly badges or gain them very early on in development, however it is not until the bears are nearing adulthood that they may find out the meaning of the badge or what power it bestows on the bear though it may manifest early under great pressure.
It is possible however for Care Bears and Cousins to not develop their badges (though this a more common occurrence in the less magically inclined Cousins) in these situations belly badges need to be bestowed upon a Care Bear by another Care Bear with a belly badge.
A bear with no badge may feel some shame in not having one, it can be noted that badge-less bears may hide this fact by drawing on a badge or using other magical means to fake the presence of a belly badge.
A badge may be based on the temperament, personality, prominent physical attribute or a skill of the Bear/Cousin or more related to the power it bestows, badges are rarely direct representations and are more abstract images however often a belly badge is very important to the personal identity of the Bear/Cousin. As a result they normally do not wear clothing which covers it, if required to wear clothing which would obscure the mark such as a raincoat or armour it will generally have the bears mark upon it in the general belly location as a Belly Badge Symbol. which they can use their powers through.
It can be assumed that if Care Bears make armour for themselves or others that it would also bear the mark of the one who is to wear it.
Power Concept: Each badge has an overarching concept which reflects the care bears personality or special talent, several bears may share similar powers with different concepts.
Here is a suggestion of concepts, bear attitudes or badge themes which could be compatible with these powers. Badges are never a direct representation of the powers within so feel free to take some creative leeway matching a badge to a set of powers.
In no way are these examples definite, feel free to create your own or to mix and match spells appropriate to your concept.
Power Concept: Sun/Light/Fiery Personality.
Typical Badge Appearance: A stylised sun, a lantern, flames.
Power Concept: Music, Boisterousness.
Typical Badge Appearance: Musical notes, instruments, megaphone/horn.
Power Concept: Adventure, Exploration, Travel.
Typical Badge Appearance: Map, telescope, a pair of boots.
Feats:
Improved Belly Badge
Prerequisites: Belly Badge or Lesser Belly Badge Racial ability.
You may use your Belly Badge abilities an additional once per day, this feat can be taken repeatedly. A Care Bear Cousin taking this feat for the first time gains full Belly Badge abilities as listed under the Belly Badge description.
Greater Belly Badge
Prerequisites: Improved Belly Badge.
You gain a 3 rd level spell as a 1/day spell-like ability, this may be chosen from both the Arcane or Divine spell lists but must be linked thematically with existing abilities.
Care Bear Stare Feats
It should be noted that all additional/alternative effects caused by Stare Feats continue for the duration that the Care Bear Stare is maintained, when Stare ends the additional effect duration dice is then rolled.
Barrier Rainbow
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability.
When using a Care Bear Stare you can choose to create 10ft by 10ft vertical plane of rainbow energy instead of producing its normal effects. The opaque wall's endpoint begins at any corner of your square and extends in a straight line for 10ft or until it contacts a solid surface.
This wall lasts for 1d4 rounds and any creatures passing through the wall take damage equal to that normally dealt by the Stare, a successful Reflex save ( DC 10 + 1/2 casters HD + casters Cha modifier) halves this damage. If you create the wall so it appears where creatures are they take damage as if they had walked through the wall and may make a Reflex save.
Barrier Rainbow Improved
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability. Barrier Rainbow.
When using a Care Bear Stare you can choose to create a plane of rainbow energy instead of producing its normal effects
This wall lasts for 1 minute/level treating the Care Bears Hit Dice as it caster level, the wall is 1 inch thick per four caster levels and composed of up to one 5-foot square per level. You can double the wall's area by halving its thickness but in either case t he wall's endpoint begins at any corner of your square.
Each 5-foot square of the wall has hardness 8 and 15 hit points per inch of thickness. A section of wall whose hit points drop to 0 is breached. If a creature tries to break through the wall with a single attack, the DC for the Strength check is 20 + 2 per inch of thickness.
The wall cannot be conjured so that it occupies the same space as a creature or another object.
You can create a Rainbow Barrier in almost any shape you desire. The wall created need not be vertical, nor rest upon any firm foundation, however if it does not merge with or is solidly supported by existing earth or structures then a single point of damage to the wall will cause the entire wall to fracture and vanish.
It is possible, but difficult, to trap mobile opponents within or under a Rainbow Barrier provided the wall is shaped so it can hold the creatures. Creatures can avoid entrapment with successful Reflex saves.
Bludgeoning Blast
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability.
As part of a Care Bear Stare you may make a ranged Bull Rush attempts against all creatures within the effect of the Stare, for determining CMB Charisma is used instead of Strength and the Stare is treated as a Large size creature (+1). If you are a leader of a group Care Bear Stare when using this effect then for every additional member within the group that has this feat treat the Stare as a size category larger (to the maximum of colossal) when determining CMB.
Care Conductor
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability. Leadership Feat, Level 12
When acting as Leader of a Care Bear Stare additional Care Bears/Cousins equal to your Hit Dice + Charisma Modifier may aid in your Stare.
Normal: A Care Bear Stare has a maximum of 10 Care Bears/Cousins in a Group.
Entangling Rainbow
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability.
When using a Care Bear Stare you can choose to enmesh all creatures in its area instead of producing its normal effects. Your Stare deals half its normal dice damage however any creature that takes damage from your Stare becomes entangled an additional 1d6 damage each round at the start of your turn. This effect lasts for 1d4 rounds.
Extra Stare
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability.
You may use your Care Bear Stare an additional once per day, this feat can be taken repeatedly.
Redeeming Rainbow
Prerequisites: Care Bear Stare Racial ability. Level 4
When using a Care Bear Stare you can choose to mimic the effects of Charm Monster to all creatures in its area instead of producing its normal effects. This effect last for 1d4 rounds and the Will Save DC to resist this effect is equal to that of the Care Bear Stare.
Class Archetypes
Care Crusader (Paladin Archetype)
“ Care Bear Countdown, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Care Bear Stare.”
Rather than linking with a divine creature or spirit a Care Crusader focuses inward upon the innate abilities of the Care Bear Family, channelling the Care Bear Stare to devastating effect.
Stare Focus : At 5 th level and every 3 levels after the Care Crusader gain a bonus feat, this feat must be selected from the Care Bear Stare feat list or a Channelling feat. At 10 th level the Care Crusader adds his Charisma modifier to the rolls when determining the duration of Stare effects.
This replaces divine bond
Wellspring of Hope : At 3 rd level Care Crusader with the Eternal Hope racial ability adds the +2 racial bonus on saving throws against fear and despair effects to the existing bonus granted to allies within 10ft by Aura of Courage.
5. Items
With many of their needs of life supplied by the Kingdom of Caring Care Bears and Care Bear Cousins do not have the same priorities and views towards crafting and creating as other races, Care Bears/cousins tend to focus on artistic crafts such as painting and sewing, horticulture or personal culinary skills. The few Care Bears\Cousins that focus beyond these areas are usually driven individuals often exploring and weaving the very cloud stuff that makes up their plane and are regarded as strange or reclusive by their fellows.
New Materials:
Cloud Matter:
Mundane Items:
Belly Badge Symbol: An embroidered or embossed precise replica of the intended recipients Belly Badge these are typically worn as a tabard or created as part as a item of clothing/armour that may obscure a Care Bear\Cousins Belly Badge.
A Belly Badge Symbol allows a Care Bear\Cousin to channel their Belly Badge powers or a Care Bear Stare through the symbol, a Belly Badge Symbol must be the same shape and size as the Care Bears Belly Badge and requires be worn for at least 24 hours over a period of a week to begin working. While simply staining or minor tears will not stop its effects significant damage such as burning or acid damage can render a Belly Badge Symbol ineffective.
Beginning Care Bear\Cousins characters may begin play with a Belly Badge Symbol on their armour or a item of clothing for free. Price: 25gp.
Magical Items:
6. Foes of the Care Bears
Due to the mission given to them by the Great Wishing Star the Care Bears are no longer simple bystanders and even the Care Bears who are not adventurers risk their lives on the material plane against a multiple of foes in their desire to do good.
Traditional Pathfinder foes:
Dark Folk: When children have been snatched in the night or a town left frightened by these sinister folk Care Bears have driven them from the streets and pursued them in the the depths of the earth. The Care Bears and Dark Folk have clashed time and time again with neither side ever understanding the motives of the ofther.
Demons and Devils: Very rarely encountered these are one of the Care Bears most dangerous foes often causing problems by proxy before they are discovered as its source. Thankfully the power of the Care Bear Stare is unbearable to these creatures often driving them from an area if not able to destroy them completely.
Fey: Care Bears encounters with the fey can be summarised in a word: unpredictable. Many good aligned fey are charmed by the kind nature of the Care Bears but even then may be reluctant to release a lost child from their spells or to cease action against a mortal who has angered them. A fey who seems friendly may suddenly become hostile because of a unknown slight or enraged fey may be calmed with a simple apology, as a result many Care Bears find such dealings exhausting.
Goblinoids: Prolifically spread throughout the dark places of the world Goblinoids are the most commonly encounter of the Care Bears monstrous foes. Many Care Bears treat simple goblins like naughty uneducated children or simple minions of evil and have on numerous occasions attempted the redemption of individual goblins to varying degrees of success.
Hobgoblins are encounter less regularly and more often than not a direct encounter with these warlike creatures is avoided with Care Bears attempting stealth and trickery to release slaves than risk force. The lone BugBears however are a foe that all Care Bears attempt to exterminate whenever possible as their desire to cause maximum pain, fear and suffering to all living creatures is everything they stand against, likewise BugBears when face with a Care Bear will try their best to both physically and mentally break down the small creature's often dragging out an encounter stalking a chosen prey or refusing to deal a finishing blow to build as much terror as possible.
Undead: While the undead are often foes to all living creatures in particular Wraths, Wights and spectres are viewed as the most dangerous amongst them as their malevolent anger fuelled personalities that seek death and destruction of all life and light are beyond negotiation. Destruction of such creatures is seen simply allowing a tortured spirit to move on and dismissing a dangerous hazard from the world.
Now I know that my blog format can be hard to read so I am posting two links below to download Carefinder v0.1:Now there is still a lot of work that needs to be done as well as formatting to make it all easily readable but constructive feedback is welcome.What is Tahtib?
Tahtib is one of the oldest martial arts in the world. Engravings have been found of people practicing the art that date back to around 2500 B.C. Tahtib was first utilized through military. It was taught to ancient Egyptian soldiers and used in battle. Since then though tahtib has become less and less of a martial art and more of a dance. The original techniques and strategies are still taught today though. The art has never really made its way out of Egypt. Still today tahtib is primarily only taught in Upper Egypt and few other places around the world.
As stated, with time tahtib turned from martial art to traditional dance. The wooden stick has still remained a part of the dance routine though. The dance encompasses many moves used from its martial art predecessor. However it is now primarily performed by tourists and is known as the cane or stick dance. The dance has also been related to a mock form of combat similar to many other cultures war dances.
The stick used in both forms of tahtib is approximately 1.2 meters in length. Its movements are notable due to the sounds that occur. This is what has made the stick such an iconic parts of tahtib. As it is moved across the body iconic sounds can be heard as the speed of the sticks movement moves the air around it.
Overall Concept
Tahtib is an art that has one primary focus and that is the opponents head. Obviously this is due to the fact that the head is such a significant part of the body. As most would know contact with the head in a fight can be decimating. It holds the brain which is key to our consciousness. Targeted strikes toward the head are even more deadly then just regular attacks. By specifically targeting weak and soft areas on the skull, a knockout can be achieved easily. Additionally this also minimizes the amount of strikes required and thus the energy exerted.
It’s easy to see why this was such an important art in the Egyptian military at the time. It allows soldiers to achieve victory swiftly in hand to hand combat. This reduction in energy required then allows more to be done in battles. Soldiers don’t have to worry about becoming tired shortly into battle. Not only would this tiredness effect their ability to defend themselves but also their ability to attack and remain in formations.
As with most martial arts tahtib’s attacking targets are also its defensive points of protection. The majority of martial arts fighting concepts include specific points of the body to target in a fight. This is due to the weakness of these areas. These arts then flip this attack into defense as they know these areas are most vulnerable. It’s for this reason tahtib focuses on protecting the head as a form of defense. From their attacking training they know how decimating damage to the head can be in a fight.
Another notable point about tahtib’s fighting concept is its progressiveness as a modern art. In the past tahtib was an art that only men were allowed to practice. As of today though modern tahtib classes are open to both genders.
Even though this art has been transformed into a form of dance as well. The modern form of the martial art still remains deadly and practical today. Obviously though the use of a stick lessens its practicality in modern life as a means of self-defense. However the art still remains a formidable martial art that can hold its own in battle. Here is an example of tahtib in the modern day:Executive Director Angela Sedeño handles ribbon-cutting duties at the grand opening of the The Kedzie Center, Chicago's first community-funded mental health clinic. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Patty Wetli
IRVING PARK — The Kedzie Center — Chicago's first mental health clinic paid for directly by the community members it will serve — opened Wednesday in Irving Park, the result of a decade-long advocacy effort that culminated in residents voting to tax themselves in order to fund mental health services.
"What our community did is unprecedented in the city of Chicago," said Sharon Nichols, a resident of Independence Park and board member of the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers, which led the charge to create The Kedzie Center, 4141 N. Kedzie Ave.
In November 2012, the people of the North River area — Albany Park, Irving Park, North Park and parts of Forest Glen — went to the polls and voted in favor of 0.4 percent property tax increase, or about $15-$20 per year for most households, to pay for what would become The Kedzie Center.
Patty Wetli says the state had to intervene to allow neighbors to raise taxes:
"People stepped up," said Michael Snedeker, executive director of the coalition. "The community initiated this and the community funded it."
The long and winding road that led to the opening of The Kedzie Center dates to 2004, when Chicago closed seven of its then-19 city-run mental health centers (six of the remaining 12 were closed in 2012).
Services to all but the most acutely mentally ill fell off the map, Snedeker said.
The coalition sprung into action, working with state legislators to craft the Community Expanded Mental Health Services Act, which Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law in 2011.
The act gives any community in Chicago the authority to establish its own mental health program — as long as residents approve of and fund the plan.
"You're asking people to contribute a little bit to provide a lot," said state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz (D-12th), a lead sponsor of the mental health services act, along with state Rep. Patti Bellock (R-47th) and state Sen. Ira Silverstein (D-8th).
"From beginning to end this bill... was an exercise in public participation," Feigenholtz said.
Mary Grigar was one of the community members who helped marshal support for the 2012 ballot question, which eventually was approved 74 percent to 26 percent.
"The neatest thing that happened, everyone I called said, 'Yes,'" Grigar recalled.
She was drawn to the fight after learning that services such as the grief counseling her family had received following the death of one her sons were no longer available, particularly for the poor or uninsured.
"I know there's this underlying necessity to keep people stable," Grigar said.
The Kedzie Center will treat members of the North River area (proof of residency will be required), regardless of an individual's ability to pay.
The focus will be on providing preventative treatment and emphasizing mental health as a wellness issue, said Angela Sedeño, executive director of The Kedzie Center.
"It is neither helpful nor humane to provide mental health care only in moments of crisis," said Sedeño, who previously worked at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.
Surveying the community, "We certainly heard people report depression, routine stress, acculturation issues and youth violence," she said.
In response, the center will offer family, couples and career counseling, as well as treatment for anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress.
"Mental health problems aren't 'out there someplace,' they're in here," said the Rev. Charles Bolser, pastor at St. Viator Parish.
"In every community we have issues of abuse, we have issues of anger. We have brokenness of mind, brokenness of spirit, brokenness of body," he said. "This will be a healing place."
"There is no place else like this," said Nichols, who expressed hope that The Kedzie Center's one-of-a-kind status doesn't last for long.
Communities across Chicago take note, she said: "Our collective voice was heard."
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:The Times' criminal justice team looks behind the scenes and behind the headlines.
March 8, 2010 at 7:39 AM
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Posted by John de Leon
A 10-month-old boy was taken into protective custody Sunday night after drugs and drug paraphernalia were found in the mother's home.
Police responded to a home in the 4300 block of 15th Avenue South about 6 p.m. Sunday after receiving a 911 call from a woman who reported a fight. When officers arrived they discovered the caller -- a 27-year-old woman -- was attempting to play peacekeeper between the two fighting parties. The woman was also highly intoxicated, according to a police account.
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The woman was breastfeeding and caring for her 10-month-old boy. Police also found drugs and paraphernalia in the home and suspected the baby may have been under the influence of "intoxicants," police said. The boy was taken to the South Precinct, where his condition was screened by Seattle Fire Department medics. The child was later taken to Seattle Children's hospital for additional evaluation and treatment.
Child Protective Services took custody of the child. Police said the investigation is continuing.Boston Bruins goaltender Anton Khudobin became the latest NHL star to sign a lockout contract in the KHL on Wednesday, joining Moscow suburb team Atlant.
Boston Bruins goaltender Anton Khudobin became the latest NHL star to sign a lockout contract in the KHL on Wednesday, joining Moscow suburb team Atlant.
At least 13 NHLers have already signed lockout deals to play in the expanding Eastern European league, most returning natives.
The Kazakh-born Russian said he had been persuaded to join Atlant after a tour of the facilities.
"I was shown the ice palace in Mytishchi and I liked it," he said of the team's home arena. "I’m very glad that Atlant made me an offer and that I have signed for this team,” Khudobin was quoted by Atlant’s website.
Khudobin, 26, started his career at Metallurg Magnitogorsk, winning the Russian league in 2007 and departing for North America right after the triumph.
He spent two seasons with the Minnesota Wild before he was traded to Boston in 2011, becoming the backup goalkeeper in the Stanley Cup-winning team.
Khudobin made only one appearance for the Bruins last season, playing at farm club the Providence Bruins.
Atlant is second in the Western Conference with four wins in six games this season.
The deadline for averting a lockout passed Saturday after the NHL and the players’ association failed to agree terms on a new collective contract.
It sparked a flurry of trades, the highest-profile of which has been Evgeni Malkin's return to Metallurg Magnitogorsk.TORONTO • The march of Canadian producers allocating capital to oil plays in the United States is picking up pace this year as capital gravitates to the most affordable basins in North America.
“We are in the range of US$45 per barrel, and getting down to rates of return that our unacceptable to be spending money,” James Bowzer, Baytex Energy Corp.’s president and CEO, told an energy conference in Toronto organized by investment bank Peters & Co. “So, today we are not spending any money in Canada.”
Calgary-based Baytex has production fields in Peace River and Lloydminster in Western Canada, but has been actively developing its Eagle Ford basin in Texas. The company said it can break even in the Eagle Ford at US$35 per barrel, compared to US$44 at Lloydminster and US$47 in Alberta’s heavy oil Peace river basin.
Like most intermediate players, Baytex has been preoccupied with lower costs and protecting its balance sheet in a stubbornly low oil price environment.
“These supply-side downturns are always longer to come out of and worse than you think they are going to be,” Bowzer said. “We have been planning for lower prices for the next couple of years.”
Baytex suspended its dividend and twice cut its capital expenditure target this year. It has also shut-in production of 2,400 barrels per day in Western Canada due to poor economics, the CEO said.
Enerplus Corp., another seasoned Canadian operator, is also seeing growth from basins south of the border, namely North Dakota and the Marcellus. The Calgary-based company was once a gas-weighted Canadian producer but has slowly transitioned towards oil in the U.S. shale basins.
This year the company allocated 70 per cent of its capital to its Williston basin in the U.S. Bakken and the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
“The Marcellus is an incredible play,” Ian Dundas, CEO of Enerplus said in an interview. “The Marcellus is clearly going to affect natural gas flows, and squeeze mid-continent and put pressure on Canadian gas operators. It was one of the reasons that we got into it.”
At US$40 per barrel, the payout period — the time it would take for investors to recoup their capital — is three years in the Marcellus and 2.3 years in the best plays in the Eagle Ford, compared to six years in the Canadian crude oil plays, according to Peters & Co. research.
“Canada has some challenges right now, relative to transport and we have incredible opportunities to improve that if we can get our act together as a country,” Dundas said.
As the Canadian oil industry watches capital flee, it is fighting hard to keep costs downs and innovating to remain profitable at lower prices.
Newalta Corp., a Calgary-based oilfield services company, for example is looking to provide modular processing facilities to allow flexibility and mobility for producers to lower their costs.
The company is also among a growing list of companies eyeing the Lower 48, seeking expansion and acquisition opportunities in the Bakken and the Eagle Ford.
“Do I think we will solve the US$40 equation? Hell, yes,” said John Barkhouse, president of Newalta during a panel discussion.
“If we don’t solve it that will be implying that the industry is going away. And I can guarantee the North American E&P hydrocarbon industry is not going away.”
yhussain@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/YAD_FPEnergyPascal Cohen, manager of aviation business development for Buffalo Niagara International Airport, has a four letter word he doesn’t like to utter when it comes to Canadian flyers.
[np_storybar title=”The new question for Canadian Snowbirds heading south: to buy or rent?” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/2014/10/21/needs-illo-the-new-question-for-canadian-snowbirds-heading-south-to-buy-or-rent/”%5DShe might be on to something. Even as the cost of U.S. housing has increased, abetted by a weaker loonie, low vacancy rates have driven up rental rates at a time when availability of homes is still very high in some states because Americans are still having trouble accessing credit.
Canadians continue to be the top foreign buyers of real estate in Florida and have purchased about US$2.2-billion in the past year, according to the National Association of Realtors for Florida. And, unlike Americans, they don’t need a mortgage. The same survey found 89% of Canadians use cash for a purchase, something analysts have speculated is coming out of their Canadian home equity. Keep reading.
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Snow. The myth of snow is about the only thing that is stopping more of us from crossing the border for a flight that is not only cheaper but usually faster and more convenient — even once you factor in driving time.
“The biggest thing is there is a false perception that we have a ton of snow and it’s difficult to get to,” said Mr. Cohen, who figures a family of four flying out of Buffalo to Orlando, versus Toronto, can save $500 on average and sometimes as much as much 60%. “The Buffalo airport never closes for weather.”
Canadians took about five million flights outbound from a U.S. city last year, according to the Conference Board of Canada. About 40% of those flights originate from the Buffalo area but cross-border flying has been common in other jurisdictions. Vancouver residents use Bellingham, Washington, and Plattsburgh International Airport now bills itself as Montreal’s U.S. airport and fully bilingual.
Full disclosure here. I’ve flown out of Buffalo’s airport before and I will be doing it again in the near future for a trip to Fort Lauderdale with the main reason being $1,200 in savings for my family of four.
The inconvenience is often touted as reason not to go but Mr. Cohen pointed out to journalists during a presentation that you have to get to a Canadian airport about three hours early for an international flight. Flying out of Buffalo or another U.S. city is a domestic flight so you can arrive one hour before flight time because you’ve already cleared U.S. customs.
The Buffalo airport never closes for weather
Customs is the other fear often promoted but the Buffalo airport pitch — the groups plans to hit Toronto with billboard ads — is that it’s really only adding another 20-30 minutes in most cases. The airport’s website is now posting border time waits.
Using his math, you add 90 minutes of driving to 30 minutes at customs and you’re about even with that three-hour wait at your Canadian airport.
He didn’t include gas or wear and tear on your car in his calculations but my own strategy is to arrive the night before to avoid the so-called snow risk, which is real, and stay at a hotel.
Parking is generally included in hotel stays, for up to two weeks, and once you factor that in with a free shuttle to the airport you’re almost even with the two cab rides you need to get to and from Toronto’s airport. For me, it’s $130 in cab fares round trip. The really thrifty can take a Greyhound bus, which stops at the Buffalo airport, for $19 each way.
Mr. Cohen says the Canadian airlines can’t hope to compete, especially in Toronto where the airport improvement fee alone tacks on $25 to every flight and $4 just for connecting. He estimates other airport fees, embedded in the ticket price, are about US$35 for Pearson International compared to US$8.25 out of Buffalo. On top of that is higher Canadian sales tax.
The downside is clearly the U.S. cannot realistically service someone trying to travel across Canada. Someone from Toronto is not driving to Buffalo and flying to Seattle to get to Vancouver. “Those would be real cherry pickers,” says Mr. Cohen.
There are also a limited number of direct flights out of U.S. border airports. In Buffalo, about a quarter of all flights go to New York City with direct travel also available to a few other select destinations. After New York, Orlando, Chicago, Boston and Washington are the top destinations.
The big fish these airports would like to grab is business travellers but Mr. Cohen says he does not have the ability to tell how much of U.S. airport travel by Canadians is non-leisure.
Toni Skokovic, vice-president of sales for iInterfaceware, attended the press event, obviously to help promote the idea this can be a useful travel method for business. “We have a sales team of about six which puts us at about 200 to 300 trips [annually],” he says. “We realized Buffalo/Niagara is viable, not just for cost but the efficiency of getting there.”
At the end of the day, Canadians are going to vote with their wallets, when it comes to cheaper air alternatives. “We just want people to know they have options,” says Mr. Cohen.
Judging by the amount of Canadian air travel originating from U.S. airports, we’ve figured it out.
twitter.com/dustywalletFACILISH
A minimal |
the Balearic Islands, in their historical sense) had numerous excellent harbours, though rocky at their mouth, and requiring care in entering them (Strabo, Eustath.; Port Mahon is one of the finest harbours in the world). Both were extremely fertile in all produce, except wine and olive oil.[21] They were celebrated for their cattle, especially for the mules of the lesser island; they had an immense number of rabbits, and were free from all venomous reptiles.[22] Amongst the snails valued by the Romans as a diet was a species from the Balearic isles called cavaticae because they were bred in caves.[23] Their chief mineral product was the red earth, called sinope, which was used by painters.[24] Their resin and pitch are mentioned by Dioscorides.[25] The population of the two islands is stated by Diodorus at 30,000.
The part of the Mediterranean east of Spain, around the Balearic Isles, was called Mare Balearicum,[26] or Sinus Balearicus.[27]
Medieval period [ edit ]
Late Roman and early Islamic eras [ edit ]
The Vandals under Genseric conquered the Islands sometime between 461 and 468 during their war on the Roman Empire. However, in late 533 or early 534, following the Battle of Ad Decimum, the troops of Belisarius reestablished control of the islands for the Byzantine Empire. Imperial power receded precipitately in the western Mediterranean after the fall of Carthage and the Exarchate of Africa to the Umayyad Caliphate in 698, and in 707 the islands submitted to the terms of an Umayyad fleet, which allowed the residents to maintain their traditions and religion as well as a high degree of autonomy. Now nominally both Byzantine and Umayyad, the de facto independent islands occupied a strategic and profitable grey area between the competing religions and kingdoms of the western Mediterranean. The prosperous islands were thoroughly sacked by the Swedish Viking King Björn Ironside and his brother Hastein during their Mediterranean raid of 859–862.
In 902, the heavy use of the islands as a pirate base provoked the Emirate of Córdoba, nominally the island's overlords, to invade and incorporate the islands into their state. However, the Cordoban emirate disintegrated in civil war and partition in the early eleventh century, breaking into smaller states called taifa. Mujahid al-Siqlabi, the ruler of the Taifa of Dénia, sent a fleet and seized control of the islands in 1015, using it as the base for subsequent expeditions to Sardinia and Pisa. In 1050, the island's governor Abd Allah ibn Aglab rebelled and established the independent Taifa of Mallorca.
The Crusade against the Balearics [ edit ]
For centuries, the Balearic sailors and pirates had been masters of the western Mediterranean. But the expanding influence of the Italian maritime republics and the shift of power on the Iberian peninsula from the Muslim states to the Christian states left the islands vulnerable. A crusade was launched in 1113. Led by Ugo da Parlascio Ebriaco and Archbishop Pietro Moriconi of the Republic of Pisa, the expedition included 420 ships, a large army and a personal envoy from Pope Paschal II. In addition to the Pisans (who had been promised suzerainty over the islands by the Pope), the expedition included forces from the Italian cities of Florence, Lucca, Pistoia, Rome, Siena, and Volterra, from Sardinia and Corsica, Catalan forces under Ramon Berenguer, Hug II of Empúries, and Ramon Folc II of Cardona came from Spain and Occitan forces under William V of Montpellier, Aimery II of Narbonne, and Raymond I of Baux came from France. The expedition also received strong support from Constantine I of Logudoro and his base of Porto Torres.
The crusade sacked Palma in 1115 and generally reduced the islands, ending its period as a great sea power, but then withdrew. Within a year, the now shattered islands were conquered by the Berber Almoravid dynasty, whose aggressive, militant approach to religion mirrored that of the crusaders and departed from the island's history as a tolerant haven under Cordoba and the taifa. The Almoravids were conquered and deposed in North Africa and on the Iberian Peninsula by the rival Almohad Dynasty of Marrakech in 1147. Muhammad ibn Ganiya, the Almoravid claimant, fled to Palma and established his capital there. His dynasty, the Banu Ghaniya, sought allies in their effort to recover their kingdom from the Almohads, leading them to grant Genoa and Pisa their first commercial concessions on the islands. In 1184, an expedition was sent to recapture Ifriqiya (the coastal areas of what is today Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and western Libya) but ended in defeat. Fearing reprisals, the inhabitants of the Balearics rebelled against the Almoravids and accepted Almohad suzerainty in 1187.
Reconquista [ edit ]
furthest right) during his conquest of Mallorca in 1229. King James I of Aragon ) during his conquest of Mallorca in 1229.
On the last day of 1229, King James I of Aragon captured Palma after a three-month siege. The rest of Mallorca quickly followed. Menorca fell in 1232 and Ibiza in 1235. In 1236, James traded most of the islands to Peter I, Count of Urgell for Urgell, which he incorporated into his kingdom. Peter ruled from Palma, but after his death without issue in 1258, the islands reverted by the terms of the deal to the Crown of Aragon.
James died in 1276, having partitioned his domains between his sons in his will. The will created a new Kingdom of Mallorca from the Balearic islands and the mainland counties of Roussillon or Montpellier, which was left to his son James II. However, the terms of the will specified that the new kingdom be a vassal state to the Kingdom of Aragon, which was left to his older brother Peter. Chafing under the vassalage, James joined forces with the Pope Martin IV and Philip III of France against his brother in the Aragonese Crusade, leading to a 10-year Aragonese occupation before the islands were restored in the 1295 Treaty of Anagni. The tension between the kingdoms continued through the generations until James' grandson James III was killed by the invading army of Peter's grandson Peter IV at the 1349 Battle of Llucmajor. The Balearic Islands were then incorporated directly into the kingdom of Aragon.
Modern period [ edit ]
In 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon (king of Aragon) and Isabella I of Castile (queen of Castile) were married. After their deaths, their respective territories (until then governed separately) were governed jointly, in the person of their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. This can be considered the foundation of the modern Spanish state, albeit a decentralised one wherein the various component territories within the united crowns retained their particular historic laws and privileges.
The Balearic Islands were frequently attacked by Barbary pirates from North Africa; Formentera was even temporarily abandoned by its population. In 1514, 1515 and 1521, the coasts of the Balearic Islands and the Spanish mainland were raided by Turkish privateers under the command of the Ottoman admiral, Hayreddin Barbarossa.
The island of Menorca was a British dependency for most of the 18th century as a result of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. This treaty—signed by the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Portugal as well as the Kingdom of Spain, to end the conflict caused by the War of the Spanish Succession—gave Gibraltar and Menorca to the Kingdom of Great Britain, Sardinia to Austria (both territories had been part of the Crown of Aragon for more than four centuries), and Sicily to the House of Savoy. In addition, Flanders and other European territories of the Spanish Crown were given to Austria. The island fell to French forces, under Armand de Vignerot du Plessis in June 1756 and was occupied by them for the duration of the Seven Years' War.
The British re-occupied the island after the war but, with their military forces diverted away by the American War of Independence, it fell to a Franco-Spanish force after a seven-month siege (1781–82). Spain retained it under the Treaty of Paris in 1783. However, during the French Revolutionary Wars, when Spain became an ally of France, it came under French rule.
Menorca was finally returned to Spain by the Treaty of Amiens during the French Revolutionary Wars, following the last British occupation, which lasted from 1798 to 1802. The continued presence of British naval forces, however, meant that the Balearic Islands were never occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars.
Culture [ edit ]
Cuisine [ edit ]
The cuisine of the islands can be grouped as part of wider Catalan, Spanish or Mediterranean cuisines. It features much pastry, cheese, wine, pork and seafood. Sobrassada is a local pork sausage. Lobster stew from Menorca, is one of their most well-sought after dishes, attracting even King Juan Carlos I to the islands.[28] Mayonnaise is said to originate from the Menorcan city of Maó,[29] which also produces its own cheese. Local pastries include Ensaimada, Flaó and Coca.
Languages [ edit ]
Both Catalan and Spanish are official languages in the islands. Catalan is designated as a "llengua pròpia", literally "own language" in its statute of autonomy. The Balearic dialect features several differences from standard Catalan. Practically all residents of the Balearic Islands speak Spanish fluently. In 2003 74.6% of the Islands' residents also knew how to speak Catalan and 93.1% could understand it.[30] Other languages, such as English, German, French and Italian, are often spoken by locals, especially those who work in the tourism industry.
Demographics [ edit ]
Historical population Year Pop. ±% 1900 311,649 — 1910 326,063 +4.6% 1920 338,894 +3.9% 1930 365,512 +7.9% 1940 407,497 +11.5% 1950 422,089 +3.6% 1960 443,327 +5.0% 1970 558,287 +25.9% 1981 655,945 +17.5% 1991 708,138 +8.0% 2001 841,669 +18.9% 2011 1,100,513 +30.8% 2017 1,150,839 +4.6% Source: INE
Population in the Balearic Islands (2005)[31]Insular council
(official name in Catalan and equivalent in Spanish) Population % total of Balearic Islands Density (inhabitants/km²) Majorca (Mallorca/Mallorca) 777,821 79.12% 214.84 Ibiza (Eivissa/Ibiza) 111,107 11.30% 193.22 Menorca (Menorca/Menorca) 86,697 8.82% 124.85 Formentera (Formentera/Formentera) 7,506 0.76% 90.17
Circa 2017 there were 1,115,999 residents of the Balearics; 16.7% of the islands' population were foreign (non-Spanish). At that time the islands had 23,919 Moroccans, 19,209 Germans, 16,877 Italians, and 14,981 British registered in town halls. The next-largest foreign groups were the Romanians; the Bulgarians; the Argentines, numbering at 6,584; the French; the Colombians; and the Ecuadoreans, numbering at 5,437.[32]
Circa 2016 the islands had 1,107,220 total residents; the figures of Germans and British respectively were 20,451 and 16,134. Between 2016 and 2017 people from other parts of Spain moved to the Balearics, while the foreign population declined by 2,000. In 2007 there were 29,189 Germans, 19,803 British, 17,935 Moroccans, 13,100 Ecuadoreans, 11,933 Italians, and 11,129 Argentines. The numbers of Germans, British, and South Americans declined between 2007 and 2017 while the largest-increasing populations were the Moroccans, Italians, and Romanians.[32]
Administration [ edit ]
Each one of the three main islands is administered, along with its surrounding minor islands and islets, by an insular council (consell insular in Catalan) of the same name. These four insular councils are the first level of subdivision in the autonomous community (and province) of the Baleares.
Before the administrative reform of 1977, the two insular councils of Ibiza and Formentera were forming in a single one (covering the whole group of the Pitiusic Islands).
This level is further subdivided into six comarques only in the insular council of Mallorca; the three other insular councils are not subdivided into separate comarques, but are themselves assimilated each one to a comarca covering the same territory as the insular council.
These nine comarques are then subdivided into municipalities (municipis), with the exception of Formentera, which is at the same time an insular council, a comarca, and a municipality.
Note that the maritime and terrestrial natural reserves in the Balearic Islands are not owned by the municipalities, even if they fall within their territory, but are owned and managed by the respective insular councils from which they depend.
Those municipalities are further subdivided into civil parishes (parròquies), that are slightly larger than the traditional religious parishes, themselves subdivided (only in Ibiza and Formentera) into administrative villages (named véndes in Catalan); each vénda is grouping several nearby hamlets (casaments) and their immediate surrounding lands—these casaments are traditionally formed by grouping together several cubic houses to form a defensive parallelepiped with windows open to the east (against heat), sharing their collected precious water resources, whose residents are deciding and planning some common collective works.
However, these last levels of subdivisions of municipalities do not have their own local administration: they are mostly as the natural economical units for agricultural exploitation (and consequently referenced in local norms for constructions and urbanisation as well) and are the reference space for families (so they may be appended to the names of peoples and their land and housing properties) and are still used in statistics. Historically, these structures have been used for defensive purpose as well, and were more tied to the local Catholic church and parishes (notably after the Reconquista).
Sport [ edit ]
The islands' most successful football club is RCD Mallorca from Palma, currently playing in the second-tier Segunda División after promotion in 2018. Founded in 1916, it is the oldest club in the islands, and won its only Copa del Rey title in 2003[33] and was the runner-up in the 1999 European Cup Winners' Cup.[34]
Tennis player Rafael Nadal, winner of 17 Grand Slam single titles, and former world no. 1 tennis player Carlos Moyá are both from Majorca. Rafael Nadal's uncle, Miguel Ángel Nadal, is a former Spanish international footballer. Other famous sportsmen include basketball player Rudy Fernández and motorcycle road racer Jorge Lorenzo, who won the 2010, 2012 and 2015 MotoGP World Championships.
Whale watching is also expected for expanding future tourism of the islands.[35][36]
Image gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes and references [ edit ]President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel drew support from one of the top Democratic foreign policy leaders in Congress.
“This decision is long overdue and helps correct a decades-long indignity,” New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday.
Engel is one of the more hawkish Democrats in Congress, most notably having challenged former President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. But Engel is hardly Republican-lite. He voted Wednesday in support of an effort to proceed with making the case to impeach Trump, joining 57 other House Democrats who lost a procedural vote that tabled the resolution.
“I support the decision to recognize Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and to move the U.S. embassy there,” the New York Democrat said. “It recognizes where Israel’s government — the parliament and the prime minister — is based, as well as the ancient and unbreakable connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.”
His statement of praise contributed a split among Democrats on Capitol Hill over whether Trump made the right decision or needlessly-undermined the prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., endorsed the move, while Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., worried it would lead to a new outbreak of terrorism. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also warned against the move
“The future of Jerusalem is an issue that should be decided by Israel and the Palestinians, not unilaterally by the United States,” she wrote to Trump last week. “Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — or relocating our embassy to Jerusalem — will spark violence and embolden extremists on both sides of this debate.”
That position was echoed by European allies, who are generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
“We disagree with the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital before a final status agreement,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said Wednesday. “We believe it is unhelpful in terms of prospects for peace in the region. The British Embassy to Israel is based in Tel Aviv and we have no plans to move it.”
Engel also acknowledged the worries about terrorism but implicitly rejected the suggestion Trump’s announcement would bar the two sides from negotiating a final deal.
“I look forward to a plan to ensure the safety and security of our embassy personnel,” he said. “I urge parties in the region to be calm and work toward a sustainable two-state solution that can bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians.”The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to settle a lawsuit brought by Vivid Entertainment challenging the constitutionality of a requirement for porn actors to wear condoms.
The agreement to settle was announced following a closed-door session of the board. No details were offered, pending agreement by all parties.
Vivid had sought to overturn the ordinance stemming from a 2012 ballot initiative, Measure B, the Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act.
After 56 percent of voters approved the measure, county officials moved to require porn producers to obtain a permit and mandate the use of condoms.
Vivid argued in its suit that the requirement violated First Amendment rights and was unnecessary as the industry already has strict requirements in place to protect its performers, including regular testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
The industry standards were not strict enough, said AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which championed Measure B, ultimately leaving the county little choice but to enforce it.
In January, AHF, also a defendant to the suit, said it had reached agreement with Vivid to drop its challenge in exchange for the county agreeing not to deny permits based on poor compliance with the condom requirement and a non-punitive fee structure, according to AHF president Michael Weinstein.
In February, the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s Standards Board voted down a measure that would have required adult film actors to wear condoms.
Industry representatives said such a measure would either destroy their multibillion-dollar industry or force it underground.Porter County Deputy Prosecutor Trista Hudson was fired from her position Monday stemming from a June 30 trial where she was accused of withholding evidence.
Porter County Prosecutor Brian Gensel stated by email Tuesday that she was terminated as an employee, and Hudson confirmed that her employment ended Monday.
"Prosecutors are held to a higher standard than other attorneys," Gensel said in an email. "The decision not to disclose exculpatory information to defense counsel in a recent case fell below the standard I expect my deputy prosecutors to maintain."
On June 30, Porter Superior Judge William Alexa acquitted a Portage man of three felony child molesting charges partly due to Hudson not informing the defense that an alleged victim in the case admitted being told to lie.
"It was an inadvertent mistake," Hudson said Tuesday. "It was never intended to be malicious. It's very unfortunate the effect a procedural decision has had — the most important impact being on the victim."
Alexa said then that the victim and the victim's mother testified that Hudson and a Portage police officer knew about the lie before the trial started.
Alexa said June 30 that he would report Hudson to the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission.
Alexa said this week he had not reported Hudson yet, but what could happen to Hudson would be known after he did.
He declined to speculate.
"It's not a pleasant thing to have to do," Alexa said.
Hudson is also a member of the Valparaiso City Council.
James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.EXCLUSIVE: Actor also hints at possible Netflix collaboration and talks Trump and Triplets in Cannes.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has said that he will be returning to the Terminator franchise and that a planned Twins sequel is set to go ahead soon.
Speaking to Screen in Cannes, where he is talking up new environmentally-focused documentary Wonders Of The Sea 3D with producer Francois Mantello [pictured right] and co-directors Jean-Michel Cousteau and Jean-Jacques Mantello, Schwarzenegger confirmed that he will star in a new Terminator film produced by James Cameron.
“It is back,” commented Schwarzenegger, who revealed that he had met Cameron recently and discussed the project. “It is moving forward. He [Cameron] has some good ideas of how to continue with the franchise,” the actor added, “I will be in the movie.”
He also said that a potential Conan reboot starring Schwarzenegger isn’t dead. “It’s being rewritten…the idea is to do it.”
Triplets
Schwarzenegger also confirmed that the mooted Triplets project, the sequel to 1986 comedy Twins, could go into production this year.
“The script will be finished in a month”, he said, confirming that he would be starring alongside Danny DeVito and Eddie Murphy, and that original producer-director Ivan Reitman is involved in the project. “It’s just around the corner,” he said.
Netflix
Schwarzenegger also weighed in on the Netflix debate, which continues to dominate chatter at the festival.
“They are a terrific company and they have done an extraordinary job,” he said, “They’re visionaries and they’ve rattled the cage a bit with the studios, that’s good. New ideas and new ways of showing movies is good. For us entertainers, it’s another way you can display yourself.”
He also teased a potential collaboration with Netflix in the future, “I’m looking forward to working [with Netflix]. Hopefully there will be something.”
Donald Trump and the environment
Schwarzenegger is enjoying being in Cannes, making comments on the weather and the atmosphere of the festival. “I love being in France,” he said, adding that the French had done “a great job with the election of the president”.
As a result, he wasn’t too keen to be drawn on the subject of US president Donald Trump, with whom he has had a long-running war of words.
“I don’t make judgement on it when I’m on foreign soil,” he said, however he added that “one man cannot take us backwards” and that he thinks Trump is “misinformed”.
Schwarzenegger, who had a strong record on environmental policies as governor of California, says that the environment continues to be one of his highest priorities.
“We need to protect our oceans. Without the ocean we cannot live. This movie [Wonders Of The Sea 3D] is here to raise awareness. That’s basically what we’re trying to,” he added.ousted chairman +
MUMBAI: Cyrus Mistry, theof Tata Sons, has hit out at Ratan Tata again, saying his impulsive ways put thousands of jobs at risk when he bought global steel major Corus at a highly inflated price and settled for a telecom technology going against expert advice for Tata Telecom In a hard-hitting missive titled ‘Ratan Tata takes credit, Cyrus Mistry shares credit’ issued on Tuesday, Mistry said it was common knowledge that the decision to acquire Corus for over $12 billion, when only a year earlier it was available at less than half that price, “was based on one man’s ego and against the reservations of some board members and senior executives”.“Similarly, in November 2003, Mr Tata, against the advice of many of his own team members, decided to back CDMA as the platform for the group’s telecom business,” Mistry wrote.The statement also presented data about high-value client wins for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) comparing Mistry’s tenure with Ratan Tata’s chairmanship. Mistry, who was sacked as Tata Sons chief, said he was issuing the statement to deny Tata Sons’ allegations that he was a hands-off chairman and that he did not make any ‘material contribution’ to the success of the Indian IT major. The statement, sent through Mistry’s office, was in response to Tata Sons statement of November 10 which had said the success of TCS and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) were a manifestation of Ratan Tata’s vision and efforts.Mistry said from fiscal 2011 to 2013, the number of clients that contributed $100 million or more to TCS’ annual revenues doubled from eight to 16. This was the period when Ratan Tata was chairman. After Mistry took over in December 2012 from Tata, the corresponding number more than doubled to 37 by the end of fiscal 2016. A similar trend of strong growth was witnessed relating to clients who contributed more than $50 million to TCS’ annual revenues, data presented by Mistry showed. During his tenure, he said he had met at least 60 global CEOs, “some along with TCS leadership, to reinforce the capabilities of TCS for organisations to co-innovate in the digital world”.Mistry also said that as TCS chairman, he had helped improve the IT major’s finances, enabling it to declare a special dividend of Rs 40 a share in fiscal 2015. Mistry said the special dividend was declared “without compromising (TCS’) firepower for acquisitions”. Cash and cash-equivalents too doubled during the same period to Rs 20,500 crore.Mistry said that as the non-executive chairman of TCS, his main focus was to future-proof its strategy and help fortify its relationships at the highest levels of corporate hierarchy “by leveraging the strength of the Tata Group”.Mistry praised the leadership of N Chandrasekaran, the current MD of TCS, and the thousands of employees, and said that the best for TCS was yet to come.In a bid to “set the record straight”, Mistry also pointed to the growth trajectory of JLR under his command. Mistry said the auto major has been able to achieve scale as well as minimise currency and supply chain risks by investing in new facilities. “Its lack of scale required it to invest disproportionately compared to the industry in new technologies that will help meet the regulatory requirements and differentiate its products. This has been done without leveraging the balance sheet and retaining adequate liquidity,” said Mistry.Mistry said that he had also been closely associated with JLR, its strategy meetings and design reviews. Between 2012 and 2016, in addition to board and budget meetings for JLR, Mistry said he had spent over “120 days including 38 days on JLR design review, 56 days on offsite strategy meetings as well as market visits to dealers in China, USA and India”.Still got questions? Send us an ask or email teamfreewillbigbang(at)gmail(dot)com.
This bang is also being run on pillowfort.io/tfwbigbang and tfwbigbang.dreamwidth.org.
Fics can feature Team Free Will and Team Free Will 2.0 (we also accept RPF). For more details, check the Rules and FAQ.
We’re back and ready to celebrate all things Team Free Will! And we want you to join this awesome alumni of writers and artists.
I see that you don't allow Team Free Love, but is Sabriel okay? And if so, is a chapter of Gabriel POV allowed? Thank you. Asked by son-of-a-bitch-spn-family
While the rules do not allow for Team Free Love explicitly, we do state that:
What does the focus of my story need to be?
Your story must focus on all three members of Team Free Will: Dean, Sam, and Castiel. This means the story can be Dean/Sam, Dean/Cas, Sam/Cas, Sam/Dean/Cas or gen. If you choose a two-person pairing, the third character must be an equal focus on the story.
We won’t be counting words, but please try to stay within the spirit of the challenge. This is about celebrating all three characters, so have fun with them.
Since 2018, we have accepted interpretations of Team Free Will that include Jack Kline (Team Free Will 2.0), but everyone must still have equal importance in your story.
***
Edit: Sabriel does not comply with the above rules if it is the sole focus of the fic. The relationship can be there, but Gabriel can’t be driving the narrative.
While the rules don’t state it explicitly either, TFW 2.0 ships involving Jack Kline would be acceptable. RPF involving the four actors is also allowed.
I hope that clarifies the shipping situation for you.
~ hit_the_booksAs a child, I loved visiting toy stores. I would spend countless hours roaming aisles in search of the perfect toy (which was typically some kind of Star Wars action figure). As a parent today, I see that same kind of thrill in my son’s eyes when we visit a store. I also still feel that thrill when I visit with Cody Hampton, merchandiser for toys and games at Disney Theme Park Merchandise. Cody recently took me on a tour of his toy showroom to highlight a few new novelty toys coming to Disney Parks this fall.
I think my favorite new item is a Pluto bank. When a coin is dropped into Pluto’s dish, he licks his plate clean. I recall having a metal bank with baseball players similar to this when I was younger (the pitcher would throw a coin into the catcher’s glove). I’m going to need more coins when my son sees this one.
Two of the more unique items Cody shared with me were Disney Mouse-Staches. Cody said these play mustaches were inspired by a popular trend in the marketplace. I once tried growing a mustache, but became impatient with how long the process took (and my fiancée Jennifer said “No”). I think I’ll stick with these peel and stick ‘staches from now on.
Another fun item that Cody shared was Disneyvision. This small retro television measures about 7-inches tall by 5-inches wide and was designed by Disney Design Group Artist Lin Shih (whom you may recall from Radio Disney Music Award fame a few months ago). The set comes with six different characters that can be placed into the television. Once Disneyvision is turned on, you can control the speed of six built-in LED strobe lights and motion of the characters by turning the dials. This lighting effect makes it appear like the characters are animated.
Finally, there are a few new Disney Princess items arriving this fall including a small rubber ball inspired by a scene from “The Little Mermaid,” a 500-piece puzzle featuring the works of Thomas Kinkade, and a small castle turret bank that contains sculpted images of Cinderella, Belle, Ariel and Rapunzel.Toyota employees walk on the company’s campus in Erlanger in April 2014. (Photo: File photo)
ERLANGER – Workforce reduction began Jan. 3 for Toyota’s headquarters in Erlanger and will continue through the end of 2018.
In April 2014, Toyota announced that it would close its Erlanger facility and relocate workers to Texas, Michigan or its manufacturing facility in Georgetown, Kentucky.
By the time the Erlanger facility is closed, Toyota will have moved about 1,600 jobs out of Northern Kentucky as part of a nationwide consolidation of the company’s operations.
The company has been an active participant in philanthropy in Kentucky and it is also one of the biggest taxpayers in the city of Erlanger.
According to Erlanger City Administrator Marc Fields, although the city is sad to see Toyota leave, it has been preparing for this moment since the announcement.
“We have been fortunate that several new businesses have come to Erlanger since the announcement or are on the move here,” he said. “We have seen the recent opening of Sterling Cut Glass, Griffin Elite Training Center, McD Concrete, ADM Technology Center, the expansion of Signature Hardware, St. Elizabeth Health Care Human Resources employees moved to the city and other smaller businesses have opened in the past two years.”
Underway is the Sun Behavioral Hospital with an expected opening in the fall of 2017 along with the proposed Showcase Cinema property development expected to break ground by the end of 2017.
“The future looks bright however we will continue to recruit businesses and promote the city to prospects,” Fields said.
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Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/2iZFcGMJeff Gross/Getty Images
On the heels of the Arizona Cardinals signing Patrick Peterson to the richest cornerback contract in NFL history, much of the talk has been whether the 24-year-old is worth the five-year, $70.05 million extension—more specifically, whether he is worth more than Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman.
People can use statistics to say anything they want these days. One of the points being brought up among those who believe Peterson is not worthy of such a paycheck centers around how the former No. 5 overall pick allowed seven touchdowns last year. While that number comes from Pro Football Focus (subscription required), which has grown in popularity over the past few years and who most consider very reputable, he may not be on the hook for all of them.
He did all he could on the plays in question and was not “burned” on any of them. On five of the seven, in fact, he could not have done anything more given the situations. Two of those five should have been called back because of offensive penalties that went uncalled.
All seven will be broken down right here right now.
Whether you think Peterson is or is not worthy of the most lucrative contract for a cornerback in league history, you will walk away from this knowing his touchdowns were the product of either perfect execution on the part of the opposing offense, poor officiating or pure dumb luck.
The Dumb Luck Group
We’ll begin by getting out of the way two of the unluckiest touchdowns allowed in Cardinals defensive history. The first play should have resulted in an interception by inside linebacker Karlos Dansby but instead went 72 yards the other way for a first-quarter score. The second should at least have been an incomplete pass and pass breakup by Peterson.
Week 2: Lions vs. Cardinals; 10:31 Remaining in 2nd Quarter
To this point in the game, Peterson has kept All-Pro receiver Calvin Johnson in his hip pocket. All the 6’5”, 230-pound star has mustered is two receptions for 19 yards—both came on slant routes with Peterson playing off-man coverage.
NFL Game Rewind
Johnson would again run a slant, which Dansby read the entire way. It’s not as though Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford is going to disguise his first read; that’s not his forte. He is still learning progression...but then again, you don’t typically have to get deep into your progression when your first read is Megatron.
NFL Game Rewind
Dansby is reading Stafford as he stares down Johnson. He knows that’s where the former No. 1 overall pick is going with the ball even before Stafford throws it.
NFL Game Rewind
Shown just a frame or two after the last picture from the end-zone view, Dansby is already cutting off the slant before Stafford has released the ball.
NFL Game Rewind
As good as he was in 2013, Dansby missed on having an additional three or four interceptions with gaffes like this one. This is the only one that ended disastrously for the defense, however. Peterson gets caught looking at Dansby because he assumed his teammate picked it off. Meanwhile, Johnson turns a five-yard slant into a 72-yard touchdown.
NFL Game Rewind
Week 10: Texans vs. Cardinals; 4:39 Remaining in 4th Quarter
Now-retired running back Rashard Mendenhall had just fumbled the ball away deep in Arizona territory. It’s 3rd-and-goal, and the Houston Texans are attempting an unlikely comeback with quarterback Case Keenum.
NFL Game Rewind
This is supposed to be a fade to the corner of the end zone to Pro Bowl receiver Andre Johnson. What you are about to see is an amount of dumb luck not seen since the "Immaculate Reception."
NFL Game Rewind
Peterson is in perfect coverage to take away a good corner-fade throw from Keenum. Johnson has no way of getting behind Peterson without interfering in some way, likely drawing a flag for offensive pass interference.
NFL Game Rewind
The pass is badly underthrown, but Peterson has such great coverage that he is able to adjust in time and get his hand on the pass, tipping it away.
NFL Game Rewind
Only instead of the ball falling harmlessly to the turf, it falls directly into the open arms of Johnson for the second of his two touchdowns off Peterson (we’ll get to the first shortly).
NFL Game Rewind
The Poor Officiating Group
It may seem uncouth to use poor officiating as an excuse for Peterson giving up touchdowns; believe me, I hate doing it. But facts are facts, and two touchdowns |
to anyone who would listen. And so I suddenly began to learn the language. My reading and writing comprehension went up so much that I got put up a year. Take that Mrs. M, you dream crusher.
Most children of immigrants can relate to what happened next. You just want to fit in, so badly that anything that sets you apart – your name, your physicality, your religion, your food, the way you don’t wear shoes inside – is an immediate embarrassment. Holy shit, my parents have accents! Cringe. Crap, why can’t I have an easy name like Stacey, I bet no Stacey ever has been made fun for their name.
Why I can’t trace my lineage to Scotland/Ireland/England like everyone else in my class? “We’re just Persian,” my mum tried to explain. “But that can’t be it!” I replied desperately. “Yes – it’s one of the oldest civilisations in the world.” Not good enough, I thought. It wasn’t until my late teens when I threw myself into writing and drama that I learned to accept my differences. It helped that I hung out with other marginalised friends who got it. They were immigrants too, or in the arts, or redheads who couldn’t sit in the sun for too long either. Or just accepting.
Then 9/11 happened and everything changed. It not only altered or destroyed the lives of those people whose lives were directly affected, but it changed the way the world looked at so many of us. Weirdly, it also provided a crash course in Middle Eastern geography for some. Suddenly everyone knew Iran was an actual country and not a misspelling of Iraq. Friends who could barely pronounce my full name were discussing places like Kandahar province, Mosul and Sulaymaniyah.
I was also treated to heavy-handed racist diatribes whenever some mentally unstable gunman with a beard terrorised innocent victims in the West. “We need to bomb them all. Fuck the Middle East.” It’s disheartening to hear this from people who have never even seen a bomb, let alone lived through a war. I’m sure military veterans and other victims of war would agree when I say – no, you have no idea, you fucking sadist. War should not be the answer. Ever. My response to this was part anger, part cathartic. These days, I put it all into my work. I create characters that respond to this in their stories, as I would like to in real life. I give them life and in turn hope that a different viewpoint is represented.
One of my favourite incidents was in my twenties. I got accosted by a man in a Hugo Boss suit on the bus who kept yelling at me about how there are too many of “us” in NZ. “There should be a bomb to get rid of all you immigrants, a nuclear bomb to get rid of all this rubbish like you!” Everyone on the bus just stared at me and I refused to engage. Instead, I wrote about it and won an award. I put it into my work. I used that anger and hatred as fuel for something better. If you are reading this Mr. Suit Man, know that you are being immortalised in a film soon. I hope you see your monstrous self reflected back and think about it.
I know I am speaking from a privileged position. Even as an immigrant there is an obvious pyramid of hierarchy. I am privileged in that coming here as a child allowed me to develop a typical Kiwi accent. I am privileged that my parents had skills to allow them decently paid work. I am privileged that I am not usually subject to the racist vitriol directed so often at my fellow immigrants from the Asian continent.
I am privileged that I can still visit the US (as long as I complete a form detailing my military experience and religious affiliations, of course). I am also privileged because throughout it all I have made friends and learned from people who are accepting. I have surrounded myself with people who are not threatened by my presence. I have developed a way to explore it all within my work. I have also learned to never read the comments.
So Mr Garner, perhaps next time you find yourself in line at another low priced American import shop, surrounded by faces that don’t look like yours, embrace it. Not literally, I mean, don’t scare people. But be curious, say hi, maybe even strike up a conversation. You’ll learn more about people and possibly hear some interesting stories. You are a journalist after all. In fact, I’ll make it even easier for you. This Labour Weekend will mark my 30th year of being here and I’ll be celebrating and drinking cheap Prosecco with friends. Perhaps you’d like to join us? I can make a mean hummus.
The Society section is sponsored by AUT. As a contemporary university we’re focused on providing exceptional learning experiences, developing impactful research and forging strong industry partnerships. Start your university journey with us today.How would you like to see the Boys in Green line up in Chisinau? Goal takes a look at three possibilities...
TEAM TALK
The Republic of Ireland narrowly scraped a win at home to Georgia on Thursday and Martin O'Neill faced criticism for the manner in which his team performed, particularly in the first half.
A visit to Moldova is up next and O'Neill is without Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady, so the Boys in Green boss has been forced into making a couple of changes at least.
Here Goal looks at some potential Ireland XIs for the game against Moldova.
A GAME FOR HOOLAHAN
By Ryan Kelly
Despite a disappointing overall display against Georgia, Martin O'Neill is unlikely to make too many changes for encounter with Moldova and rightly so. However the former Celtic boss will have to shake up his midfield.
Veteran players Glenn Whelan and Wes Hoolahan started on the bench in Dublin, but should come into the team in place of Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady. A midfield foundation of Whelan and James McCarthy will allow Hoolahan the freedom to pick apart the Moldovan backline as well as bring the likes of Jonathan Walters and James McClean into the game.
McClean struggled in terms of his delivery against Georgia, but the former Derry City midfielder was a potent threat in the box and on another day he would have gone home with a goal. His will to get forward and drag the team up the pitch is an asset and as such he should be retained in the starting XI.
While Shane Long has toiled in vain in front of goal - he hasn't scored since the pre-Euro 2016 warm-up friendly against the Netherlands - O'Neill should persist with the Southampton striker and a relatively easy contest against the team ranked 161st in Fifa's world ranking table is an opportunity to regain some confidence.
Stephen Ward's position in the team is safe given the lack of viable alternatives within the squad, but the Burnley full-back was suspect in possession against Georgia, astonishingly running the ball out of play while under no pressure whatsoever. Ciaran Clark could arguably feature at left back, but his partnership with Shane Duffy in the centre is one that will strengthen the more they play together.
FRESH APPROACH NEEDED
By Ronan Murphy
What we have seen from Ireland in one qualification campaign and the first part of the second under Martin O'Neill does not work.
The Boys in Green barely qualified for Euro 2016, and would not have played at it or reached the knockout stage of it were it not for the fact that Uefa decided to let everybody and their dog get in through finishing third in qualifying and at the tournament proper.
O'Neill's players only ever seem to start to play when they have nothing to lose, so continuing on down the same path seems crazy at this stage, as the system of relying on luck and moments of magic is bound to come crashing down sooner rather than later.
What is needed is a fresh approach, and a relatively easy game against the likes of Moldova can be where that approach begins.
Against Georgia, only Seamus Coleman seemed capable of turning the match around, and pushing Ireland's best player further up the pitch will allow him to become more involved and have a better chance of dictating the play. Putting John O'Shea back in the starting XI can then balance the lack of experience in the backline with Cyrus Christie playing right-back.
Wes Hoolahan can pull the strings and control the middle of the field, but asking James McClean to do anything other than run at the full-back seems like a lesson in failure. For that reason, Callum O'Dowda should be allowed to stake his claim for a starting wide role, as the Bristol City winger showed more in his few minutes of international football than McClean has in 45 games for Ireland.
In fact, the 21-year-old probably has a far greater chance of finding Shane Long in the box with his crosses, and has the vision to pick out the Southampton attacker with some slide rule passes that can exploit the Moldovan defence.
Austria in November will be a huge test, and the time to start planning for it is now, because if O'Neill continues with the old predictable system in Vienna, David Alaba and co. will ease to three points.
BRING BACK THE DIAMOND
By Alan O'Brien
Continuing to eschew the 4-3-1-2 formation to which the Republic of Ireland's talent pool looks best suited produced yet another anaemic attacking performance against Georgia on Thursday, in which Martin O'Neill's chosen midfield looked completely devoid of creativity in the absence of Wes Hoolahan.
Injuries to Robbie Brady and Harry Arter, coupled with Jeff Hendrick's suspension, limits O'Neill's options in that area ahead of the visit to Moldova on Sunday.
Glenn Whelan, omitted against the Georgians, remains available to reassume duties at the base of midfield however, which would allow the positionally questionable James McCarthy - who was at least partly responsible for five of Ireland's six concessions at Euro 2016 - to occupy a more suitable role.
David Meyler's energy and defensive contribution renders the Hull City ever-present a natural choice to deputise for Hendrick, completing a ball-winning midfield triumvirate that ensures Hoolahan's talents can be safely accommodated.
Shane Long's continued isolation in O'Neill's preferred 4-1-4-1 can be resolved by renewing his partnership with Jonathan Walters, who despite his poor recent form for club and country remains a preferable option to Aberdeen's untested Adam Rooney or winger James McClean.
How would you like to see Ireland line up? Let us know!LG just released the company's Q3 2016 financial results, and while at large LG is still profitable, its mobile unit is turning into a truly massive drag on the greater business. I've dug through about five years of LG's quarterly results, and I can't find a single one with a greater operating loss than the staggering $389.4 million the company reported this morning. This time last year, the mobile division was losing money, but not nearly on this scale. For reference, even at its peak bleeding during its ownership by Google, Motorola was only almost managing to burn this much money per quarter.
The difference, of course, is that LG still has viable mobile products and a large sales footprint, and much of this loss likely stems from costs written down as part of the G5's overall failure in the market. With the company unable to legitimately compete with Samsung in the premium handset space for much of the year, LG's expenditures haven't had profitable devices to counterbalance the weight of investment in developing products and marketing. The V20 will likely slow the pace of loss in Q4 2016, but it seems all but impossible that the mobile unit could go from losing nearly half a billion dollars to breaking even thanks to a single, relatively niche smartphone.
A smartphone that may well go down in LG history - but not in a good way.
This almost certainly means LG is facing difficult questions about its smartphone business. If not for the mobile division, LG's overall operating profit would have been $650 million this quarter. Instead, it's $252.7 million - and LG executives and shareholders have to be eying the mobile unit for hurting what would otherwise be a wildly successful, as opposed to merely successful, result.
If the mobile unit doesn't dramatically cut costs and produce competitive handsets, it seems likely that LG will find fewer and fewer reasons to keep the unit at its current footprint. Is a complete smartphone exit by LG on the table? At this point, probably not. But I doubt it would take more than a few strings of losses of these magnitudes to get it there. The mobile division has now been unprofitable for five consecutive quarters. And the losses only seem to be growing.New Orleans mayoral candidate Frank Scurlock was picked up on a charge of public masturbation after police say he was found with his pants pulled down in the back of an Uber in Santa Monica, California.
Terry White, a deputy city attorney in Santa Monica, confirmed Friday (Sept. 22) that Scurlock faces a charge of lewd conduct, which includes a maximum penalty of a year in jail and possibly requiring him to register as a sex offender.
Scurlock is due in court on Oct. 16, two days after the mayoral primary, White said.
White confirmed the details in a story first reported in The Advocate. The Advocate also reached Scurlock, who acknowledged someone in California had made an allegation against him, but said he didn't know much more about the case, nor the charge he faces.
Scurlock did not immediately return a message left with a woman who answered his cell phone.
Scurlock was picked up from a West Hollywood hotel by an Uber driver in February and was being driven through Santa Monica when the driver heard noises coming the backseat, White said. The woman stopped the car and opened the passenger car door and discovered Scurlock with his penis exposed and masturbating, according to the prosecutor.
"The driver felt because of sounds that came from the backseat that (Scurlock) was masturbating," White said.
The driver then went to a gas station to call police, and Scurlock fled the scene, White said. After police arrived, the driver gave them a description of Scurlock and told them she had picked him from a hotel.
"They went back to the hotel and were able to get a name," White said. "Based on the name, they got a picture and put it in a photo lineup, and the driver identified him."
The February incident in California came three months before Scurlock's arrest in New Orleans. He approached a policeman near a Confederate monument removal protest in Mid-City and was charged with obstructing a public passage. The charge was later changed to assault, but a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.
Confederate monuments: Watch mayoral hopeful Frank Scurlock get arrested at Jeff Davis The bounce house baron was arrested by New Orleans police after making a scene at the Jefferson Davis monument in Mid-City.
Before the mayoral race, Scurlock was best known for his family's bounce house business and for paying for skywriting above the city. He has put more than $600,000 of his own money into his campaign for billboards and commercials.OKLAHOMA CITY -- The mighty U.S. Olympic softball team struck out.
Virginia Tech's Angela Tincher pitched a no-hitter in a 1-0 win over the three-time defending Olympic gold medalists Wednesday night, ending the U.S. team's 185-game winning streak in pre-Olympic exhibitions.
It was the American team's first loss in a pre-Olympic exhibition since May 3, 1996. During that span, the U.S. team outscored opponents 1,475-24.
Tincher struck out 10 and allowed one baserunner on a one-out walk to Kelly Kretschman in the second inning.
"My hat goes off to Angela Tincher," U.S. coach Mike Candrea said. "She pitched a great ballgame. I told our team what she was capable of and told them to be ready to go. But she came out firing and really kept us off our game."
Earlier, the U.S. defeated DePaul 23-0, running its record on the "Bound 4 Beijing" tour to 17-0. Candrea will announce his final 15-player roster for the Beijing Games on Friday.
The Hokies scored their only run in the second inning off Jennie Finch, one of 12 players on the U.S. squad that won gold at the 2004 Athens Games.
Kelsey Hoffman led off with a double and was replaced by pinch-runner Anna Zitt, who moved to third on a Finch's illegal pitch. Caroline Stolle's two-out bloop single scored Zitt.
Tincher, an All-American last season who had pitched her 12th career no-hitter last week against North Carolina State, retired Crystl Bustos, the U.S. team's top power hitter, on a pop to shortstop for the final out.Italian will have organ removed; faces long layoff as he recovers from multiple injuries
The BMC Racing Team has confirmed that Alessandro Ballan was seriously injured as he crashed yesterday, on the penultimate day of the team’s training camp in Dénia, Costa Blanca, Spain. News of the 2008 World champion's crash was reported earlier by tuttobiciweb.it, but more details have now been released.
“Ballan was descending the Coll de Rates climb near Parcent toward the end of a four-hour training ride when the high-speed accident occurred,” the team confirmed.
The Italian Classics specialist suffered a mid-shaft, displaced fracture of his left femur, a fracture of his ninth rib and some abdominal trauma; that trauma included an injury to his spleen, which means that the organ will have to be removed. He was transported to a local hospital by team doctor Dario Spinelli, where the injuries were diagnosed.
"The broken rib actually made a small puncture in his lung," said the BMC Racing Team’s chief medical officer Doctor Max Testa. "The first priority is the spleen injury – that is considered a medical emergency."
Doctor Testa also confirmed that Ballan was undergoing surgery to remove his spleen this evening, Thursday, while a decision on when and where his leg will be operated upon will be made at a later date.
Ballan was to have been part of the BMC Racing Team’s seven-man roster for the Santos Tour Down under towards the end of January. He will obviously not be able to take part in the race now, and he also stands to miss the entire Classics season as he recovers.
"Of course his loss means a lot since Alessandro is one of our key riders for the classics," said directeur sportif John Lelangue. "But most important right now is that he can recover and just get back to his normal process. We'll wait for all the medical information before even beginning to think about what could be his plan for coming back."Chinese universities and publishers are rapidly launching English language journals in a bid to internationalise Chinese research, according to a new survey of the rapidly changing publishing market in China.
“New English journals are springing up like mushrooms,” according to a market report about China, released on 24 August by the Publishers Association, which adds that the trend is driven “by the desire for international impact” among institutes, universities and publishers.
Some of the new English journals – which are mostly in fields such as science, technology and medicine – are making a big impact in global science, with 185 included in this year’s Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report, which lists the world’s most cited journals, up from 162 two years previously.
“With the continuing policy and financial support from the government and Chinese publishers’ better understanding of the game rules and processes, there are good reasons to believe that the range of high impact of English journals will enlarge,” the report says.
Although Chinese language journals still form the majority in China, they are increasingly trying to gain international readers by translating certain papers, as well as including English abstracts, figures and tables, the Publishers Association observes.
There is now much tougher competition in China for international publishers, the report adds.
“Newcomers try to win a position in the market, while those who already have been here for years want to introduce more of their services to the market. Chinese librarians and publishers are becoming more demanding than before, for lower prices, better deals, and localised services,” it says.
david.matthews@tesglobal.comrobertbchew
Lycans: Harnessing the raw power of Lycan state these operators work together in groups to be effective. Working in pairs they help each other maintain their focus so as not to lose control and potentially harm their own team. While technology/methodology helps control them their true strength comes from their pack and the bonds between each member.
From the top, left to right:
1: Alpha. Team leader. Issues commands, maintains their team, and leads by example. Incredibly strong and has mastered the Lycan state.
2: Huntsman. New Lycans. Useful in all situations. Tough, strong, and reliable. Teams can further specialize in to specific roles.
3: Goliath. Heavy weapons team. Able to bring rotary gatling guns, autocannons, and small artillery Goliath teams are a force to be reckoned with.
4: Seeker. Counter snipers, scouts, and trackers. Seekers push ahead quietly eliminating threats and gathering recon.
5: Veterinarian. A specialized medic able to work with Lycan physiology. Heals injured comrades and can remove gravely wounded team members from the operation zone to safety.
6: Arcane. Lycan battle mage. A rare breed of Lycan able to harness magic and the elements. Powerful in their own right and highly sought after.
7: Feral. Berserker. Unable to revert to human form Ferals are used to sow chaos and destruction. Highly regulated with transformation serum they fight in a drug induced haze.
8: Retainer. Team tracker. Maintains other Lycans through use of transformation serum to regulate their state. If need be they can revert a Lycan back to their human form if they become dangerous to other team members. Not glamourous but very important.
And finally the sketches i used to get to the final images.For other people named Albert Hammond, see Albert Hammond (disambiguation)
Albert Louis Hammond OBE (born 18 May 1944) is a Gibraltarian singer, songwriter, and record producer. A prolific songwriter, he collaborated most notably with the songwriters Mike Hazlewood, John Bettis, Diane Warren as well as Holly Knight, Carole Bayer Sager.
He wrote commercially successful singles for artists including Celine Dion, Joe Dolan, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, Leo Sayer, Tina Turner, Glen Campbell, Julio Iglesias, Willie Nelson, Lynn Anderson, and Bonnie Tyler, and bands Ace of Base, Air Supply, Blue Mink, Chicago, Heart, Living in a Box, The Carpenters, The Hollies, The Pipkins, Starship, and Westlife. Notable songs co-written by Hammond include "Make Me an Island" and "You're Such a Good Looking Woman" by Joe Dolan, "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship, "One Moment in Time" sung by Whitney Houston, "The Air That I Breathe", a hit for The Hollies, "To All the Girls I've Loved Before" a Julio Iglesias/Willie Nelson duet, and "When I Need You" by Leo Sayer. In 2015 he received the British Academy's Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Song Collection.
He was also a solo singer in his own right. His biggest (and only Top 20) Billboard hit was "It Never Rains in Southern California", #5 US 1972. Other songs of his include "Down by the River", "The Free Electric Band", "I'm a Train", "When I'm Gone" and others. For a time he was part of the vocal group The Family Dogg, with whom he had the hit "A Way of Life". He has also produced for a number of artists.
Early life and success [ edit ]
Hammond was born in London, England, which is where his family had been evacuated to from Gibraltar during World War II.[1] Shortly after his birth, they returned to Gibraltar, where he grew up.[1] In 1960, he started in music with Gibraltarian band The Diamond Boys, which had no real commercial success, but played a part in Spain's introduction to pop and rock music. The Diamond Boys performed at the first nightclubs in Madrid to stage modern bands, alongside Spanish rock and roll pioneers such as Miguel Ríos. In 1966, Hammond co-founded the British vocal group the Family Dogg, reaching number 6 on the UK Singles Chart with "A Way of Life" in 1969[1][2] from the album of the same name.
Main career [ edit ]
He also wrote songs for others with frequent collaborator Mike Hazlewood. These include "Little Arrows" for Leapy Lee, "Make Me an Island" (1969) (which Hammond himself recorded in a Spanish disco-style in 1979), and "You're Such a Good Looking Woman" (1970) for Joe Dolan, "Gimme Dat Ding" for the Pipkins in 1970 (itself a cover from the Freddie and the Dreamers album, Oliver in the Overworld), "Good Morning Freedom" for Blue Mink, "Freedom Come, Freedom Go" for the Fortunes in 1971 and "The Air That I Breathe" which was a hit for the Hollies in 1974.[1] In 1971 Hammond also sang on Michael Chapman's fourth album, Wrecked Again, and worked briefly with the Magic Lanterns on recordings of his and Hazlewood's songs, and other material.[3]
He then moved to the United States, where he continued his professional career as a musician. However, he had his greatest commercial success in mainland Europe. He is known for his successful singles of the 1970s, released on Columbia subsidiary Mums Records: "Down by the River", "It Never Rains in Southern California", "The Free Electric Band" (his only single to chart in the UK),[2] "Half a Million Miles from Home", "If You Gotta Break Another Heart", "The Peacemaker", "I Don't Wanna Die in an Air Disaster", "I'm a Train" and "99 Miles from L.A."
Written with Carole Bayer Sager, "When I Need You" was first recorded by Hammond on his 1976 album When I Need You. Produced by Richard Perry, Leo Sayer's version made No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in February 1977, after three of his earlier singles had stalled at No. 2.[citation needed] Commercially successful worldwide, it reached No. 1 In Canada (RPM Top Singles) (also for two weeks), and on the Billboard Hot 100 for a week in May 1977.[citation needed] Leapy Lee released a version of "When I Need You" on his first recording since 1970.[4]
Hammond had success as a singer-songwriter with his Spanish recordings. His releases on Epic Records allowed him to tour every region of Latin America.[citation needed] During this period he met Manuel Montoya, a CBS Mexico executive, who became his personal manager in 1985. This led to Hammond's Grammy Award winning production of Lani Hall's, Es Facil Amar, the producer and writer of "Cantaré, Cantarás" (the Latin American equivalent of "We Are The World"), and collaborations with Roberto Livi on recordings by Raphael, and Eydie Gormé.[citation needed]
Hammond also had two successful singles in the Philippines during 1981. His songs "When I'm Gone" and "Your World and My World" (from the album of the same title) were popular in the country.[citation needed]
With Hal David, Hammond co-wrote "To All the Girls I've Loved Before", a hit in 1984 for Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson. Hammond collaborated with Diane Warren on "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now", a transatlantic No. 1 in 1987 for Starship,[citation needed] and "I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love", a hit for Chicago that peaked at No. 3 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1988. With lyricist John Bettis,[citation needed] Hammond co-wrote "One Moment in Time", the theme song to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, as performed by Whitney Houston.[citation needed]
In 1991, Hammond co-wrote "When You Tell Me That You Love Me", which was recorded by Diana Ross, which reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Ross recorded the song again, this time as a duet with Westlife. Again the song reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart.
He wrote several hits for Tina Turner, including "I Don't Wanna Lose You", "Be Tender with Me Baby", "Way of the World", and "Love Thing".[citation needed] Bonnie Tyler recorded the original version of Hammond/Warren's "Don't Turn Around", a UK No. 1 for Aswad in 1988 and a hit for Ace of Base five years later.[citation needed]
In 2005, he released Revolution of the Heart (where Todd Sharpville was his music director), and the single "This Side of Midnight".
In 2008, Hammond met Kasaan Steigen of the Los Angeles-based Trigger Management who became his personal manager, during which time Hammond collaborated with British singer Duffy and others. Duffy's resulting album, Endlessly, co-written and co-produced by Hammond, was released in November 2010.[5]
In 2010, Hammond also worked on Legend, a new recording of duets of his most successful singles. featuring artists including Elena Paparizou and Bonnie Tyler. It was released on Sony Spain on 23 November that year.[6][7]
His son, Albert Hammond Jr., is a successful solo musician and also a member of the Strokes.
Awards and recognition [ edit ]
In 1987, Hammond's composition with Diane Warren "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (recorded by Starship) was nominated for an Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy Award.[citation needed] In 1988, Hammond won an Emmy Award for the song "One Moment in Time", a song he wrote along with John Bettis.[citation needed]
In 2000, he received the Order of the British Empire (OBE).[1] On 19 June 2008, Hammond was inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.[citation needed]
Half Man Half Biscuit paid tribute to Hammond in their 1986 track "Albert Hammond Bootleg".[citation needed]
In May 2015, Hammond collected the Ivor Novello award for outstanding song collection.[8]
Discography [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
Singles [ edit ]
in The Family Dogg
Solo
Songwriting credits [ edit ]
(in alphabetical order of song title)
Other languages [ edit ]
(in alphabetical order of song title)
Other songwriting credits [ edit ]
(in alphabetical order of song title)
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Editorial note: This is the fourth in a series that explores the art of New York’s cemeteries.
Calvary Cemetery in Queens is something of a shadow city to New York. With over 3 million interments (roughly the population of the city of Chicago, to give the staggering number a visual), it not only has more burials than any other cemetery in the city, but also in the United States. The views from within Calvary Cemetery can be startling, as walking up the central hill the skyscrapers of Manhattan mix with the crosses and worn granite on the horizon, an eerie melding of the world of the living with the dead.
Calvary dates its first burial to 1848, yet while it is nearly as old as the garden-style cemeteries of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and Trinity Cemetery in Manhattan, its constituents have always been working class and its layout is therefore less elaborate. There are no bronze angels by 19th century masters or mausoleums for famous families whose names still mark the city. Instead, what is most affecting about the cemetery is the vast multitude of graves that dodge from decade to decade as you walk through the grass paths, and the way all these simple memorials capture the evolution of the population of the city. Many of the immigrants have both their birthplace and deathplace inscribed, the journey in between unwritten, and others from recent years have incredibly personal memorials from families who have left plastic flowers along with old footballs, stuffed animals and worn photographs. Few of the graves were art commissioned specifically for the deceased, like you might find in the more elite cemeteries, but there is the poignant clutter of all the similar angels and sorrowed ladies standing in crowds and gazing off stonily to their own private eternities.
Like Green-Wood, Woodlawn and Trinity, the creation of Calvary was necessitated by outbreaks of disease stoked by the overcrowded cemeteries in lower Manhattan, particularly an 1832 cholera outbreak that took the lives of roughly 3,500 and caused thousands of others to leave the city. At the time, there was little out in Queens in terms of urban settlement, so with its abundance of space it became the city’s cemetery center. The burial grounds still hold the highest elevations in the borough, and there are still more people who are dead than alive in Queens.
Calvary was established by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, whose trustees with the Archdiocese of New York purchased land in the Newtown Township in the area known as Blissville for a Catholic Cemetery to accomodate the burials that would no longer fit in its graveyard on Mulberry Street (they had yet to complete their new cathedral uptown on Fifth Avenue). The land was previously the farm of the Alsop family, and their 18th century Protestant graves are still contained within Calvary.
Over 150 years after its first burial and still under the operation of the Archdiocese of New York, Calvary has now expanded to four different sections, each named for a catacombs in Rome, with First Calvary, the oldest, being Saint Callixtus, Second Calvary being Saint Agnes, Third Calvary being Saint Sebastian and Fourth Calvary being Saint Domitilla. On an overcast, but humid, summer Sunday, I explored the roughly 365 acres of First Calvary, better known as Old Calvary, which has its entrance on Greenpoint Avenue just over the Newtown Creek from Brooklyn. Visitors first pass through an ornate metal gate with spiralled details, then by the surprisingly elegant Roman Vernacular Queen Anne-style brick gatehouse from 1892.
Along with the gatehouse, there is another architectural find within the cemetery: the chapel. I continue to be surprised at the masterful architecture in New York City that is something of a secret simply because it is inside a cemetery. The chapel was designed by Raymond F. Almarill, who also designed the domed St. Michael’s Church in Sunset Park and the Emigrant Savings Bank in Manhattan, and he spent a significant amount of time studying Italian mortuary chapels in working on this Romanesque-style church for Calvary. The dome goes up to 80 feet and is 40 feet wide, which was a great feat of concrete construction for its time, and it is topped by a statue of Christ reaching out his arms in a blessing, which was carved from a single block of limestone.
The chapel contains a catacombs below for the burial of priests, although it was never completely filled. When Calvary was at its most busy, with anywhere from 70 to over 100 burials a day, the church was an essential device in moving the funerals along without them colliding, with separate entrances for those arriving and those departing.
Among the millions of dead in Calvary are 21 Roman Catholic Union Civil War soldiers, whose sacrifice, along with the thousands who died with them in the war, is memorialized with an obelisk surrounded by four bronze statues sculpted by John G. Draddy, whose celebrated work on church altars included the Coleman Memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. If you have been to Green-Wood Cemetery, you might remember that there is a nearly identical memorial, except its soldiers are cast in zinc instead of bronze, and Calvary’s are unfortunately in a much more deteriorated condition. However, this gentleman with the axe was recently restored by the New York Parks Department.
The Civil War soldiers were buried free of charge by the Archdiocese, and the church did the same for others who were not able to cover the costs, including many Catholic immigrants from the tenements on the Lower East Side. Otherwise it was $7 to bury a loved one, although sometimes Calvary allowed families to bury their own relations, particularly during a gravedigger shortage in the early 20th century. While these, like the majority at Calvary, where all marked with humble monuments if at all, there is one grave in Calvary that stands out like an ostentatious monolith. The Johnston Mausoleum is the largest personal mausoleum in the cemetery, and was built at a cost of over $100,000 by the 19th century Johnston brothers who owned J.C. Johnston fabrics on 22nd Street. The mausoleum was luckily built before the last of the Johnston brothers lost all the family fortune and effectively erased their name from respectable history, dying in a barn, insane and racked with pneumonia.
The dark granite Johnston tomb is easily spotted from the Long Island Expressway that runs along the edge of the cemetery. It and the BQE slice through the sections of the cemetery, which also jut up against busy Queens side streets and stop just before the slope down to the Newtown Creek, where once people would arrive by ferry from across the East River with their funeral processions. Despite all this traffic, Calvary still has an odd peace, its marble relics from the 19th century offering sudden moments of fading beautiful among the granite stones, its few trees and ankle-high grass making it still feel a bit rural even with the expressway and skyline so clearly in view.
As a cumulative collection of the funerary art from the 19th and 20th century, Calvary Cemetery is unrivaled in the city. Nowhere else are there so many graves representing the working class population, and as a Catholic cemetery there is an abundance of crucifixion scenes, carved crosses and statues of Mary and angels, showing the memorial art progressing into our standard idea of the American cemetery. There are few famous names in the millions, mostly now forgotten New York |
“proving” a “female” or “male” brain exist, but this has been disproven time and time again. We have no idea what a world without gender roles would look like, though feminists have been working towards one for some time.
All that said, gender is not, simply, a performance. It isn’t something we have the ability to escape. Women cannot simply “perform” differently in order to escape their place in the hierarchy. We cannot choose to escape the tyranny of male violence and power. When we talk about gender as “fluid,” we fail to acknowledge the material reality of women in a patriarchy.
At Huffington Post, Zeba Blay argues that what Dolezal did “plays into racial stereotypes and perpetuates the false idea that it is possible to ‘feel’ a race.” While Jenner may have transitioned for her own survival, the notion that one can “feel female” remains problematic for similar reasons that the idea of “feeling” a race is. It perpetuates the stereotype that femininity is something that exists deep within us — in our souls and minds. If it didn’t, to say that one “feels female” would mean nothing but “feeling human” or “feeling like a human that has female body parts.”
The alternate argument would be that both race and gender are simply superficial qualities achieved through synthetic interventions like plastic surgery, bronzer, a wig, or a weave.
The very least we should be able to admit to is that we are in a bit of a pickle as far as the discourse surrounding these two individuals go.
Beyond the question of a “female brain” or a “male brain” is the larger one of social categories and hierarchies that oppress entire groups of people. I cannot, for example, simply identify my way into the upper class. I also cannot simply choose to start living as an Indigenous woman. The context for my existence, history, and life experience is attached to the fact that I was born a working class white female in Canada.
So it’s difficult, when we see race and class as categories that one cannot simply identify our way in and out of, to know what to make of someone like Jenner, who lived her whole life as a rich, white man, until recently. She may believe she felt like a woman on the inside and will likely learn what it is like to move about as a woman, now, but she was treated and socialized, for her whole life, as a man with a great deal of privilege.
When people say, of Dolezal,
[She] passed for black for a number of years, but she cannot undo her past. She was born into a white family, grew up as a white child, attended Howard University as a white woman. She can’t erase—or re-race—all those years that she experienced the world as a white girl and woman.
I wonder whether they would say the same of Jenner? Can she “undo her past?”
Beyond that, the question of what “feeling female” means remains. It might, arguably, make more sense to say that one does not “feel” like a man, as defined by the gender binary, than to reinforce the idea of brain sex by saying one “feels like a woman on the inside.”
To be clear, I have little interest in challenging Jenner’s sense of self, chosen name, or how she chooses to present herself or live her life. I am not against transition if it makes a person feel happy or feel more comfortable. I do not wish for anyone to suffer or be forced to live in a way that makes them deeply unhappy. I also acknowledge that I have no idea what it is like to be transgender. From what I gather and from what I guess, it is hard. Transgender people are subjected to abuse, violence, and discrimination and suffer in ways no one should. I can’t say what it means to be transgender because it is apparent that various transgender people have different experiences and understandings of what being transgender means to them.
That said, I asked my friend and ally, Aoife Emily Hart, who is white and identifies as a transwoman, what it means to her. She said, “Being a transwoman isn’t about being ‘female’ as an essential sex, but is a way of recalibrating my body and social presentation to soothe both the unbearable agony of sex dysphoria and to enable my personality to emerge. I was born male, medically and socially transitioned to a transwoman, and now live happily.” She adds that, for her, transition was never about being a woman. “It was about being me, Aoife.”
Jaqueline Sephora Andrews, a black transwoman, told me, “I really can’t say that I always felt like a woman because I really don’t know what it means to ‘feel like a woman.’ I have had wishes of being a woman, and it did, at one time, cause severe depression. Even now, honestly, it still is a wish, but I still accept my biology.” She, like Aoife, says she suffers from sex dysphoria.
While I may not know what being trans is like, on a personal level, I do know is what it’s like to be a woman. The reason I know what this is like is not because of some innate sense — because of a feminine essence or feeling that exists inside me — but because I know what it is like to be treated like a girl, then a woman, from birth. Because I was told I was female and what that entailed. I am aware that the way I move around in this world has been shaped by socialization in a patriarchy. I know how I have been treated by men because I am a woman. I know that I learned being pretty and thin is the most important thing and that I should desire marriage and children. I learned how not to take up space, physically and in all other ways. I learned how to flirt, engage with, and relate to men, as a woman. I learned to be careful not to hurt or offend others and that to ask for what I want or to say what I really think is not an attractive quality for me to display. I know what it’s like to feel looked-at, to feel afraid in public (and private) spaces, and a myriad of other things, many of which I’m likely not even fully conscious of. But all of this was learned over time. When I was a young child, I played with trucks, wore sneakers, hated pink, and had short hair. I did not desire “femininity” until I learned I should.
There is no need to compete at the game of who-is-most-oppressed with regard to these issues; there is a great deal of oppression and suffering in this world, whether it be through patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, or capitalism — enough to go around, you might say. Certainly we should be able to acknowledge that sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, and transphobia all hurt people, but also acknowledge and understand that women’s particular experiences in this world are shaped by a particular kind of oppression that begins the moment we emerge from the womb and that this oppression is not “natural.” We are not born neutral. Even the women I know who intentionally avoid traditional displays of femininity cannot escape the oppressive confines of gender. Certainly the political category of “woman” matters for these reasons.
At the same time, it matters to be trans in a world that has created a binary wherein there is only “masculine” or “feminine.” That room must exist in between and outside those categories is necessary if we ever dream of living outside their confines. What I’m asking is not that the suffering and real lives of transgender people be ignored, but that we acknowledge that context, history, and socialization are real and also matter. That when little girls are taught to be pretty and polite, to not take up space, to spend their lives on a diet, to be desirable but also that they will be punished through that desirability, those experiences matter and happen to us because we are born female. That we learn to understand our sexualities only in relation to what men want matters. That we learn our bodies are not ours, but public commodities, matters. That we learn our boundaries are “rude” and that they will be violated matters. That we must fear those we depend on (or even love) for our survival matters. That we learn to put ourselves last and to “sit down and shut up” matters. That we learn solidarity with men will get us further than solidarity with women matters. We aren’t fighting against trans people, we are fighting for our lives and the right to speak about our lives, bodies, history, and oppression, as a class. We are also fighting against the notion that either femininity or masculinity are innate parts of our beings, an idea that reinforces male power and female subordination.
When Jenner — a wealthy, white Republican — came out as Caitlyn, the pressure women felt to embrace her sexualized, objectified performance of femininity as something vaguely liberating and empowering was hard to swallow for many of us. Jenner likely has suffered in ways that I cannot understand, but I and my feminist sisters who were raised and socialized as women and are fighting against the very notions of femininity we are told to celebrate have suffered because of the ways Jenner’s (and, of course, many celebrity women’s) image is being presented and in ways I’m not sure she understands. Simply, femininity and objectification aren’t “good” for women.
I don’t have all the answers to many of the questions I and others are asking with regard to connections between Rachel Dolezal’s cooptation of blackness, as a white woman, and Jenner’s new identity. But surely those of us who were born and raised as female have the right to define and discuss that experience and our movement, as we have done for over a century now, as we see fit. While I am happy to fight alongside transgender and male allies to end male violence and misogyny, I am less happy to be told what it is, in this fight, I should celebrate as liberatory and even less happy to be told what defines womanhood by someone who only just chose to start living as a woman now, at 65. Her gender identity was kept secret, which is something I imagine would feel torturous, but that does not erase male privilege and does not translate to being socialized and oppressed as a woman. That fact, without making any arguments for or against Jenner’s chosen identity or feelings about who she truly is, matters when it comes to talking about womanhood and what it means to be a woman in a patriarchy and to have femininity forced upon you from birth.
I want people to be free to be who they are and to feel happy in their own skin. This is why I choose not to dispute how individual trans people want to live. But I also want to be able to fight back against a system that says I am less-than because I was born female. Not to imagine that reality out of existence by pretending gender socialization isn’t real and a primary way in which women are systemically oppressed, throughout their lives. I also don’t want to romanticize and glorify femininity and worry that narratives like Jenner’s do just that.
The fact that Dolezal felt all she needed to do to be “black” was to get a perm and a tan and to begin identifying as part of the black community, as though history and social contexts that maintain and perpetuate systemic racism don’t factor in, and that she thinks by choosing to identify as black makes it so, begs a number of questions. If we acknowledge that women are an oppressed group, under patriarchy, some of these same questions we are asking about Dolezal come up, with regard to folks like Jenner.
Identity can be an individual thing. But systemic oppression, whether it be through race, class, or gender, is not simply about individual feelings or how one chooses to present or express themselves out in the world. It is not a personal matter or a personal choice. And as complex as these issues are and as much as I struggle with them, myself, this is something that must be acknowledged within political movements.
The way in which the political and activist landscape has been overtaken by identity politics, by which I mean both that we tell one another we have no right to speak to particular issues unless we have direct experience with whatever it is we are commenting on (i.e. “You may not have an opinion about the sex industry unless you identify as a sex worker”) as well as the trend of individualizing absolutely every experience and obsessing over our own personal feelings above all else (for example, “Taking sexy selfies makes me feel empowered, ergo self-objectifying is empowering because I feel it and because I say so”) has had a detrimental impact on movements, particularly the feminist movement.
If gender identity is an individual, personal thing, as we are told, is gendered oppression no longer a social issue but rather a malleable choice?
We are not simply individuals floating around in personal bubbles among other individuals. Society is real and so are systems of power. Both must be acknowledged in order for us to confront them.
If “the black identity cannot be put on like a pair of shoes,” can womanhood?
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Meghan Murphy Founder & Editor Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, I-D, Truthdig, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog.Senior party figures tell leader that he must take some responsibility after historic byelection loss in Copeland
Jeremy Corbyn has come under intense pressure to take some personal responsibility for Labour’s historic byelection defeat in Copeland from senior party figures, including trade union leaders and even members of his own shadow cabinet.
The Labour leader was urged not to “pass the buck” or sugarcoat the result after Theresa May’s Conservatives secured the first byelection gain by a government since 1982, in a Cumbrian seat that had been held by his party since 1935.
As some claimed the result placed Labour on track for electoral meltdown, the general secretary of a trade union that has backed Corbyn in two leadership elections issued a stark warning.
The Guardian view on the byelection results: a test for Mr Corbyn | Editorial Read more
Unison’s Dave Prentis described the Copeland result as “disastrous”. “No one objective could argue last night’s byelection results were good for Labour,” he said.
The Unison leader welcomed Labour holding off the Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, in a second byelection in Stoke, although he said even that result should never have been in doubt.
“The blame for these results does not lie solely with Jeremy Corbyn, but he must take responsibility for what happens next. Nurses, teaching assistants, care workers and ordinary people everywhere need a Labour government. Jeremy has to show he understands how to turn things around and deliver just that,” he said.
Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, argued that the result was not simply about Labour’s battle to come to terms with an EU referendum result that had divided its coalition of voters.
The view from Copeland: 'Lifelong Labour voters want Corbyn out' Read more
He told the Guardian that the outcome was more “fundamental” than the question of Brexit, adding: “It was a very bad result... I’m not sure we are acknowledging how bad a result it was.”
The prime minister described the result as “astounding” after her party secured a 6.7% swing from Labour, handing Trudy Harrison the seat with 13,748 votes, ahead of Labour’s Gillian Troughton on 11,601.
The result overshadowed Labour’s victory in Stoke-on-Trent Central, where the party’s Gareth Snell defeated Nuttall by 7,853 votes to 5,233, in a constituency that some had described as one of Britain’s Brexit capitals.
Corbyn used broadcast interviews and a speech focused on Labour’s Brexit challenge, making it clear that he did not believe his leadership contributed to the defeat in Copeland and said he would not be stepping down.
The Labour leader admitted he was disappointed by the result in the Cumbrian constituency but said it was important to highlight the victory in Stoke. “You shouldn’t underestimate the defeat for Ukip in a city they began to call their own. It is a very significant turning point in British politics,” Corbyn said, claiming that the media had assumed Labour would be defeated in Stoke.
Asked by a journalist if he had looked in the mirror to ask whether Labour’s problems were his fault, Corbyn responded with a curt “no”.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, hit out at disunity within Labour, blaming both sitting MPs and Tony Blair and Lord Mandelson, who criticised the party’s approach to Brexit.
“We cannot have a circumstance again, where a week before the byelection a former leader of our party attacks the party itself,” he said.
Ian Lavery, the party’s joint elections coordinator, told the Guardian that his time campaigning in Copeland had convinced him that the challenge was about people’s fears for their jobs and not Labour’s leadership. “Honestly, Jeremy Corbyn did not come up when I was knocking on doors,” he said.
Lavery joined other shadow cabinet members, such as Richard Burgon, in describing the Cumbrian seat as “marginal” despite it always being held by Labour previously.
Another senior figure in the party suggested that unfair treatment of Corbyn in the media, including the BBC’s decision to field Mandelson days before the election, and bad weather as a result of Storm Doris had contributed to the defeat.
Despite some senior sources hitting out at fractious MPs who forced Corbyn into a second leadership battle last year, critical backbenchers were largely quiet on Friday.
Some said there was a “vow of silence” in order to prevent disunity in the immediate aftermath being blamed for any of Labour’s difficulties in the future, although sources close to the leadership claimed “unnamed MPs” seemed happy to attack the leader.
One MP, David Winnick, did criticise the leader openly, while a number of senior figures in the wider Labour movement also waded into the debate.
John Hannett, the general secretary of Usdaw, the shop workers’ union which has not supported Corbyn in his bids for the leadership, called the the result a “wake-up call” and warned the Labour party not to “pass the buck”.
“We can’t dismiss these byelections or blame other people - whether previous politicians or the media,” he told the Guardian. “All of that is a distraction from why isn’t the current Labour party connecting with voters.”
He said there needed to be an “urgent debate” from the leadership team down about how to turn Labour into at least a “credible opposition” and then a government-in-waiting.
The concerns were based on fears of Labour being wiped out from parts of the country if May decided to trigger an early general election. A projection from Electoral Calculus based on recent polls suggests a Conservative majority of 80 would occur with 41% of the vote going to the Tories and 27% to Labour.
MPs such as John Woodcock in Barrow and Furness, Cat Smith in Lancaster and Fleetwood and Mary Creagh in Wakefield could be among those that are vulnerable to being ousted by the Conservatives.
Corbyn’s closest allies acknowledge the challenge but believe that May’s “Brexit honeymoon”, which has seen the Tories take a 14-point lead in the polls, cannot continue after article 50 is triggered in late March.
However, there is increased pressure on the leader, with a tightening of his inner circle and claims that even his closest supporters now talk openly of a future “handover”. Sources added that key allies had warned Corbyn about the seriousness of the poor performance in the polls.
Some senior Labour figures who know the inner circle well say that nothing will happen until Len McCluskey, his most powerful union backer, has secured re-election as the leader of Unite, in April. One backbencher said: “When Len’s back in the driving seat, he will not want to see Labour wiped out; he will want to see a candidate they can get behind.”
The MP said the most critical player would be McCluskey, whose leadership of Unite has come under pressure because of his support for the leader.
Starmer followed Corbyn’s Brexit speech by laying out how Labour planned to differentiate itself from the Tories in terms of internationalism, human rights and a fairer economy, arguing there would be a clear “faultline” between the parties.
He said the problems thrown up by the referendum would not be solved by Brexit, arguing that “the EU has been used as a mask for political failure for years and the mask is now going to slip”.Paul Sakuma / AP CompUSA workers look at a display of Microsoft's new Windows Vista computer operating system in California, Friday, Jan. 26, 2007.
Back in the day, your operating system was a big deal. It was who you were. Mac vs. Windows was like Catholic vs. Protestant, or Republican vs. Democrat, and about as rational. Now it's somewhere down around Coke vs. Pepsi. Microsoft is still winning the battles the iPod "halo effect" notwithstanding, Apple is hovering at about a 5% market share but no one's getting worked up about the war. So many of the file-compatibility issues have been solved, and so much computing goes on in the browser anyway. So who cares?
That's one reason for the near-total non-excitement surrounding the launch of Windows Vista, the first new version in five years of the software that runs hundreds of millions of PCs. The other reason is that Vista is... pretty good. It's not a disgrace, and it's not a masterpiece. It's not worth buying a new machine for Vista, and there's no reason to switch to it if you use a Mac, but it gets the job done. Not the stuff of which great headlines are made.
And now that I've drained all the interest out of this review, let's go to the features:
1. Vista looks pretty. The edges of the windows are now transparent, like little glass microscope slides. Vista blatantly following the trend set by Apple represents data as translucent and jewel-like and faintly glowing. Subtle shadows, gleams and animations enhance the illusion. It's just cosmetic stuff, but given how much time one spends there, it's nice when one's desktop doesn't feel like a soul-leaching cubicle. (To assuage the Mac faithful: yes, many of Vista's features are pilfered directly from Mac OS X, and in general Apple has shown itself to be far more efficient and innovative in the operating systems market. Done.)
2. Vista makes sense, more or less. Much of the challenge of creating a good operating system is design, not technology. Which means figuring out a visually logical way for users to get at all their information easily. Vista is creeping in that direction, with improved search functions and nicely built-in music and photo organizers you can actually "tag" photos with keywords, which is very handy. Useful widgets like clocks and photo albums cluster happily at the edge of the screen like attentive waiters, happy to serve you.
What truly makes a great user interface is an ineffable internal logic, a set of consistent internal rules that one absorbs without their having to be stated (like in a manual, for example), and I don't see that quite yet in Vista. You don't always instinctively know where the back button will be, or the "close this window" button. If your desktop is overcrowded with windows, you can hit an icon that will line them all up for you, tilted at an angle, so you can pluck out the one that you need. Nice but at the same time, it breaks with the visual metaphor of a flat desktop.
3. Vista is secure, or at least it's securer. If that's a word. Being a near-monopoly makes Windows a magnet for phishers, viruses, adware and other malware writers. So Microsoft has worked on that, mostly under the hood. I think what most impressed me were the built-in parental controls: you can decide when your kids will use Vista, what websites they can go to, what applications they can run, whom they can IM with, and so on. And if they try to break the controls, Vista will rat them out.
4. Vista is expensive and a bit of a resource-hog. There are two versions targeted at home users : Basic ($199, which is about what OS X costs) and Premium ($239). (Note that Basic doesn't give you that nice pretty translucent look, which is Vista's most immediately appealing feature.) Most people won't buy Vista at retail, but you'll feel the burn somewhere in there whenever you buy your next computer. For the Premium edition Microsoft recommends a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM, as well as a respectable graphics setup, but I think you'll need quite a bit more power to get the full, smooth experience. The laptop Microsoft loaned me to test Vista had 2Ghz and 2GB, so be careful not to buy more Windows than you can run.
To sum up: Vista is a perfectly respectable new iteration of Windows. They've even, finally, come up with a decent way to make laptops sleep and wake up again, which XP was never very good at. The fact that it took Microsoft over five years and $6 billion dollars to create Vista is and I mean this quite seriously an embarrassment to the good name of American innovation, but it's perfectly fine.
Two closing thoughts. One, there's a lot of functionality built into Vista look at the photo editor, which is integrated with the operating system and which works like a stripped-down version of the already-stripped-down Photoshop Elements. Isn't that the kind of anti-competitive integration that got Microsoft into anti-trust court last time around? (Not that they ever left: they're facing hundred-million Euro fines in Europe as we speak.)
And two, Vista's real test won't be some reviewer checking off features in his lonely office. It will come when millions of Vista users make their way out into the deep waters of the greater Internet ecology, where legions of Internet-based criminals will start banging away on its security features, looking for a way to fool it, break it or hijack it. Translucent borders are all well and good, but out there in the jungle, no one cares how pretty you are.Blaine Higgs, the plain-spoken former finance minister, won the Progressive Conservative leadership in New Brunswick on Saturday, defeating six other candidates in a three-ballot race.
The final ballot came down to two Saint John-area candidates, a region considered a stronghold for the Tories after the 2014 election.
Higgs won 1,563 votes on the final ballot, beating former Saint John mayor Mel Norton.
The 62-year-old former finance minister led on every ballot, while Norton finished second in each of the three rounds of voting.
Higgs told the crowd that he intends to do politics differently as leader.
"Winning this means that people in this province have hope that we're going to put the province first and politics second," he said. "And that's not just a slogan for me. I've been this way since I started."
Higgs, who was an executive with Irving Oil Ltd. before entering politics in 2010, said he understands he has a lot of work to do as the new Tory leader.
"We have a party to rebuild, we have a party to unite, but guess what, we are the party for the future of this province because we are uniting people across party lines," he said at the main convention venue in Fredericton.
"We are bringing a new message to politics."
Higgs was able to pick up some support from other candidates, such as Jean Dubé and Mike Allen, heading into the final ballot.
Former finance minister Blaine Higgs won the Progressive Conservative leadership in New Brunswick in a three-ballot race on Saturday. (Paul Hantiuk/CBC)
However, Moncton lawyer Monica Barley, who earlier in the day had picked up the endorsements of Jake Stewart and Brian Macdonald, encouraged her supporters to back Norton.
Norton, who was considered one of the front-runners heading into Saturday's vote, saluted Higgs on his victory.
This was Norton's first foray into provincial politics and he said he was proud of his campaign.
"We know that this an uncertain process, but we know that we have an incredible team. We had teams from Grand Manan Island right to Bathurst working to hold delegates and get them to vote," he said.
Liberals criticize Higgs
Liberal cabinet minister Donald Arseneault was briefly removed from the PC leadership convention by security on Saturday because he didn't have credentials. He congratulated Higgs on his victory but said the Liberals would point out his record as finance minister. (Julianne Hazlewood/CBC) Liberal cabinet minister Donald Arseneault spoke to reporters after the final results were released.
He also congratulated Higgs on his victory, but pointed out the party's security officers removed him from the convention hall earlier in the day.
"The first thing out of his mouth is that he is going to do politics differently, but he threw me out of the convention floor," Arseneault said.
Arseneault also said he does not believe Higgs has been able to expand the party's base out of southern regions of the province during the leadership race.
He said Higgs will now have to defend all his tough talk from his days as finance minister.
"For the last six years, his reputation has been about cut, cut, cut. He has never talked about opening up opportunities for the province, it was always doom and gloom," Arseneault said.
Higgs led on 1st, 2nd ballots
Former MP Mike Allen pledged his support to Blaine Higgs on the final ballot. Allen placed fourth on the second ballot. (Jacques Poitras/CBC)
On the first ballot, Higgs had 1,228 votes, followed by Norton's 1,078 votes, Barley's 948 votes and Allen's 892 votes.
MLA Jake Stewart had 700 votes, followed by MLA Brian Macdonald with 605 votes and former MLA Jean Dubé with 39 votes.
On the second ballot, Higgs had 1,417 votes, followed by Norton's 993, Barley's 861 and Allen's 829.
The three candidates who dropped off the ballot quickly began moving to other camps.
After finishing in seventh position, Dubé announced he was backing Higgs, who called his lead on the first ballot "humbling."
The Quispamsis MLA said after the first ballot that he hoped his campaign's message was resonating.
"I'm hopeful that the message that I'm trying to send, a message that is basically about how we change, how we do business in the province, and how we change how we do politics in the province will carry, regardless of what camps do what in the process," he said.
2 candidates backed Barley
Mel Norton and Moncton lawyer Monica Barley hug after the second ballot results were announced. Barley put her support behind Norton on the third ballot. (Julianne Hazlewood/CBC)
Barley could not pull into second place in the latest ballot despite picking up support from Macdonald and Stewart after the first ballot.
Stewart said he chose to back Barley as she was the only one who would listen to him on controversial language issues.
"She is the only one who will touch the language file," he said. "I have worked with all six of them. And she is the only one who believes in change on that file."
Stewart has been openly critical of Katherine D'Entremont, the commissioner of official languages, during his leadership campaign.
Barley was asked whether she thought the languages commissioner should be fired.
"What I can say is that the language commissioner should be a position that is bringing us together, and she's not doing that and we have to rectify that," Barley said.
Former Saint John mayor Mel Norton shook hands of supporters in Fredericton after finishing second on the final ballot. (Paul Hantiuk/CBC) The main venue of the leadership convention was Fredericton, however, there were satellite voting stations set up in Moncton, Saint John, Bathurst and Saint Leonard.
There are also smaller voting locations on Grand Manan Island, Deer Island, and Campobello Island.
The leadership race began when former premier David Alward resigned after his government was defeated by Brian Gallant's Liberals in 2014.
The Liberals have 26 seats in the legislature, the Progressive Conservatives have 22 and there is one Green MLA.CLOSE Jeffrey Neely, a Captain with the Metro-Nashville Fire Department, was arrested on Arson and Insurance Fraud charges, authorities said. video by Michael Schwab/Tennessean
Jeffrey Neely (Photo: TBI)
Metro-Nashville Fire Department captain Jeffery Todd Neely has been arrested in connection to a scheme in which he set fire to his home last year to collect insurance money, state law enforcement officials announced Wednesday.
Neely, 48, was arrested Tuesday after being indicted last week on arson and insurance fraud charges, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
“The Nashville Fire Department was made aware of the indictment of Captain Jeffrey Neely on Wednesday afternoon," the department said in a statement.
"Per departmental policy, NFD administration placed Captain Neely on administrative leave pending an internal investigation. We will have no further comment about the criminal investigation at this time.”
On Sept. 7, TBI agents began an investigation into a Sept. 5, fire that occurred at the home at 1055 White Bluff Rd. in White Bluff, Tenn.
During the course of the investigation, the TBI said, it was determined that Neely intentionally set fire to his own residence.
As a result of the investigation, on Oct. 18, a Grand Jury returned the indictment. Neely was arrested and booked into Dickson County Jail on a $50,000 bond on Oct. 24.
Neely posted bond, according to jail officials.
The home fire was extinguished Labor Day last year by White Bluff firefighters only to catch fire again later, resulting in a total loss, according to White Bluff Fire Chief Eric Deal.
Firefighters outside the White Bluff home in September 2016 after the fire is extinguished the first time. (Photo: James Bendall/ File / For the Herald)
“There was considerable damage to the center portion of the house. It was extinguished. All the utilities were disconnected to the house,” said Deal last year.
Neely was taken to the hospital for chest pains after the fire, Deal said at the time.
“It was a total loss,” said Deal about the condition when firefighters arrived. “The roof had already collapsed. The whole house had already collapsed to the basement.”
No one was inside the home when the fire rekindled, Deal said.
“Just because of the nature and it rekindling 19 hours after we were there the first time, we contacted the state arson investigation division to take a look at it and let them be the ones to determine the cause,” Deal said.
Chris Gadd contributed to this story.
Read or Share this story: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/25/nashville-fire-department-captain-arrested-arson-charge/799895001/QUICK PILL The post Delhi\'s last Lokayukta, Manmohan Sarin, retired in 2013 Since then, the post has been lying vacant The philosophy AAP was formed as an offshoot of the Jan Lokpal movement The institution of the Lokayukta and its anti-corruption powers resonate with the party\'s philosophy The delay It\'s been six months since AAP formed a govt with a humongous majority in Delhi But even now, a Lokayukta has not been appointed The Lieutenant Governor and the opposition BJP is questioning the govt\'s inertia Leader of the opposition Vijender Gupta alleges he has not yet been consulted, as required by law The govt claims it has sent the names to the Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court
It took 45 years to get the Jan Lokpal Bill passed through Parliament. But eventually, when it did, it must be acknowledged that Arvind Kejriwal played a role in the agitation that made it a mass movement which politicians could no longer ignore.
But the irony is that six months after Kejriwal became the Chief Minister of Delhi, the post of Lokayukta remains vacant.
There has been no Lokayukta in Delhi since Manmohan Sarin retired in 2013.
On 2 September, a national daily reported that Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung sent a letter to the CM, urging him to send a "panel of names" of candidates for the Lokayukta's post.
The very next day, it was reported that Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party government had already sent a list of names, to Delhi High Court chief justice G Rohini.
"We had already sent a list of names to the chief justice. The L-G should know that it takes time for the entire process, and he'll only get the list of names once the chief justice approves," said a source in the party who didn't wish to be named.
Deputy CM Manish Sisodia's media advisor, Arunodaya Prakash, added: "If the L-G is really concerned about appointing a Lokayukta, why did he not do so in the one year he was in charge of Delhi?"
Inordinate delay
Three months ago, the Delhi High Court sent a notice to the AAP government and the Lieutenant Governor to appoint a Lokayukta as soon as possible, explaining the imperative need for an ombudsman.
In the last 18 months, there has been a growing number of cases for the Lokayukta, and citizens feel they are being denied a key legal right.
The Delhi government has, since then, repeatedly stated that it has already begun the process to appoint a Lokayukta. In July, it submitted to the court that it was "firmly committed to implementing the Lokayukta Act".
The govt claims it has sent a list of candidates to the Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court
While a Lokayukta is responsible for charges of corruption against officials at the state level, the Lokpal is for officials at the Centre.
But the party source claimed the AAP wanted to alter the law. "We are not happy with the present Lokayukta Act. We need a more stringent Act, wherein the Centre's officials can also be questioned. We will have a special session on this," the source said.
Contradicting claims
As per Article 3 of the the Delhi Lokayukta and Uplokayukta Act, |
child’s life at risk.”
Last month, news.com.au columnist Jo Thornely slammed Daily Mail Australia for giving a “bizarre amount of oxygen” to the “increasingly ignored” Australian Vaccination-Skeptics Network.
In addition, a recent video entitled How anti-vaxxers sound to normal peoplecomparedrejecting vaccination with not using sunscreen (because it’s poison for your skin), letting a house burn down (every home needs to learn how to burn) and refusing to wear condoms (one per cent of the population has a latex allergy).
Tara learned the hard way, spending more than a week in quarantine at her Ottawa home watching her children coughing so hard they would vomit, and knowing her mistake had led them to contract an illness that can be fatal.
The mother of seven does not want others to go through the same, and has spoken out despite being attacked by both anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers — who say her story is propaganda and likely to have been paid for by big pharma.
“An issue like this invokes fear, distrust, anger, and upset, and it was never our intent to create those feelings,” she said. “We can only say that we are truly sorry for the unintentional but real impacts to everyone involved. We hope that sharing our personal story will be some token of reconciliation.
“We took the personal risk of going public because we knew that others like us might be willing to re-evaluate the topic sooner than we did if more people used a better approach. We know that the more we communicate constructively, the more we can work together to help people make sound decisions for their family and community.”Warning! At least some content in this article is derived from information featured in Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery. Spoilers will be present within the article.
Kneazle Species information Related to Cat Native range Originated in Britain, but now exported worldwide Distinction Cat-like, flecked, speckled or spotted fur, outsized ears and a tail like that of a lion's Ministry of Magic Classification Beast
XXX [Source]
Ron Weasley: "What was that?" : " Harry Potter: "It was either a very big cat or quite a small tiger." — Ron and Harry meet Crookshanks for the first time[src]
A Kneazle is a magical feline creature related to, and similar in appearance to, a cat. They have spotted, speckled or flecked fur, large ears and a lightly plumed tail, akin to that of a lion's. They are thought to have separate breeds, like cats, and therefore vary in appearance. They make excellent pets if they like a witch or wizard.
Contents show]
Description
Kneazles can interbreed with normal cats, and generally have up to eight kittens in every litter. Kneazle owners are required to have a licence to own the animals. Some wizards and witches make a living by breeding Kneazles or part-Kneazles. Arabella Figg, a Squib, makes her living in this manner, which would explain why she has so many cats.[1] One notable Kneazle hybrid is Hermione Granger's half-Kneazle, Crookshanks.
Kneazle whiskers can be used in wand cores although they are said to make inferior wands when compared with Unicorn hair, Phoenix feather and Dragon heartstring.[2]
Nature
They have a very high level of intelligence, are independent and occasionally aggressive, and have an uncanny ability to detect suspicious and distrustful people. They can also safely guard their owners home. Because of their aggression towards certain individuals, Kneazles have an XXX classification by the Ministry of Magic, if they are not interbred with another species.[3]
History
In 1832, wizard Abel Treetops of Cincinnati claimed to have patented a method of taming Wampus cats for use as guards over wizarding houses. Treetops was exposed as a fraud when MACUSA raided his home and found him putting Engorgement Charms on Kneazles.[4]
Known kneazles and part-kneazles
Pure kneazles
Half-kneazles
Behind the scenes
While their exact life expectancy is never stated, it is known that Hoppy, Milly and Mauler have lived with Newt and Tina from at least 1991 - 2017, at least 26 years, an age that would be considered very old if reached by a non-magical cat.
Appearances
Notes and referencesExclusive unique GoPro video from the Birkebeiner cross-country ski marathon
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Yesterday marked the 40th running of the American Birkebeiner cross-country ski marathon in Hayward, Wisconsin. Over 10,000 participants skied the combined four races that make up this great event.
With a 54 kilometer course running through the northwoods of Wisconsin from Cable to Hayward, it is an event that is hard for media to adequately cover. I strapped a GoPro video camera to my chest to take some video as we cruised through the beautiful pine trees in northern Wisconsin.
Here are five videos from different parts of the race.
Video one – the start
I actually missed the start. They had the on deck group with their skis off, and I accidentally got in with them instead of my wave. I was late getting over there because I was taking pictures of the wave before me starting. When I lined up I was in the wave after me on deck. With 30 seconds to go to my wave’s start, I realized I was in the wrong place. I ran up under the rope and put my skis on after the gun went off. With such a long race ahead of me it was no big deal as it is good to start off slow anyway.
Video two- Near the beginning
The 26 kilometer Korteloppet starts at the same time as the 54 kilometer Birkie, so the beginning is pretty crowded until the Kortie veers off about 7 kilometers in. This video was taken while the two races were still packed together.
Video three – Water and food station
Every seven or eight kilometers the town of Hayward and Cable set up food stations manned by volunteers who distribute water, energy drinks, fruit, and even cookies. These morsels are much needed and provide a short respite for skiers during the arduous marathon.
Video four – I make a move
One of my last burst of energy during the last third of the race, I shot past a group of skiers. I really petered out at the end and this was one of my last second winds. I pretty much went into the walking dead mode for the last ten kilometers.
Video Five – The finish line in Hayward
The Birkie ends in downtown Hayward, Wisconsin. They actually truck in snow to cover Main street where the finish line is located at.
TT
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A New York gay actor and model dodged jury duty this month by saying he could not be impartial because he is treated as a second-class citizen.
Jonathan D Lovitz, was waiting to be called in with other jurors when they were asked whether they could be impartial.
He wrote on his Facebook page: “I raised my hand and said, ‘Since I can’t get married or adopt a child in the state of New York, I can’t possibly be an impartial judge of a citizen when I am considered a second class one in the eyes of this justice system.”
He was then excused by the judge.
Speaking to News Nation, he said: “It was such a spur of the moment thing. I was shaking, trembling. It just came out of me so spontaneously.
“I never intended to be an activist... I’m just a young gay man who saw some inequality in the state, in the country.”
Mr Lovitz added: “We have certain civic responsibilities, like paying our taxes and serving on juries. and I think everyone is obligated to participate.
“But when it’s your turn to say how you really feel, you need to say how you really feel.”
Legal experts say it is up to a judge to dismiss a member of the jury if he or she is considered unable to be impartial.DALLAS -- The NBA issued a two-game suspension to Dallas Mavericks public-address announcer Sean Heath due to tweets criticizing officiating, multiple sources briefed on the situation told ESPNDallas.com.
Editor's Picks MacMahon: Bully NBA made tweets big deal The NBA magnified the size of Sean Heath's microphone by a million fold by taking it away from the previously anonymous Mavericks PA man for two games, writes Tim MacMahon.
The suspension will begin Saturday night, when the Mavs face the Phoenix Suns in their final home game of the regular season. Heath will complete the suspension either in the first home game of the playoffs or next season's home opener, depending on whether the Mavs advance.
Heath, who declined to comment, wrote a series of tweets regarding the officiating after the Mavs' 122-120 overtime loss to the Golden State Warriors on April 1.
The league office acknowledged in a statement the next day that Warriors center Jermaine O'Neal should have been called for goaltending when he blocked a potential go-ahead shot by Mavs guard Monta Ellis with 16 seconds remaining in overtime.
Three of the tweets from Heath's account with 253 followers were directed to the NBA's account, the most inflammatory of which said that games such as the Mavs' loss to the Warriors are why the league has a "reputation that the games are rigged."
@nba Danny Crawford just blew a goaltending call and cost the Mavs a game. We will all be awaiting your apology. #pathetic - Sean Heath (@theseanheath) April 2, 2014
@EyeOnBasketball That headline should read: Danny Crawford buries Mavericks. Again. - Sean Heath (@theseanheath) April 2, 2014
@nba If you have the technology to get calls right, we'd all LOVE to see it implemented as soon as possible. These. Games. Matter. #thefans - Sean Heath (@theseanheath) April 2, 2014
@nba : The ONLY professional league in the US with the reputation that the games are rigged. Know why? Because of games like tonight. #shame - Sean Heath (@theseanheath) April 2, 2014
Sources said that the league issued the suspension Thursday but granted a request from the Mavs to postpone it until the next game to give the team time to find a suitable replacement for Heath, who is known for his high volume and passion.Crashed Marengo plane belonged to atheist activist Rob Sherman
hello
A small plane crashed overnight in a Marengo cornfield. The sole occupant was killed, but the name has not yet been released. Courtesy of Paulette Bodnar
The pilot of a small plane was killed after the home-built aircraft crashed in a corn field near Marengo overnight, authorities said Saturday.
The single-engine plane belonged to longtime suburban atheist activist Rob Sherman, Federal Aviation Administration records show. The pilot's name has not yet been released.
A passer-by called 911 at 7:27 a.m. to report the plane wreckage in a farm field off Meyer Road, according to the McHenry County Coroner's office.
Marengo firefighters found the single victim, a man, who was pronounced dead at the scene at 7:53 a.m.
Sherman, 63, a 32-year resident of Buffalo Grove, recently moved with his wife, Celeste, to a home with an airplane hangar in Poplar Grove, west of McHenry County, where he was setting up an airplane construction business.
Sherman unsuccessfully ran as a Green Party candidate for Congress in the Fifth District this fall. Not long after his loss, he announced his intention to run in 2018 for the 12th District seat downstate.
Sherman first made headlines back in 1986, when he challenged the suburb of Zion's right to display a Christian cross on a public water tower paid for by tax dollars. He has taken on a number of other issues over the years.
Attempts to reach Sherman and his family Saturday were unsuccessful.
The plane, a Zenair CH601, crashed under unknown circumstances, FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro said.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators were planning to take the plane to a secure facility because of the heavy snow expected Saturday night, spokesman Keith Holloway said.
The crash occurred either late Friday night or early Saturday morning near Meyer Road, just north of Pleasant Grove Road, said Marengo firefighter-paramedic Joe Taylor.
The McHenry County Coroner's office will perform an autopsy Monday morning.
• Burt Constable and Lisa Friedman Miner contributed to this report.When you think of “places I'm dying to eat,” Houston may not be the first (or the 20th place) that comes to mind. It wasn't for David Chang, either—until he went there to taste it for himself.
A few years ago, when Linsanity ended in N.Y.C. and Jeremy Lin signed with the Houston Rockets, I made a stupid comment on Twitter that I'd open a Momofuku in Houston just so I could see Lin play. Houston food people did not appreciate my dumb humor.
After a handful of visits since then, I've realized the joke is on me: I wish I were opening in Houston, because it just might be the next food capital of America. I've always wondered where the food in a Blade Runner-like future would appear first and what it would taste like—and I genuinely believe it's here.
Partly that's due to a demographic reality: By some measures, Houston is the U.S.A.'s most ethnically diverse city (a bunch of New Yorkers just choked on their halal kebabs reading that, but it's true), and when you get a collision of immigrants, the food scene is guaranteed to be bonkers.
Houston also has cheap commercial and residential rents—oh, and no state income tax—which means broke-ass cooks and chefs can afford to live and open here. Zoning laws are more permissive than an Amsterdam brothel. And customers have cash to spend.
Two chefs at the forefront of all things Houston are Justin Yu of Oxheart and Chris Shepherd of Underbelly. These guys would be successful anywhere, and it's amazing what they've done in two very different parts of Houston.
Oxheart, in the Warehouse District, has one of the country's most original tasting menus. (When I was there, I had the mung-bean crepe and the savory porridge with vadouvan spice.) It's the kind of restaurant everyone wants to eat in now: amazing food and flawless service, but also a zero-pretense attitude—and a shock to the palate every time you sit down.
If Oxheart is a sniper rifle, then Underbelly (in the artsy Montrose neighborhood) is a shotgun—it takes the same carefully sourced local ingredients and blasts them into something Shepherd defines as New American Creole. What that means is a fun and crazy (yet deadly serious) menu representing every bit of diversity in Houston: Mexican influences rub shoulders with Thai, Cantonese, Sichuan, Korean, Punjabi—and, of course, Texas barbecue.
Yes, Houston has barbecue worthy of its home state. (Order the gigantic beef ribs at Killen's.) Houston also has America's best Vietnamese food. Pho Binh Bellaire is Justin Yu's favorite spot, and now it's one of mine. Even great ramen can't hang with the soup they're dishing up.
All of this leads me to the one culinary mash-up that best embodies what I love about Houston, and that's the evolution of Vietnamese-Cajun food—think seafood, rice, and herbs, French-tinged but also very spicy. Crawfish & Noodles, the restaurant where I was indoctrinated into this fusion of cultures, makes me optimistic about gastronomy. It's weird in the best possible ways. There's nothing I enjoy more than the communal aspects of sucking down a cauldron of crawfish heads with friends. This is the dish I think about all the time. It haunts me.The parents of a Nova Scotia teenager who killed herself earlier this month after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by a group of boys at a party has responded to a Christie Blatchford column about the incident.
“I’m not upset or mad. A little disappointed maybe. The writer, Christie Blatchford, makes a few statements I would like to address,” writes Glen Canning, Rehtaeh’s father, in a blog post on his website.
In her column, Blatchford explores why there might not be a case against Rehtaeh Parsons’ alleged rapists, who many have accused of passing around a cellphone picture of Rehtaeh, then 15, having sex as she vomits out a window. Bullied mercilessly for months, the 17-year-old hanged herself in her bathroom. Three days later, on April 7, her family removed her from life support.
Blatchford argues there are two sides to every story, and that the evidence was “all over the map.”
“What she did say was all over the map and that is exactly what one should expect it to be from a 15 year old girl who remembers very little but is being swamped at school and online with slut stories about what took place,” Canning writes in response.
There was also no evidence Rehtaeh was too drunk to consent, Blatchford writes.
Canning takes issue with Blatchford’s interpretation of “consensual sex.”
“The two boys involved in taking and posing for the photograph stated Rehtaeh was throwing up when they had sex with her. That is not called consensual sex. That is called rape,” Canning writes.
Sorry it wasn’t the 100% perfect case that rape victims need in this country in order to get justice but she tried
“They also stated they had to get her dressed when they were finished. She was passed out. That is the story they told to anyone at Rehtaeh’s school who would listen. That is their account of what happened. There are numerous people who heard that and shared that. No evidence she was so drunk that she couldn’t consent? How drunk does someone have to be? Drunk enough to get sick or drunk enough to not remember?”
Blatchford also addresses the photo circulated online, arguing it “shows virtually nothing that would stand up in court” and that it doesn’t reveal “a recognizable face.”
Canning argues that the boy in the photograph has admitted it is him and that the girl is Rehtaeh.
“What did the person in the photograph say? That it was him, that the female was Rehtaeh, that she was vomiting, and that he was having sex with her,” he writes.
“He repeated that story many times to many people all while texting that photo to God knows who. Hard to believe that could be presented to the Crown and dismissed but there you go.”
Canning explains how he prepared his daughter for accusations she “asked for it” or that she deserved to be raped.
“Sorry it wasn’t the 100% perfect case that rape victims need in this country in order to get justice but she tried,” he writes. “And for that I am very proud of her.”
At the end of his post, Canning criticizes Blatchford for placing the blame on the victim by including the detail in her column that Rehtaeh was being flirtatious at the party, according to a girlfriend.
“Isn’t that why most rape victims say nothing?” Canning writes. “Because it’s never about the rapist, it’s always about the victim.”
Leah Parsons, Rehtaeh’s mother, also responded to the column, writing a note to Blatchford on a Facebook page dedicated to her daughter.
“This article clearly highlights the “slut shaming” going on in our country and the abuse that Rehtaeh felt over and over for the past 18 months,” she writes.
“If a grown woman can write such a biased, degrading, harassing article think of how a 15 yr old was able to deal with the torment of those young boys. I only pray that you do not have any daughters or granddaughters.”
National PostThe Air Force's Force Structure State for Fiscal Year 2015. The Air Force plans to cut nearly 500 planes from its inventory over the next five years if the Defense Department’s Fiscal 2015 budget request is approved by Congress, the service announced March 11, 2014.
WASHINGTON — The Air Force plans to cut nearly 500 planes from its inventory over the next five years if the Defense Department’s Fiscal 2015 budget request is approved by Congress, the service announced Monday.
The reductions — which would affect the active duty, Guard and Reserve — would be implemented in 25 states and the District of Columbia, according to a diagram provided by the Air Force. Only 47 planes would be eliminated overseas at a time when officials are emphasizing the importance of maintaining a strong forward presence to deter adversaries and respond quickly to crises.
The drawdown was necessitated by budget constraints imposed by Congress. The Air Force’s proposed base budget is $109.3 billion, down from the $114.1 billion originally proposed for this year, but slightly higher than the $108.8 billion actually enacted by Congress. If sequestration goes back into effect in fiscal 2016, the service’s budget would take further hits.
“Our challenge in a constrained funding environment is to maintain the balance between having a ready force today, and a modern force tomorrow,” Air Force budget director Maj. Gen. Joe Martin told reporters at the Pentagon last week.
The cuts would entail the elimination of the entire A-10 and U-2 fleets, as well as significant reductions in the number of F-15s and MQ-1s.
“In addition to fleet divestment, we made the tough choice to reduce a number of tactical fighters, command and control, electronic attack and intra-theater airlift assets so we could rebalance the Air Force at a size that can be supported by expected funding levels. Without those cuts, we will not be able to start recovering to required readiness levels,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III said in a news release.
The Air Force’s top budget priorities are the F-35 tactical fighter, the KC-46 tanker and the new long-range bomber, and the Pentagon is trying to protect those programs from the budget axe, officials said.
The procurement budget for the F-35, which has been plagued by cost overruns, technical problems and schedule delays, would rise to about $4.3 billion from $3.3 billion this year, funding the purchase of 26 planes. The Air Force would buy seven new tankers at a cost of $1.6 billion. Money for research, development and testing for the new bomber would more than double from $359 million this year to $914 million, Martin said.
As the war in Afghanistan draws down and China continues to rise militarily, the U.S. military is trying to move assets to the Asia-Pacific region and prioritize high-end platforms over personnel.
“The FY15 [budget proposal] request favors a smaller and more capable force — putting a premium on rapidly deployable, self-sustaining platforms that can defeat more technologically advanced adversaries,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last month.
To maintain capability at lower cost, some assets will be moved from the active duty force to the Reserve. The size of the Reserve fleet will only decrease by 17 aircraft, according to the diagram.
“Wherever possible the Air Force leveraged opportunities to rebalance personnel and force structure into the Reserve component,” Air Force Secretary Deborah James said in the news release. “For that reason, at most Air Reserve component locations where we divested aircraft, we replaced the existing flying missions with a new mission and preserved the majority of the manpower to ease the transition.”
In addition to getting rid of aircraft, the service also plans to slash personnel. The Air Force would reduce its end strength from 503,000 airmen to 483,000 in fiscal 2015. The removal of 17,000 active duty airmen and 3,000 Air Reserve members would be accomplished through the elimination of weapons systems, reductions in headquarters staffing and paring back aircrew-to-cockpit ratios as combat in Afghanistan winds down, officials said last week.
The Air Force plans to use voluntary force reduction measures to thin out the ranks, as well as involuntary programs if necessary, Martin said.
At this point, these Air Force plans are just proposals because Congress has yet to approve them. Certain measures, such as the elimination of the A-10, will be strongly opposed by some lawmakers.
At a budget hearing last week, Sen. Carl Levin D-Mich., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said some of the proposed force structure reductions would be “difficult for many to support.”
Senators Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., John McCain, R-Ariz. and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., have all come out against the elimination of the A-10. Ayotte’s husband is a former A-10 pilot. McCain and Chambliss each represent states where dozens of the aircraft are based.
harper.jon@stripes.com
Twitter: @JHarperStripesIf you're looking to get that much closer to your family these holidays, here's an idea that might just help.
A Christmas card onesie that can fit four people has been created by the Chalmers family in Rochester, Minnesota, who were wanting an extra personal touch for the holiday season. The family have been sending about 80 regular Christmas cards out to family and friends for 15 years, but wanted to try something different this year.
Diane and Greg Chalmers and their sons, Garron, 13, and Keenan, 10, will also be modeling their 16-square-foot onesie during family visits during the holidays.
This is what it looks like when the Christmas card onesie is modeled for you.
Image: Supplied
What it says on the card. Image: Supplied
Let's not forget about the pets though, with Lucy the cat from Raleigh, North Carolina modeling another wearable Christmas card from her owner Joe Wright.
Both of these were created using custom fabric site Spoonflower, with a seamstress helping the Chalmers family add holes in the fabric to make it a true onesie.
Here's some pictures of Lucy spreading holiday cheer.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Ah Christmas, the only time you can wear goofy seasonal things and get away with it.Reports that Naya Rivera had been fired from Glee emerged Monday after a story in The New York Daily News cited an on-set altercation with Lea Michele as the impetus to axe the actress. But a spokesperson for 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Glee, tells BuzzFeed that is not the case, saying, "There is no truth to the rumor Naya has been fired from the show."
Rivera's publicist denied allegations earlier this week that the actress had been fired; but now, for the first time, 20th Century Fox is also confirming that Rivera is still a part of Ryan Murphy's musical dramedy. "She remains under contract to Glee," the spokesperson added.
It's unknown if Rivera will appear in Season 5's final two episodes, the first of which airs this Tuesday, May 6.Lobbying expenditures from the payday loan industry more than doubled from $2,045,000 in the 109th Congress to $4,182,550 in the 110th Congress, according to a new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).The report, released Tuesday, finds that federal campaign donations by the employees and political action committees of 13 industry companies and trade associations “jumped 80% between the 2006 and 2010 midterm election cycles.”
Former Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-FL) was the largest recipient of payday loan campaign cash, receiving $53,900 from the payday industry in the 2010 election cycle, according to CREW. The group said the next largest recipient of donations from the payday lending industry was Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who is the ranking member and former chair of the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions. Maloney received $48,400 in donations from the industry during the 2010 election cycle, said CREW.
Overall, CREW said the industry’s spending on lobbying “has skyrocketed, jumping 120% from the 110th Congress to the 111th Congress.”
“Once again, we see that money talks in Washington,” CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. “As usual, money paid to lobbyists was well spent, but working Americans were left out in the cold.”
During the period in question the industry was able to kill legislative proposals which would have capped payday loan interest rates and limit the number of times people could use such loans, said CREW.Premier League clubs spent £660m on international transfers last year, including more than £50m on agents' fees, a Fifa report has revealed.
After the Premier League, Italian clubs were the next biggest spenders overseas (£286m), followed by France (£253m), Spain (£192m) and Germany (£144m).
Brazil supplied the most players sold overseas with 1,558 - 13% of the total.
Spanish clubs were the biggest net earners when it came to deals in 2013, earning £150m selling players abroad.
"There are just a very few clubs making very big moves and that is skewing the market, but the rest of the market is very stable,'' said Mark Goddard, general manager of Fifa's Transfer Matching System.
The biggest overseas signing made by a Premier League club was Arsenal's club-record capture of Germany's Mesut Ozil for £42.4m from Real Madrid, while the biggest outgoing transfer was Gareth Bale's world record-breaking £85.3m move to the Spanish giants from Tottenham.eSports has done a lot for me I get to do what I love on a day to day basis. If there was a game that most heavily influenced my journey to get to where I am now it is surely Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. It’s for this reason I want to give back to the community that has done so much for me.
I am proud to announce that with the release of Modern Warfare Remastered I am throwing a 16 team event at the very venue that I first started in, Xtreme Gaming www.xtremegaminguk.co.uk in Colchester over the last weekend in November 26-27th November 2016.
We will be playing on Ps4’s and it will be a double elimination bracket.
I will be putting up the minimum prize fund myself and hope to increase it as we wind our way closer to the event hoping to bring in more sponsors to help take care of costs and contribute in any way they can.
The entry to this tournament will free entry with only a small deposit to reserve tickets that will be refunded when the player/Team attends.
The exact rules for this tournament will be based of the Old Decerto v2 rules for CoD4 however I will be liaising with pro players closely to tweak the rules to the very best settings possible and will have them locked and published shortly after game launch.
Since this is taking place in the lively town of Colchester we are trying to sort a discount with various hotels for attendee’s and will announce any success with this as soon as possible.
16 team 4v4 double elimination tournament.
Casted by myself and a selection of other casters including some new faces.
Streamed in house to Twitch (Channel to be determined)
The age restriction will be 18+
Hosted over 2 days at Xtreme Gaming in Colchester (www.xtremegaminguk.co.uk)
Minimum £1000 prize pool supplied by On The Mic Media
Throwback tournament for CoD4 on the new Remastered game.
Team breakdown will include reserved tickets for pro teams, open tickets and local tickets, exact numbers will be announced soon.
Trying to make it free entry with a small deposit on places.
Sponsors to be announced in the next 4 weeks.
More details and announcements to follow soon.
Ticket information
For those who wish to attend the upcoming “A Lan by Brice” on the 26th and 27th of November open tickets are now available.
To request your tickets please email BriceLan@mail.com You will then be forwarded payment details to pay a £40 per team (please list your roster in the payment notes) deposit which will refunded upon attendance at the event.
Alternatively, you can forward the details of a hotel booking for Colchester on those dates and we will accept that instead of the deposit as guaranteed attendance.
If you are local to Colchester you can visit Xtreme Gaming at 63 High Street in Colchester and apply for one of the spots reserved for local teams and register there.
If you are a veteran or pro who is interested in the “Veteran” Slots please contact Brice via twitter @Bricetacular these spots are extremely limited.
For Updates on this event
@Bricetacular
@Xtreme_GamingPennsylvania Lawmakers encourage supporters to join them at Capitol event
Politicians in Washington, D.C., have been exerting undue influence on the states and it’s time for them to stop. That’s the sentiment behind a rally Rep. Samuel E. Rohrer (R-128) and Sen. Mike Folmer (R-48) will hold at noon on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda.
“If you think the size and scope of the federal government has far exceeded our Founding Fathers’ intentions, then we hope you come out Monday to support our cause,†Rohrer said. “For too long, Congress and the president have been encroaching on policy areas that ought to be decided by the states. This rally is the equivalent of posting a ‘no trespassing’ sign.â€
The rally will focus on a resolution Rohrer is introducing in the House to defend Pennsylvania’s sovereignty under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Folmer will introduce a sister resolution with language identical to Rohrer’s in the Senate.
“When our country was founded, our Fathers envisioned a form of government in which the federal government served as an agent of the states – not the states serving as an agent of the federal government,†said Folmer. “Today, federal legislation and funding compel states to serve the federal government, a total reversal of the structure originally intended. This rally seeks to remind federal officials of their constitutional limitations while affirming Pennsylvania’s 10th Amendment rights.â€
The lawmakers’ resolutions are part of a larger national trend of state lawmakers who are reasserting the sovereignty of their independent states under the 10th Amendment. At the rally, Rohrer and Folmer will be joined by lawmakers from other states who have introduced similar measures in their own state legislatures.
The rally is free to attend and open to the public. For more information about the rally or to acquire driving directions to the state Capitol, residents are encouraged to visit Rohrer’s Web site at SamRohrer.com.
Rep. Samuel Rohrer
128th District
Pennsylvania House of Representatives
(610) 775-5130
(717) 787-8550
www.SamRohrer.com
Contact: Dan Massing
House Republican Public Relations
(717) 772-9845
www.pahousegop.comBeer Pioneers™ is a feature documentary, produced by filmmaker Jay Sheveck. It reveals the candid and personal stories of the people behind the global revival of craft brewing (the return to traditional brewing and serving methods and use of classic ingredients in beer). Through rare and intimate interviews with the very Pioneers themselves, the successes and struggles behind the famous—and some nearly forgotten—beers, brands, breweries and events of the early beer rennaisance and today's thriving craft brewing revolution are recounted.
The narrative of the film also explores the origins and evolution of craft brewing, microbreweries, homebrewing, and the grassroot beer campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s — and examines the maturing of artisinal beer and the uniting of its consumer support during the 1980s and 1990s.
Featured in Beer Pioneers™ are some of the the earliest pioneers in the industry (Fritz Maytag, Michael Jackson, Michael Hardman, Jack McAuliffe and Frank Appleton), the earliest pioneering breweries (Anchor Brewing, Traquair House, Litchborough, New Albion and Horseshoe Bay), the first consumer-led campaigns (The Campaign for Real Ale and Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood), the earliest home brewing organizations (Durden Park Beer Circle, American Homebrewers Association, and Maltose Falcons Home Brewing Society), the stalwarts of all beer festivals (Great British Beer Festival and Great American Beer Festival), and a modern day reincarnation (Northampton Brewing Company); and nanobreweries, brew-on-premises, brewers guilds, brewery architects, and trips through hop fields, malt houses, yeast laboratories and beer hotels.
Take a journey back to the days of beers earliest pioneers. Join the beer revolution...
Beer Pioneers™ is coming soon!AMD Radeon R9 300 series are just around the corner.
Exclusive: Confirmed rebrands of AMD Radeon 300 series
More and more leaks confirm what we were telling you for the past few weeks. Radeon 300 series are essentially rebranded cards from Radeon 200 series. Only FIJI will be new GPU in the series. In fact FIJI might just get it’s own series, just like NVIDIA’s TITAN.
Here’s a list of all confirmed rebrands from Radeon 200 series to 300 series. There are three Curacao parts, one Bonaire, one Tonga and two Hawaiis.
AMD6658.1 AMD Radeon(TM) R7 360 Graphics Bonaire XTX [Radeon R7 260 |
news that day of soldiers seizing a schoolboy and pitching him head-first into an operating cement-machine. Almost forget. Then I spotted a group of villagers beating a stray dog to death for their sport. A metaphor of sorts for all that is wrong, another link in a word-association chain that goes something like Famine… Drought… Overpopulation… Deforestation… Conflict… Barbarism… Cruelty… Machetes… Child Soldiers… Massacres… Diamonds… Warlords…Tyranny… Corruption… Despair… Disease… Aids… Africa.
Africa remains the heart of darkness. Africa is hell.
Pay to Play - Put your money where your mouth is and subscribe for an ad-free experience and to join the world famous Takimag comment board.When I’m at the lab, I dress as invisibly as I can. I wear dark jeans, boring, long-sleeved shirts and hoodies, and casual shoes. My hair is tied back into a sloppy bun, and my makeup is minimal. I look like I live in an organic granola commercial.
I gave little thought to this uniform until a few years ago. At the time, I was a teaching assistant in the psychology department at the University of Toronto. I was helping my students prepare for the midterm exam that I had just finished putting together. My partner at the time had been teasing me about the bun, so I decided to start wearing my hair down.
I debuted my bun-free, feminine hairstyle on midterm prep day. One student asked me what I thought was on the exam, so I outlined the topics that would be covered. He gave me a look of skepticism and began to lecture me on what would really be on the midterm.
For a moment, I was frozen in shock. No student had ever spoken to me like this before. To prevent him from confusing the other students, I interrupted his monologue and reminded him that I was the TA and had designed the exam. He kept going and going. Nothing I said could convince him of my authority.
As a woman who works in a scientific field, it’s an experience I’ve had before. This incident was a prime example of “mansplaining,” a term used to describe when a person, often but not always a man, explains something in a condescending manner to someone they assume is less knowledgeable.
While I’ll never know if my student’s behavior was tied to my hairstyle, his actions are compatible with building evidence that women scientists are taken less seriously when they dress in a feminine manner. Either way, the bun was back the next day. I felt myself downplaying my femininity, slipping back into a uniform that made me feel more comfortable in my workplace.
This experience is likely familiar to many women in science. In the months since the election, the science community has politically activated, inspiring more discussions of marginalized groups in science. The recent March for Science even sparked a larger discussion about the underrepresentation of women, indigenous people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and people of color in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Through all of this, I’ve found myself wondering what it would be like if I were a man working in the scientific community. What kind of advantages do men in STEM have over me?
As a first step to answering this question for myself, I performed a gender swap experiment on Science Twitter, an online community I turn to for STEM-themed conversations. I spent a week tweeting with the profile picture of a woman, then switched and spent a week tweeting with a male profile picture. I was surprised to discover that the experiences had subtle but important differences that meant a lot to my self-confidence and emotional well-being.
I’ve experienced subtle sexism throughout my career as a scientist
My parents were the first to push me toward science. I remember being 6 years old and squirming with embarrassment in the spice aisle of the grocery store as my dad delivered a lesson on how and why salt is iodized. In high school, I became interested in radio astronomy. My proudest moment was during my graduation, when the emcee announced that I’d be pursuing astrophysics in university, prompting a gasp from the audience. These days I might have rolled my eyes at that, but young me was overjoyed to be more like the boys than the girls.
That changed once I got to university. At each step in my education — from astrophysics to computer science to neuroscience — I’ve gravitated to spaces with progressively greater female representation. My current lab, for example, has always been majority women. Nonetheless, when I leave the lab, I have to contend with work environments that are far less welcoming to women.
Once I enter these predominantly male science spaces, I have a go-to set of tactics. My clothes and my bun are just one part of my “woman in science” toolbox. I also have scripts prepared for encounters that demean my intelligence or objectify me. When someone oversimplifies their science for me or appears to be testing me, I have special phrases to quickly convey intelligence. A reference to Fourier transforms or quantum mechanics always works — their eyes brighten, and a truckload of technical jargon spills out of their mouths.
I have a speech prepared for the times that fellow scientists hit on me at conferences. “Are you with someone?” they’ll ask. “Why yes, I’m here representing the Lab for Thinking, Reasoning, Creativity, and Educational Neuroscience. Would you like a copy of our poster?” I’ll reply.
That obliviousness also comes in handy when men insult me, sometimes accidentally. I’ve been told that women are less intelligent because our brains are smaller, because we win fewer Nobel Prizes, and most frequently, because Steven Pinker said so. When I’m good at my job, I’ve been told it’s because I’m not like normal women, or there’s something about women biologically that makes us especially suited to do whatever task I just completed. Sometimes I respond with a groan, but it’s easier to pretend I didn’t hear them.
Most women in science have a set of strategies and accommodations like this, sometimes taught to us explicitly but mostly learned through trial and error. Often, these accommodations are invisible to us, or they gradually become part of who we are. In a 2007 study of the top 100 institutions for seven STEM fields, only 14 percent of tenured or tenure-track STEM faculty were women; only 0.58 percent of the faculty in the same study were identified as African-American, Hispanic or Native American women. This imbalance means that we constrain our emotions to avoid being stereotyped as emotional. We’re more likely to receive negative criticism in science, so we become perfectionists.
Ironically, this additional scrutiny may make us better scientists: When an experiment returns an unexpected result, men are more likely to dismiss it, whereas we’re more likely to replicate the experiment to figure out what’s going on. We’re also, on average, more ethical than our male colleagues.
Most of the time, working in an environment that undervalues us can damage our self-esteem. We may know all about impostor syndrome, but we still worry we’re impostors. We lose confidence in ourselves and misattribute that loss of confidence to inability rather than wage, employment, or funding discrimination. This environment hits hardest against those of us who belong to multiple marginalized groups, such as indigenous women, women of color, women with disabilities, and LGBTQ women.
Understanding this gender bias has almost never helped me on an individual level. Unless a reviewer explicitly states that he’s rejected my paper because of gender — something that has happened before, though not to me -- I have no way to know whether bias was involved. That ambiguity is a confidence killer. Anytime I lose out, I blame myself.
My Twitter gender swap experiment
Until a few months ago, my Twitter avatar was a genderless cupcake. I was very happy as a cupcake — nobody starts fights with cupcakes. It was a peaceful existence. Aside from the name “Eve,” my profile had no gender markers. I had heard that women get harassed on Twitter, but hadn’t experienced it. The scientist in me, and perhaps also the masochist, decided to see for myself.
The goal of the experiment was to see whether changing the gender presentation of my avatar would change the way others interacted with me. I agonized over experimental design, as I always do. Would knowing the gender of my avatar affect the way I tweeted? Could I randomize which avatar I used any given day? Could I “blind” myself, i.e., keep myself from seeing which avatar is tweeting on my behalf? Should I refrain from tweeting anything gendered or let a bot control my tweets?
I finally settled on a process. First, I started by making my gender more explicit on Twitter. I changed my avatar to a stock photo of a generic woman scientist, with a bright, welcoming smile, a lab coat, and very scientific-looking beakers of blue and green liquids. I didn’t change the content of what I was tweeting and essentially ran the experiment as myself, only with a female avatar.
My female avatar seemed to make more mistakes than my cupcake did. She might misspell a word or say “never” when she really meant “rarely.” It amused me at first, that these helpful corrections began appearing just after my new avatar did, but eventually I forgot about it and it became part of my Twitter experience. I adapted and moved on.
In February, I began step two: adopting a male persona. I Googled “male scientist,” and set one of the images as my avatar. I changed my Twitter name from “Eve Forster” to “Steve Forster,” and announced to my followers that I’d be doing a week-long gender swap experiment. To soothe my fears about conducting an unblinded experiment, I told myself it was a preliminary study, to understand the terrain before tackling a full-scale experiment.
I set a few rules for myself: During Steve Week, I wouldn’t mention my gender identity to anyone and would allow people to infer it from my avatar. I made no changes to my profile description, which didn’t reference gender. I could tweet about things that were traditionally female-coded, and use hashtags like #WomenInSTEM and #MarginSci, but I had to do so with the understanding that I was tweeting as a man.
The biggest surprise: my perceptions about myself, the way I felt about myself, had way more impact on that experience than any interactions — Eve Forster (@EveForster) March 17, 2017
At the end of my man week, I thought, wow, not a huge amount changed. Somehow, I'd managed to trick myself. Just 2 days as a woman, and WOW — Eve Forster (@EveForster) March 19, 2017
Immediately, people started responding to me in a more positive way. My tweets got more likes and more replies, and those replies were free of the condescension I’d come to expect from Twitter. On the first day, I encountered a troll who called me names, but those tiny, nitpicky criticisms went away. It’s easy to identify and disregard a troll who calls you names. Someone who appears to be tweeting in good faith and has a very slight problem with what you have to say is more likely to slip under your skin. This second group seemed to have fewer problems with my tweets when I was Steve.
At the end of the experiment, I remember thinking: I was really funny on Twitter this week! I felt smarter, more confident and authoritative. I even slept better, an average of 18 minutes longer per night, according to my sleep-tracking app, SleepBot.
At first, I attributed all of these things to the positive associations I had with being male. Expectations can have a big influence on how you feel, and I attributed my newfound confidence to a maleness “placebo effect.” I thought perhaps I had imbued the image of Steve with positive characteristics such as intelligence and confidence, and this may have led me to perceive those characteristics within myself. I had noticed that the nitpicking had completely disappeared, but that felt so minor that I assumed something else must have contributed to the boost in my mood. Those minor criticisms couldn’t have affected me so negatively, could they?
In time, I discovered that the effect on my confidence was indeed that subtle, and to understand why, I should explain what it was like to tweet as Eve one week previously and then again one week later. Just like tying my hair in a bun in real life, I’ve figured out how to tweet without making waves: avoiding certain hashtags, phrasing my tweets as nonconfrontationally as possible, and qualifying everything I say. When I want to tweet about a fact as a woman, I research it thoroughly first to ensure I have every tiny detail exactly right.
As Steve, I stopped getting pushback, and my confidence grew. I gradually realized that even if I made a mistake, I’d be given the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t need as much precision and no longer had to worry about how my tweets would be received, which saved me time and emotional energy. I no longer second-guessed myself, and started tweeting less cautiously. In my hubris, I forgot to use those safeguards the following week. After two days of using a female avatar, the attacks, nitpicking and “mansplanations” were back, stronger than ever, and my stress was back to its original level.
Preliminary lessons from a preliminary experiment
While there is still a lot to unpack from my experiment, the main lesson I learned from this exercise was the difference between noticing the presence and absence of discriminatory behavior. The former is much easier than the latter, especially within a society that masks inequity so well. Noticing the subtle confidence boost because you’re not getting picked apart for every word is much harder than noticing it drop.
I’ve long assumed that my experience working in science has been directly related to my intellectual ability and the quality of the research that I’ve done. My experiences during this experiment suggest this may not have been the case. If I could put on a male avatar in real life, would I feel more confident, and be more comfortable challenging my colleagues and defending my opinions? I wondered how much of my career progress has been hindered by the emotional and professional burden of having to prove myself to a higher standard than male scientists. How often have I hindered the progress of scientists more marginalized than me?
I have to point out that I have it much better than many others in science. I’m lucky at my current job, where I haven’t experienced harassment at the hands of my colleagues. As a white, able-bodied woman, I’m insulated from the daily violence, both minor and major, inflicted on women of color, women with disabilities, indigenous women, and LGBTQ women in the scientific community and in society at large. I also benefit from the structures that oppress them, and have the prerogative to ignore those structures or not.
This is a lesson that all men and white women in science must learn: We must continually remind ourselves that our experiences are profoundly sheltered. Not only do we lack the experience of underrepresented scientists but we have difficulty even knowing what to look for. It’s our responsibility, on Twitter, in science, in life, to find out for ourselves, and to actively work against the structures that systematically exclude underrepresented minorities from science. Here is a good place to start.
Eve Forster is a PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Toronto. She uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the neural underpinnings of analogical reasoning, and tweets @EveForster.
First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.Meet the Azlans, Northern Ireland's only predominantly gay rugby team BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A group of dedicated sportsmen have got together to create Northern Ireland's only gay rugby team in a bid to make the game more inclusive. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/meet-the-azlans-northern-irelands-only-predominantly-gay-rugby-team-34662754.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/article34662751.ece/26c8b/AUTOCROP/h342/2016-04-27_new_20404712_I1.JPG
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A group of dedicated sportsmen have got together to create Northern Ireland's only gay rugby team in a bid to make the game more inclusive.
Better than that, the Belfast-based Azlans club is open to all - young and old, gay and straight, complete beginners and those with a great deal more experience.
Kevin Bartlett, the man behind the team, explained: "The Azlans are actually an inclusive team. It is about welcoming everyone and making everyone feel welcome."
Antrim man Kevin, a disability support officer, has been involved in inclusive sport for the past 20 years.
He was involved heavily with the Ulster Titans, Northern Ireland's first gay-friendly rugby club, before it ceased to exist.
"Like I said, the Azlans are inclusive," he continued. "Yes, the team is open to gay people, but you don't have to be gay to get involved. We're open to all.
"It came about because a lot of people were saying to me that they would like to play rugby but they didn't know where to go.
"We are there for people who maybe have never played rugby before, for whatever reason, or maybe they would like to get back into the sport. You can come along and learn and train. Everyone is accepted - it doesn't matter who they are.
"We thought there was an interest out there, so we put something up on Facebook and made up some leaflets and 15 people turned up on the first night.
"The team is inclusive. It offers the opportunity to develop and there is also a safe environment but it isn't all about just being gay.
"Yes, there are gay people who come along and feel comfortable, but it is actually about targeting everyone, for example the person who has always played Gaelic but thinks they would like to give rugby a go."
Stephen Aiken, from south Belfast, has been involved with the team since it was first set up towards the end of last year. "I only played rugby in school and it was only during the last few years when a new teacher brought it to the school," explained the 27-year-old, a hair colourist who works on the Lisburn Road.
"After school, I would have run for Northern Ireland, so I was more involved in independent sports rather than team sports.
"But I heard about the Azlans and thought I would give it a go and I have really enjoyed it.
"I work an awful lot and I don't really get to do an awful lot except work and sleep, and I thought this would be an opportunity to do something different.
"It is designed for people of all levels - for complete beginners to people who are really into the game but have been out for a while because of injury.
"When we are out on the pitch, you realise how well everyone gets on - what happens on the pitch doesn't affect what happens when you come off it.
"It's great because you don't have to put on a front, you can be yourself in front of everyone and be comfortable."
To find out more about the Azlans, visit their Facebook page at facebook.com/inclusiverugbyni
Belfast TelegraphFinally, the Star Wars footage you've been waiting for... or maybe not. Episode VII director J.J. Abrams is giving fans a huge tease of the return of the Millennium Falcon, but all isn't exactly as it appears. The clip is actually a surprising mashup of Star Wars and Batman. Zack Snyder, who's directing Batman v. Superman, has been mashing up the two films on Twitter for a few months now, and now Abrams' production company is finally responding with an elaborate mashup of its own. Let's just say that what follows is one of the last things we'd expect to see on the underside of the Falcon.
This teaser also plays into the way that Abrams has been revealing Star Wars details since the shoot began. Abrams' production company has made a habit of tweeting out photos of handwritten notes, but those notes have been placed against familiar backgrounds — including some that looked like they came from the Falcon and the Death Star. His other big reveal was in a video promoting the Force for Change charity event, which slowly zoomed out to reveal that Abrams was standing beside an X-Wing. The film is planned for a release on December 18th, 2015.Apple has released the first iOS 10.3.3 public beta for users to test without paid developer accounts. The update likely includes bug fixes and performance improvements as well as new wallpapers discovered only on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro…
Apple’s public beta program is free to participate in unlike its paid developer program. iOS 10.3.3 will be released to everyone likely next month, and the public beta allows more users to test pre-release versions of the software update before it’s finalized.
Today’s release marks the third software update this week starting with iOS 10.3.2 for all users on Monday and the first iOS 10.3.3 developer beta yesterday.
The presence of new wallpapers only on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (which you can download here) further suggests what analysts expect: updated iPad Pros may be coming at WWDC in a few weeks. The missing wallpapers on the 9.7-inch iPad models may suggest these will be marketing wallpapers for new 12.9-inch and the first 10.5-inch iPads.
For a look back at what changes Apple included with iOS 10.3, check out our hands-on video below:
For more on iOS 11, check out these stories:security alert posted this morning by antivirus vendor Intego reveals that the company has discovered a new Trojan horse that is being carried by pirated copies of iWork '09 circulating on a number of torrent sites.The Trojan, which Intego has classified as a "serious" risk and named OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, allows a malicious user to connect to an infected machine and perform various functions, as well as download additional software to the machine.
This software is installed as a startup item (in /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices, a location reserved normally for Apple startup items), where it has read-write-execute permissions for root. The malicious software connects to a remote server over the Internet; this means that a malicious user will be alerted that this Trojan horse is installed on different Macs, and will have the ability to connect to them and perform various actions remotely. The Trojan horse may also download additional components to an infected Mac.
Intego reports that over 20,000 users had downloaded the package as of 6:00 AM Eastern time this morning, and an update to an entry posted on Intego's Mac Security Blog notes that the Trojan now appears to be actively downloading new code to infected machines and using them to carry out denial-of-service attacks on certain websites.: Despite significant publicity surrounding this incident today, the infected iWork package remains active in the torrent community. In light of this continued activity, we have moved this report from Page 2 to our front page and are providing instructions for deactivating and removing the Trojan from infected systems.
1) (open Terminal.app)
2) sudo su (enter password)
3) rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices
4) rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices
5) rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices
6) rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg
7) killall -9 iWorkServices
OSX.Trojan.iServices.A appears to be the first significant OS X Trojan to advance beyond the proof-of-concept or pranking stage to engage in truly malicious behavior. MacScan has released a free utility to remove the Trojan from infected systems.NuGet support for C++ projects in Visual Studio has arrived in NuGet version 2.5! This has been an elusive feature for VC++ developers so we are thrilled it's here. It's been around for about a month now so we figured we'd go talk to one of the developers who helped make it happen, Microsoft's Garrett Serack.
Huge thanks to Garrett and the awesome NuGet team for bringing NuGet goodness to C++!
Download NuGet 2.5
Download the tools to build C++ packages
[00:00] GoingNative();// Charles and Ale construct the show. Sorry about missing last month! Milan update. NuGet.
[02:25] Charles interviews Garrett Serack about NuGet for C++
[39:04] ~GoingNative(); // Please send any and all feedback about NuGet for C++ to us!
More information:
NuGet Team blog post on NuGet for C++
VC++ Team blog post on NuGet for C++
Building Native Libraries for NuGet with CoApp's Powershell Tools (video)
Consuming Native NuGet Packages in Visual Studio (video)
We really want to hear from you, so please tweet feedback to @C9GoingNative (follow us!) and send your requests, ideas, complaints, praises, hate mail, and love letters to C9GoingNative@hotmail.com. We will read and respond to all messages! That's how we roll, brothers and sisters. If you are a Facebook user (who isn't these days?), then please join our C9::GoingNative Facebook group.Apple claims that iOS 6, the next version of its iPhone and iPad operating system, is "compatible" with devices as old as the iPhone 3GS. The 3GS was originally released nearly three years ago in June 2009 -- an eternity in gadget time.However, at the bottom of Apple's iOS 6 info page lies a small disclaimer: "Not all features are available on all devices." This is followed by eight footnotes detailing exactly which features work on which devices.Some features, like the VIP List for email, the Offline Reading List, and Shared Photo Stream won't work on the iPhone 3GS. Even flagship iOS features like Siri and FaceTime over cellular won't work on recent devices like the iPhone 4 or the iPad 2 -- not to mention the iPhone 3GS.All that said, however, iPhone 3GS owners will receive iOS 6 features like redesigned App and Music Stores, Cloud Tabs in Safari, Facebook integration, and other improvements -- it just won't include nearly the same number of features as the owners of Apple's latest and greatest gadgets.When: Saturday November 8th 2014 from 10:00am to 4:00pm
Where: YWCA Hamilton – 75 MacNab St S. Hamilton, Ontario
Register: eventbrite.ca/e/girls-learning-code-day-intro-to-html-css-in-hamilton-ages-8-13-registration-13209994449
Organizer: Ladies Learning Code – Hamilton Chapter
This is a beginner level workshop for girls 8-13 years old and their parent/guardian/aunt/older sibling.
Bring a special girl in your life to this workshop on National Girls Learning Code Day and learn to create a website together from scratch! Note: this workshop is BYOL so each parent or guardian/youth pair is required to bring one laptop on the day of the workshop as well as their own lunch.
The Workshop:
This workshop experience offers girls the opportunity to learn how to use creativity to build an online web presence! The workshop will focus on the use of Mozilla Thimble, an easy-to-use online web making platform that allows for live previewing while coding. Girls will learn HTML and CSS basics by hacking pre-existing text, links, images, and videos on various templates, and then use their skills to create their very own fun business website from scratch (think ice-cream store, pet store, or any other fun real-world workplace!). Fundamental concepts of code, such as divs, classes and ids will enforce organization and prepare the girls to continue creating – at home and at school. Thimble also allows for easy sharing, so their awesome content can be shared with you and anyone with a link!
What is Girls Learning Code?
Founded by the same women who introduced Ladies Learning Code in 2011, Girls Learning Code is less about “code” and more about changing the world – through teamwork, creativity, and, of course, technology.
What Makes Girls Learning Code Different?
Girls Learning Code has been designed specifically with girls in mind, by the team who founded Ladies Learning Code. When developing plans and curriculum for workshops, we keep in mind a recurrent theme in research on gender and technology: girls approach the computer as a “tool” useful primarily for what it can do; boys more often view the computer as a “toy” or an extension of the self. Thus, the theme of workshops are “Changing the World” and how technology can be used as the means, not the end.
Check out this video of one of our Girls Learning Code programs:
What parents say about Girls Learning Code:
“My daughter went to the camp without a clear understanding of what a tech camp for girls was but was pleasantly surprised by the experience. She enjoyed every single day at the camp and showed great enthusiasm about the topic she and her group chose to present. I would not hesitate to send her to another tech camp with LLC whenever the opportunity arises.”
“My daughter wasn’t sold on the idea of attending a “technology camp” for March Break. By the second day she was raving about how much fun she was having AND how much she was learning. What a great combination!”
“I learned about Girls Learning Code from the Toronto Star. I looked into it and I thought it was such a great opportunity for my daughter to be exposed in the field of technology. I was really happy that she went to Girls Learning Code because she was introduced to different programming languages, exposed to companies like Google and Mozilla and had to work with different girls she’s never met before. I wish my older daughter who is now in first year university had the same opportunity as her sister.”
“This was a great iniative that is needed to encourage females to become leaders in computer technology field. It was inspiring for my daughter to visit Google, to see a modern office space, to see a bilingual women in a leading position at Google. This camp provided a perspective to girls that they not only can play and use technology, they can design, create and become leaders in technology.”
“My daughter had a blast, the other campers were a great bunch of girls, they learned, grew and had fun. The venue was well chosen, the balance of activities was good. The extra little touches of caring were noticable and appreciated. The camp was down to earth and unpretentious but the counsellors took their jobs seriously. A+. I will recommend to other parents.”This interview originally appeared in Beatdom #12 – the CRIME issue. You can purchase it on Amazon and Kindle.
Amiri Baraka is Beat.
He walked away from the scene in Greenwich Village, where he edited literary journals Yugen, Kulchur, and The Floating Bear from 1958-65. Working with Hettie Cohen, Michael John Fles, and Diane Di Prima, respectively, the journals brought new works by new names. Featured writers included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Whalen, and Michael McClure. He co-founded Totem Press and was influential in the launching of Corinth Books. Yugen magazine was perhaps most significant as the platform for the “new” Beat writers, allowing their work to find a place in one of the first venues to give credulity to the movement.
A wise and controversially outspoken man, his views have kept him on the Outside, the Beat side. The U.S. Air Force discharged him after two years of service due to his belief in communism. In 1961 he was arrested for distributing obscenity after mailing copies of The Floating Bear, Issue Nine, to subscribers; and his presence at the 1967 riots in Newark, New Jersey, saw him arrested and severely beaten by police. It was also the year he changed his name from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka. The charges against him were eventually dropped and much of his support came from the Beat community.
From Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, his first book of poems in 1961, to his upcoming play, The Most Dangerous Man in America, he has stayed the course, worked and fought for his beliefs of an equitable society.
With the death of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (who visited Baraka’s Newark home a week before his murder), he left the mostly-white Bohemian literary scene and the environs of the East Village to take up a more radical stance towards Black Nationalism. But despite his distancing himself from the Beats in the mid-sixties, Baraka read poetry and attended panel discussions at Beat-haven Naropa Institute through the 1980-90s, and remained friends with Ginsberg until Allen’s death in 1997.
More recently his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” brought an end to his New Jersey “Poet Laureate” post when Governor Jim McGreevey took umbrage to the poem’s questioning of the events surrounding the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centers. The “Who?’ of the exploding owl in the poem echoes the angst of Ginsberg’s voice in “Howl.” Having heard Ginsberg recite live from ten feet away, this writer finds both poems equally as exciting and important.
Baraka has been called “the triple-threat Beat.” His talent has brought him recognition and awards not just in poetry and prose but also in theater as an Obie Award winning playwright. A sampling of awards bestowed upon him include the PEN Open Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. Maybe one of the most bittersweet titles placed on him is that of the Poet Laureate of Newark Public Schools, which he received after Gov. McGreevey’s actions against him
Additionally, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and regarded as a respected academic, having taught at the state universities of New York at Stony Brook and Buffalo, Columbia University, and other institutions.
We started by asking why he walked away from the Beat Movement, which gave him a vehicle to establish himself as writer/thinker/activist to a wider audience.
~
Well, that whole thing [the Beat Movement], was very explosive, but remember that the whole Civil Rights Movement was intensifying. I got out of the service in 1957. The Montgomery bus boycott had gone on a couple years before. After they had successfully made them integrate those buses, they blew up Doctor King’s house. At that point, it really began to be clear this was the kind of struggle that was going on particularly in the south, at least for me, having been in the service for two years.
That was the point that it became clear… until they blew up King’s house and he says… you know, the black people showed up at his house with their rifles and said, “What should we do, what should we do, Doctor King?” and he said, “If any blood be shed, let it be ours.” So my whole generation reacted negatively to that and said, “No, it won’t be like that. If people are going to be shooting, they are going to be shooting back and forth.”
Malcolm X appeared at that scene with his whole idea about, you know, “You treat people like they treat you. They treat you with respect, you treat them with respect. They put their hands on you, send them to the cemetery.”
So a whole generation of black youth responded to that positively as a sign that Doctor King was indeed a normal man instead of some kind of a saintly non-violent kind of perseverant. During that period, the next years of 1958-1960… In 1959, Fidel Castro led that revolution in Cuba so I went down there the next year, 1960, to Cuba and met Fidel, Ché Guevara, and all those people. I also met the black activist from North Carolina, Robert Williams, who was in exile in Cuba because he had really been practicing a kind of a self-defense in North Carolina, a thing that actually ended up with him stopping the [Ku Klux] Klan – removing their hoods… and then he found out it was the State Police! Then they framed him for kidnapping a white couple and he went to Cuba to escape that kind of injustice, so I met him.
Anyway, that was the point – 1960 – when, while I had this kind of awareness of the Civil Rights Movement, I actually became much more directly involved in it. So, about 1965, when Malcolm X was murdered, I felt the best thing to do would be to get out of the Village and move to Harlem. I found that, for a lot of black people, that event made us take stock of ourselves and move out of Greenwich Village into Harlem. That was actually the point. I began the Black Arts Repertory Theater Company in 1965 at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue.
Who else was involved in the theater?
Larry Neal, poet, and Askia Touré, poet, those were two of the leading figures. Many people came to Harlem who were not already in Harlem, because they were attracted to the Black Arts Repertory School that we opened. We would send out trucks into the neighborhood every day… four trucks, one had graphic arts, the other had poetry, the other had music and the other had drama. We did this every day throughout the summer of 1965 so that created a kind of militant venue for Black Arts. They found that was desirable rather than having to submit to the continued racism of Greenwich Village.
The perception is that the Village was not so racist.
At that particular point, a lot of young black people felt it was better to move to Harlem to take an active kind of fighting stance against it, rather than to be isolated in Greenwich Village.
Taking action was better than writing about it or publishing work about it?
Right, absolutely… it was not only about the publishing; it was about actually being an activist in that community and on the street and actually making Black Arts relevant to the movement rather than simply commenting on it.
Do you feel that we are losing ground and giving back too much of what was gained then?
Absolutely! It is like one step forward, two steps back. The whole Obama campaign, the victory… on one hand has brought a kind of very sharp reaction. It is like after the Civil War – once the slaves were so-called “emancipated,” that’s when you get the Ku Klux Klan and the black “coons” and all of that strict re-segregation. Rather than ending slavery you got the whole segregation of the south and the whole dividing of the south into black and white even though they were theoretically free from slavery… but slaves were plunged into sharecropping and many times they couldn’t go anywhere. The white people in the south wouldn’t let them go until years after slavery was over. They started going north and |
matter that would, in theory at least, be a solid with superfluid characteristics.
The researchers have already begun developing a microscope to make use of the dipolar quantum fluid's unique characteristics. Their "cryogenic atom chip microscope" is a magnetic probe that should measure magnetic fields with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. This kind of probe may even allow for a more stable form of quantum computation that uses exotic quantum matter to process information, known as a topologically protected quantum computer.
Beyond these applications, the study offers physicists another line of attack toward understanding unconventional quantum effects.
"It's a problem that has stood unresolved since the mid-80s," said Lev. "It's worth taking a new approach."
Media Contact
Benjamin Lev, Department of Applied Physics: (650) 723-0268, benlev@stanford.edu
Max McClure, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-6737, maxmc@stanford.eduPlease note: this list is not inclusive of all playgrounds, but represents what local moms have expressed to be their favorite playgrounds in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. This will be an ever-evolving list, so if you have more information on any of these playground or your favorite neighborhood spot isn’t represented and you think it should be, please email me at [email protected] Thank you!
BEST PLAYGROUNDS BY CATEGORY *
*More details about some of these playgrounds can be found in the Neighborhood section below.
BEST COVERED PLAYGROUNDS:
Kids Konnection (Mandeville), Little Farms (River Ridge), and Palmer Park (Uptown) all have sunshades covering the playground equipment, making them ideal for rainy days and days when you don’t feel like slathering on sunblock.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS
Bonnabel Boat Launch (Metairie), Miracles to Milestones Playground (Destrehan), and Kids Konnection Koop Drive (Mandeville), Audubon Park (The Walnut Street Playground at the front of the park near St. Charles Avenue, Uptown) were cited by local moms as being their favorite options for children with special needs.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS FOR SMALL TODDLERS:
Cleary Playground (Metairie), Danneel Playground (Uptown), Pontiff Playground (Metairie), and Mike Miley (Metairie) are our favorite playgrounds with toddler-friendly features (wide stairs, small slides, etc.).
BEST PLAYGROUNDS FOR ACTIVE MOMS
Audubon Park (Uptown), City Park (Mid-City), and Lafreniere Park (Metairie) all offer large walking/biking tracks, fields for group sports, and additional fitness features.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS WITH WATER FEATURES
Lafreniere Park (Metairie), Ormond Park (Destrehan), East Lakefront Children’s Park (Mandeville) are all well-maintained splash pads where you can take the kids to beat the heat. A splash park is also slated to open in City Park in the future. For more places for water fun in and around New Orleans click here.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS FOR SWINGING
Pontiff Playground 1521 Palm St, Metairie, LA 70001: Pontiff Playground has two play areas both with excellent swinging options. The larger of the play areas has a row of baby swings and several special needs swings. The smaller play area has 2 swings for bigger kids or moms (a rare sight these days!), a baby swing, and a special needs swing.
City Park 1 Palm Drive, New Orleans, LA 70124: You will find a long row of swings for kids of all ages an abilities in the play area next to Morning Call. In the field across from City Putt there are also rows of porch swings for those who want to swing in groups.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS WITH GATED PLAY AREAS
Bonnabel Boat Launch (Metairie), Confetti Kids (Algiers Point), Daneel Playground (Uptown), Munholland (Metairie), Lafreniere Park (Metairie), Williams Playlot (Metairie) are all excellent playground with gated play areas so you don’t have to worry about your kiddos running into the parking lot.
BEST INDOOR PLAYGROUNDS
Lakeside Shopping Center 3301 Veterans Memorial Blvd, Metairie, LA 70002: Located at the Food Court entrance of Lakeside Shopping Center, The Kids’ Castle is pretty much a mom’s dream come true. You can get some shopping checked off your list, grab lunch or dinner, and, once the kids start getting antsy, take them to the Kids’ Castle which features a climbing castle and cool medieval elements for the kids. For parents, it offers precious amenities like a hand-washing station (No having to cringe picturing germs on everything, mama!), baby changing counters, a family restroom, and three private nursing rooms. It is colorful, clean, FREE, and offers generous hours of 10:00 am – 8:00 pm Monday – Saturday and 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm on Sunday.
Riverwalk New Orleans 500 Port of New Orleans Place, New Orleans, LA 70130: The Riverwalk has been a haven for both local and visiting moms who need respite from the heat on hot and humid days. The play area is located past the food court and is a circular structure lined with cushioned benches. The floor is soft and padded. The swamp-themed play equipment mainly consists of foam climbing pieces that are geared towards younger children. The play area is free, but if you drive you will most likely have to pay for parking.
Palm Tree Playground 3011 N. I-10 Service Road, East in Metairie, LA 70002: Palm Tree Playground in Metairie is open on most weekdays for open play, but is sometimes closed for events so it is best to check their calendar before planning a trip. Admission is free for adults and infants under 6 months and then $6.00-8:00 depending on the child’s age. Palm Tree has a large toddler area on one side to keep children under the age of three entertained for hours. On the other side is a small basketball court and a climbing structure for those four years and older. In between is a playhouse, building blocks and cars, puzzles, and ride-on toys. With a concession stand and plenty of tables for snack time, Palm Tree Playground is a local favorite for play dates.
Monkey Room 1501 Religious St, New Orleans, LA 70130: The Monkey Room is a large, indoor playground located in the Lower Garden District. They have a huge climbing structure with slides and obstacles, as well as a padded toddler structure with blocks, slides, and other things for the little ones to climb. Admission is free for adults, $7.00 for just the Toddler area, and $9.00 for full access to all equipment. Like Palm Tree Playground, the Monkey Room is available for private parties and it is best to check their calendar before planning a trip.
BEST PLAYGROUNDS BY NEIGHBORHOOD:
DOWNTOWN/FRENCH QUARTER/MARIGNY
Mickey Markey Park 701-799 Piety Street, New Orleans, LA 70117: Located in the Bywater section of Downtown, Mickey Markey Park underwent an extensive renovation in 2013 and is now a great place for families to take their kids. It has a full, modern play set including swings. Neighborhood moms love it for the large grassy area for picnicking and soccer and the sidewalk that is perfect for riding bikes.
GENTILLY/NINTH WARD
Donnelly Playspot 6013 Wildair Drive, New Orleans, LA 70122: Donnelly features two small play areas: one for toddlers and one for older kids. And they are both covered! One local mom noted that the playground also has hills that are perfect for wearing out the kids for naptime.
Oak Park Playspot 5134 Perlita Street, New Orleans, LA 70122: This is sometimes referred to as the Arthur Ashe Playspot because it is next to Arthur Ashe Charter School. Designed for kids from ages 2 to 12, this is a great spot for play dates because there is a little something for everyone. There are two play structures (one with smaller slides and stairs and one with larger slides), swings for big kids as well as special needs swings, a large, jungle gym climbing feature, and a bouncy motorcycle. The playground is surrounded by lots of trees providing welcome shade.
St. James Playspot 2400 Filmore Ave, New Orleans, LA 70122: Kristi, one of our Gentilly Mombassadors recommends St. James Playspot and not just because she helped build it! St. James is a Kaboom playground. The play equipment is low to the ground and excellent for toddlers. It also has an area for older kids, swings, and a grassy area with picnic tables.
HARAHAN/JEFFERSON/RIVER RIDGE
Harahan Playground 6601 10th Street, Harahan, LA 70123: Located in a quiet neighborhood, Harahan Playground offers an excellent play area flanked by two picnic pavilions and surrounded by a walking track.
Jefferson Playground 4100 South Drive, Jefferson, LA 70121: Jefferson Playground was my favorite place to play as a child. A lot has changed in the past 20+ years. What once was a skating rink is now a parking lot and the playground equipment with the long row of “big kid” swings and the metal roller slide (so much fun, so much danger!) has been replaced by a new (and probably safer) set of equipment. The updated playground includes two slides, a jumpy bridge, a ropes wall, a rock climbing wall, two baby swings, and a wheel-chair accessible ramp with interactive games. There is a small set of fitness equipment next to the playground and a covered pavilion with picnic tables about fifty feet away.
Little Farms Playground 10301 South Park, River Ridge, LA 70123: Little Farms has two play areas. One is an older, metal play area that is gated and next to the tennis courts. The second play area is on the left side of the gym across from the baseball field. The equipment has a cool pirate ship theme with cannons, slides, a steering wheel, and is covered by a large sunshade making it perfect for hot and/or rainy days.
LAKEVIEW/MID-CITY
City Park 1 Palm Drive, New Orleans, LA 70124: Does any other park in the city even compare to City Park? What New Orleans childhood is complete without days spent climbing the live oaks in City Park? There are so many fun things to do for families of all ages. Older kids will love renting bicycles and pedal boats at the Big Lake and playing miniature golf at City Putt. Younger kids (and those young at heart) will love stepping into their favorite fairy tales at Storyland and running around the playgrounds. And everyone will love Carousel Gardens Amusement Park (open seasonally) and grabbing beignets and milk at Morning Call after a fun morning with family and friends. For rainy or unbearably hot days, spend a few hours strolling through the New Orleans Museum of Art where children 6 and under get free admission. NOMA also offers monthly programming for kids.
Desmare Playground 3456 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70119: Desmare Playground, located next to Cabrini High School, is an ongoing love project for the residents of Bayou St. John. The playground is a neighborhood favorite because it is small and gated. It currently has a climbing structure, slides, picnic tables, and a small field for playing, but residents are raising money to update the equipment.
Lakeview Playground 5501 General Diaz St, New Orleans, LA 70124
Lakeview Presbyterian Church Playground 5914 Canal Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70124: Lakeview Presbyterian is a favorite spot for the Lakeview/Mid-City Community group to meet for play dates.
McKay Playspot 405 Mound Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70124: This neighborhood gem features a small playset, swings, and a slide. There’s also plenty of open space for running around.
METAIRIE/KENNER
Bonnabel Boat Launch 1599 Bonnabel Blvd., Metairie, LA 70005: Although the Bonnabel Boat Launch doesn’t have swings, it is still a favorite among moms in the New Orleans. The entire play area is gated to keep kids from wandering into the parking lot. There are a good number of picnic tables and lots of slides. The ramps make it wheelchair and toddler accessible, and it still has plenty of climbing features to keep the older kids interested. The best part about this playground is that it is practically on the water supplying parents with nice views and cool breezes. Bonus: there is a nearby bark park for your fur babies!
Lafreniere Park 3000 Downs Boulevard, Metairie, LA 70003: What City Park is to New Orleans, Lafreniere Park is to Metairie and Kenner. This expansive park offers so many options for family entertainment. At the center of the park is a beautiful carousel that is $1 per ride when open to the public. (It can also be rented.) There are well-maintained playgrounds throughout the park and large fields for team sports or just running wild. The best part about Lafreniere Park though is the large pavilion and the lagoon where you can feed the ducks.
Miley Playground & Stadium 6716 W. Metairie Avenue, Metairie, LA 70003: Mike Miley playground on West Metairie Avenue is one of the best options in the city for parents with children of various ages. It has two, new play areas – one with high slides and a rock climbing wall for older kids and one with smaller slides and musical elements for toddlers. The best part is that the play areas are right next to each other so parents can easily keep an eye on their 2 year olds and their 6 year olds at the same time. Across from the play areas is a set of swings with two baby swings and two special needs swings. On either side are covered picnic tables and the gym with restrooms is right across the parking lot. Some moms might not like that the playground is off of such a busy street, but it is gated and the kids get a kick of seeing all of the different cars pass.
Munholland Church Playground 1201 Metairie Rd, Metairie, LA 70005: Located off of Metairie Road in Old Metairie, Munholland Playground is a gem for local moms. Its gated play area is shaded by trees and perfect for toddlers. Please note: it is open to the public on weekends, but it is only open to the public after 2:00 pm on weekdays during the school year since Munholland Church utilizes the playground for its Kid Day Out program.
Wally Pontiff Jr. Playground 1521 Palm Street, Metairie, LA 70001: Formerly Metairie Playground, Pontiff Playground has two play areas. The larger of the play areas is located to the right of the gymnasium. It has four sets of play equipment for children of various ages. Across from this play area is a long row of swings. The smaller play area is across from the gym, in between the running track and the tennis courts. This play area is a favorite among the toddler mom set for its easily accessible toddler equipment (including a small slide set that looks like a bulldozer). The smaller play area has a clear view of the train tracks so it provides excitement for tiny Thomas the Train fans. Surrounding the play ground is a walking track that is largely shaded.
UPTOWN
Alma Peters Playspot 346 Eleonore St, New Orleans, LA 70115: This favorite neighborhood spot is affectionately referred to as the “Toy Graveyard” because locals donate toys like tricycles and ride-ons to it once their kids have outgrown them. It’s gated and tucked in a friendly neighborhood.
Audubon Park 6500 Magazine St. New Orleans, LA 70118: You can’t overlook the splendor of Audubon Park. The largest play area is located at the front of the park off of St. Charles with public bathrooms nearby. The 1.8 mile walking/jogging trail is canopied by Spanish moss covered trees and it is great for people watching. Do your kids like feeding the ducks? Well, then bring your oats and seeds with you when you visit Audubon because there are plenty of ducks to feed in the pond. Those driving can access parking through the Magazine Street entrance. Streetcar access is on St. Charles across from Loyola University.
Danneel Park 5342 St. Charles Avenue, 70115: Located on the iconic St. Charles Avenue, Danneel Park seems to be the overwhelming favorite neighborhood play spot for our Uptown moms. The equipment is clean and well-maintained and, though there is no covering, the beautiful trees around it provide ample shade. The one downside? There is no bathroom nearby.
Palmer Park Claiborne and Carrollton Avenues: As mentioned earlier, Palmer Park has a sunshade covering the play area making it one of our favorite Uptown spots to play. In addition to the modern jungle gym, Palmer also has a rock climbing wall and a large field for picnicking or having your kids let off steam. Its convenient location makes it easily accessible by bus or streetcar.
RIVER PARISHES
Miracles to Milestones 9762 River Road, Destrehan, LA 70047: Located in East Bank Bridge Park, Miracles to Milestones Playground was created by a local mother with the United Way of St. Charles Parish as a play spot where children of all abilities can have fun and play together.
Monsanto Park 12501 River Rd, Luling, LA 70070: Monsanto Park is a favorite in the River Parish area for large get-togethers. It has lots of large grassy patches for running around, picnic tables, and new play equipment to entertain the kids.
Ormond Park 1901 Ormond Blvd, Destrehan, LA 70047: Ormond Park is a favorite of River Parishes moms for many reasons. Not only does it have a FREE spray park, it also has new playground equipment, a walking trail, and a covered area bathrooms close to the play area. It just underwent an extensive renovation and reopened in 2014.
ST. BERNARD
Sidney D. Torres Memorial Park Jean Lafitte Parkway, Chalmette, LA 70043: According to the moms we asked from St. Bernard, Sidney Torres is by far their favorite park. There are several covered pavilions where you can host parties and play dates. There are two sets of play equipment – one wooden, one metal. There are plenty of grassy areas for running and sports. And there is a small lake where you can feed the ducks and rent pedal boats.
WEST BANK
Confetti Kids Park 451 Pelican Ave, New Orleans, LA 70114: Located near the ferry, Confetti Kids is the favorite neighborhood spot for play dates in Algiers Point. Although it is small (you won’t find large areas to run around in the grass here), the playground equipment provides lots of climbing and sliding fun, and there are swings for babies and older kids, picnic tables with painted chess and checkers boards, and ride-on toys.
Gretna Heritage Playground 1035 Huey P Long Ave, Gretna, LA 70053: Built in 2013, Heritage Playground has a lot going for it. There are three sets of climbing/sliding equipment that are covered in sun shades, swings for various aged children, and a merry-go-round. Add picnic tables and space to run wild and you’ll see why moms on the West Bank love taking their children here.
Mel Ott Park Playground 2301 Belle Chasse Hwy, Gretna, LA 70053
Oakdale Playground 650 Wall Boulevard. Gretna, LA 70056
BEST PLAYGROUNDS ON THE NORTHSHORE
Kids Konnection 21490 Koop Dr., Mandeville, LA 70471: Kids Konnection was overwhelmingly the favorite playground recommended by moms on the Northshore. It was created by parents of children with special needs to be a place where children of all abilities can have fun and play together. Featuring a gated play area, equipment covered by a sunshade, and a pavilion with picnic tables, it is easy to see why moms and kids alike love spending time here.
Paul D. Cordes Park 3101 E Causeway Approach, Mandeville, LA 70448: You would be hard-pressed to find a park where you would feel safer than Cordes Park, which is next to City Hall and the Police Station. The park has two play areas (one of which is a fenced in toddler area), tennis and basketball courts, and covered pavilions.
Heritage Park 1701 Bayou Lane, Slidell, LA 70458: Heritage Park features a huge children’s play area, a walking track, several public shelters and picnic tables. Heritage also has an amphitheater where it hosts free concerts.
John Slidell Park 105 Robert Rd., Slidell, LA 70459: The favorite among the Slidell moms we asked, John Slidell is a beautiful park with tons of trees offering shade. There are two playgrounds, multiple walking trails, a pavilion, and a lovely area with flowers.
Coquille Park 13505 LA-1085, Covington, LA 70433: Coquille Park on the border of Covington and Madisonville offers two parks, a splash pad, a walking trail, and a pond. There are also plenty of soccer and baseball fields and basketball courts for older kids.Some things are still immigrant comedy. Asian shows are still considered immigrant comedies.
The Fresh Off the Boat problem.
For whatever reason, it suddenly holds responsibility for all Asian shows or leads or protagonists.
How did you develop the voice of The Nightly Show? How do you think it evolved?
Well we started with a very simple thing. It was Jon Stewart’s idea. He wanted a platform for voices that don’t always get to be on television. And his original idea was that the show would be all talk, and I would be the ringleader of that discussion. But as we started developing it, I felt that I needed a segment where I could just say what was really on my mind. You know, that the audience would want to hear from me also. And so then it became a kind of a combo platter if you will. A half-Daily Show, half what Bill Maher does.
That had its own complications. We started with four different people on the panel, and different people every night, and that was a nightmare. A booking nightmare first of all. I had to prepare for two types of shows: a comedy editorial that you have to write, which is hard enough, and a full-blown panel show. My head was exploding every single day.
For me it was about the content. If it got real funny that was great. But sometimes, if you are talking about certain issues, you dig in and get to the gritty of it. So that’s the way it evolved. We got our stable of people, and so we could just book one person. And that became the comfort sweater that we had for the last six months.
The media has taken a lot of shit this election—specifically cable news and even more specifically CNN—for its use of panels. But one of the things that The Nightly Show did so well was create a space for intelligent dialogue, which is often obstructed on cable by the use of campaign-affiliated pundits.
Yes, completely. You have pundits who are already steeped in their point of view, and they are mainly saying their talking points. You don’t really get an opinion. You end up seeing people trying to defend someone like Donna Brazile, who obviously did the wrong thing, but they are forced to defend her because they are on that side and it’s like, c’mon you know that bitch stole those questions. [laughter] It’s like, stop defending that, you know? Not that I am calling Donna Brazile a bitch, that’s a colloquial expression. That’s what will come out of this interview: Wilmore calls Donna Brazile a bitch.
But you know what I mean? So it just gets annoying to me when I see that kind of stuff. One of the most interesting shows right now is Megyn Kelly’s show, and Emily Nussbaum just wrote an article about it that I agree with 1,000 percent. She is kind of going against the company edict there, you know. That bullshit “fair and balance” which doesn’t mean anything at all. But she is trying to keep it real, and so it’s fascinating to see when she keeps it real. When Sean Hannity was talking to Trump and she basically said, “Well let’s see if we can get a real journalist,” and I was like, “Oh my god! Oh snap!” Now that was keeping it one hundred you know.
Megyn is interesting. She’s come a long way since the New Black Panther Party and Santa Claus is white. I wonder how much of that has to do with the changes at Fox in the wake of Roger Ailes’s departure.
I think it’s mainly due to the Ailes thing. His exit may have lifted something at Fox. But she’s an interesting character to me. Very interesting. I find Fox the most interesting, CNN the most entertaining, and MSNBC the smartest.
I’ve been surprised at how much Fox I’ve watched this election.
It’s the most interesting. You never know what you are going to get, it could be a shit show. [laughter] It’s like an anthropological examination of a certain part of the culture. There’s just so much.
What do you miss about doing The Nightly Show?
I really miss being able to speak about a lot of these things. Like, as soon as the show was canceled, Trump immediately goes to a black church. Like immediately. Almost like to stick it in my face. I mean you have to be fucking kidding me, Trump. Hillary needs the black vote so much now she definitely would have done our show at this point. We would have had to tell them to stop calling us.
The news cycle is so much faster than it was even four years ago. This year it feels like something will happen and three and a half hours later it will be old news, or even like it never happened. That’s a challenge for comedy.
It is. It expires so quick, you know. The milk spoils so fast, as you are pouring it into the cereal.
There’s been a lot of talk this election cycle about comedy’s inability to really nail Trump. Not just in the Darrell Hammond impersonation sense, but editorially as well. Do you think that’s fair?
He’s such a caricature of himself, you can’t be funnier than he is. I think that’s the problem. Like with Obama, his persona was just so boring you couldn’t make it sunny; he was just so straitlaced. And white comics were afraid to make any jokes cause, “Ahhh I don’t want people to think I’m racist.” Just make fun of him, nobody cares.
Kate McKinnon’s Hillary is brilliant. Her depiction really taps into the psychosis of it, which is so funny. It’s endlessly watchable, her portrayal of Hillary. She really catches the narcissism of a politician so well.
Over the last week, there’s been a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton’s struggle to turn out black voters. She’s turning to Beyonce and Pharrell—maybe even LeBron James—down the stretch. What do you think the challenge is there?
The thing is, she’s following Barack Obama. It’s like if you are a standup and you try and go on stage after Robin Williams. It’s just not fun. He’s one of the more popular people to run for president. People were excited to vote for him, and not just blacks. He had a historic candidacy. So her appeal with blacks is being measured against Obama’s, it’s not being measured against John Kerry’s or Al Gore’s or even her husband’s. It’s being measured against the guy who got the most black votes, so I think she is kind of fighting that more than anything else.
How would you rate Obama’s legacy?
Well it’s interesting that Obama’s pitch for Hillary is about himself. “Vote for her to protect me!” It’s like, well, what about her? It’s so weird, you know. The way that people endorse Hillary is almost at arm’s length.
We will see about Obama’s legacy. I still think the historical nature of his candidacy will be the biggest part of his legacy.
Bill Cosby was one of your favorite targets on The Nightly Show and he’s emerged as a secondary player this election—a lot of Trump’s surrogates have been comparing him to Bill Clinton.
In terms of me covering it—it’s not fun to cover those types of things. I felt it was my duty not to ignore it. I’m like, fuck that motherfucker you know, he shouldn’t be doing what he is doing, and I am happy that women were being heard. But it’s certainly not a fun thing to cover.
You’re hosting the National Book Awards in a couple of weeks.
Yes, I’m looking forward to that; it’s going to be fun.
If the country hasn’t disintegrated.
We are going to need books so bad. Books are going to be our only evidence of a civilized society.
What can people expect?
It will be kind of a nonpolitical appearance for me, I guess. Support reading and all that kind of stuff. You know these awards. But I’ll stick in some stuff here and there. You know, it’s me. What am I supposed to do? Act like I’m not me? I didn’t do that when I was with the president, so why would I at the National Book Awards?BEFORE Noah Syndergaard registered his first triple-digit radar gun reading this season or Yoenis Cespedes launched his first light-tower home run, the New York Mets stars pushed their bodies to the limit in the weight room.
Syndergaard opened a window into his offseason workout program in an interview with Men's Fitness magazine, which chronicled his fondness for "squat heavy'' days and a protein-heavy diet highlighted by venison, buffalo, sweet potato hash, avocado and an egg-laden concoction known as the "Bowl of Doom.'' As if a 98-mph fastball weren't lethal enough, Syndergaard concluded he could take his game to even greater heights by reconfiguring his body and throwing even harder.
"Noah Syndergaard added 17 pounds of muscle this offseason,'' blared the Men's Fitness headline in February. "Now he's stronger than ever.''
Cespedes, who signed a $110 million contract in November, also embraced the bigger-is-better philosophy. During a March 4 video segment with ESPN's Jessica Mendoza, he lifted 990 pounds while using a Kaatsu band, a device that moderates blood flow during exercise. In the video, Cespedes attacks a massive stack of weights with encouragement from Mets strength and conditioning coordinator Mike Barwis, who pumps him up with the exhortation "come on, Vin Diesel'' before his first rep.
So how did all that grunting and sweating work out? Syndergaard, a fastball-throwing machine, won't be throwing heat until after the All-Star break as he recuperates from a partially torn lat muscle. And Cespedes, who went on the disabled list April 28 with a strained left hamstring, hopes to return to action during a homestand next week.
As the Mets struggle to overcome the injuries, it's impossible to pinpoint precisely where things went awry. Drawing a straight line from Point A to Point B and declaring a training regimen directly responsible for an injury is a dangerous and risky proposition.
Editor's Picks Are the Mets through without Thor? As Noah Syndergaard hits the DL, the Mets can either wait for him to return or make a bold move -- but even a major splash might not save New York now.
How much will the Mets miss Thor? The Mets' hopes depend on Noah Syndergaard, but what happens if his stint on the DL runs long? Plus, a look at the impact for each MLB team if it lost its best pitcher. 1 Related
But the results clearly aren't what anyone in Flushing had envisioned and have helped perpetuate a reputation for chaos that the Mets would love to put in the past.
When Syndergaard left the mound in pain and closer Jeurys Familia went down with a blood clot in his shoulder, it forced tortured Mets fans to relive the concussion issues incurred by Ryan Church and Jason Bay, Jose Reyes' run of hamstring injuries, the soap opera surrounding David Wright's spinal stenosis and a lengthy run of pitching injuries in recent years.
General manager Sandy Alderson and other Mets officials contend that the team is singled out for excessive scrutiny by the New York media and criticized for garden-variety issues that might earn other teams a pass. But interviews with multiple baseball sources debunk the perception that the Mets are simply unlucky. Those sources shared insights that suggest it might be time for the Mets to engage in some serious introspection in several facets of their operation.
Multiple people familiar with the Mets' operation -- most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity -- say the team has a less-than-optimal command structure that allows routine problems to fester until they become major conflagrations. Too often, the Mets' approach leads to communication breakdowns, mixed signals or a lack of trust between the team and its players.
"It's the same old, same old mistakes,'' one industry source said. "The Mets are a successful, profitable organization. But no organization, over a protracted period of time, has more significant players on the disabled list. There's a failing across the board. And what changes have been instituted, if any?''
The media guide resumes are impressive enough. Head athletic trainer Ray Ramirez has 25 years of experience in the majors with the Mets and Texas Rangers and nine seasons in the minors before that. Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' medical director, is a respected surgeon whose New York office is on a short list with Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Neal ElAttrache as a go-to destination for pitchers with arm injuries.
But Altchek, with his busy practice at the Hospital for Special Surgery, is not a regular presence at Citi Field. And Barwis, the top strength and conditioning employee, works out of an office in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and is primarily responsible for training players in the offseason.
"Ultimately, these areas of expertise and coordination fall under my responsibility. It's not Jeff or Dr. Altchek or Mike Barwis. Whether it's coordination, or we're sending guys to the right rehab facility, or we have the right people visiting players in the offseason, this is all my responsibility." General manager Sandy Alderson
So who's in charge? Multiple sources said the lack of a single medical point person allows for greater involvement by COO Jeff Wilpon in areas where he's lacking in professional expertise. They describe Wilpon as a micromanager who creates an environment in which the Mets simply whipsaw from one crisis to the next and are too often governed by how their decisions will be publicly perceived.
"Jeff gets in the middle of everything that's going on, and he ends up doing more damage,'' said a person who has been involved in the Mets' internal operation. "He meddles. I can't come up with a more appropriate term.''
While Alderson concedes the Mets have room for improvement, he disputes the notion that Altchek isn't at the ballpark enough, or Wilpon is too involved in the medical and strength and conditioning operation, or Barwis' training methods have been less than effective.
"David Altchek does our minor and major league surgeries,'' Alderson said. "He has a particular role, and the rest of our professional medical staff is a function of that. We do not have any single doctor here continually, but we have orthopedic coverage every night.
"With respect to Jeff, I would not say he's heavily involved in the medical side. He is sort of marginally involved, as any owner would be. Ultimately, these areas of expertise and coordination fall under my responsibility. It's not Jeff or Dr. Altchek or Mike Barwis. Whether it's coordination, or we're sending guys to the right rehab facility, or we have the right people visiting players in the offseason, this is all my responsibility.''
General manager Sandy Alderson and the Mets have faced ongoing injury issues that have kept some of New York's brightest stars off of the field. Alex Trautwig/Getty Images
HOW SHOULD A medical department be judged? Keeping players productive and on the field seems like a reasonable place to start.
By that definition, the Mets are hardly MLB's biggest offenders. According to the website www.ManGamesLost.com, the Los Angeles Dodgers led MLB clubs with 7,169 games missed because of injury from 2010 to 2016. The Rangers, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres, Oakland Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies were next in line, while the Mets ranked seventh with 5,545 games lost to the disabled list.
As industry experts point out, DL days can be deceptive. One or two Tommy John surgeries in a season can skew results, and some players are going to suffer injuries that are beyond a team's control.
"Nothing you do from a strength and conditioning standpoint can prevent a guy from getting hit by a pitch and breaking his hand, or running into a wall trying to make a catch and cracking his ribs,'' said Mike Boyle, a longtime strength and conditioning coach who held the position for the 2013 world-champion Boston Red Sox. "It's different if you're looking at things of a soft-tissue nature. If you're doing a good job there, the general trend should be a decrease.''
New York's young pitching rotation of Syndergaard, Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Steven Matz and Zack Wheeler poses particular challenges -- just as the "Generation K'' trio of Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson and Jason Isringhausen posed challenges in the 1990s.
"We know that young pitchers get hurt more. We know that hard-throwing pitchers get hurt more. So is it really that surprising that a bunch of young, hard-throwing guys end up with a bunch of injuries?'' said Will Carroll, a longtime sports medicine writer who now works for Motus, a company specializing in wearable technology to provide biomedical analysis for athletes. "It's like driving a bunch of Ferraris against a bunch of Honda Accords. The Ferraris are going to win every time, but they're going to spend half the time in the shop, while that Honda keeps |
, I decided to switch to paper for scribbling down action items. It’s a better fit for the way I think about things. Deprogram yourself. In the U.S., particularly, we are obsessed with goals. This linear thinking forces you to lean into the future, and to always be thinking about the next piece of chocolate you’re going to eat, not the one in your mouth right now. A lot of people who get to places like MIT have had to work very hard to achieve their goals, and that’s why deprogramming is a basic part of what we do at the Media Lab. We want them to tap into self-motivated, passion-driven learning. The answer to, “Why am I doing this?” is “Because I want to do this” rather than to please someone else, or to buy that thing. When you buy a new car, you pretty quickly want the next car; the cycle never ends. Whereas if you’re happy being present—you can always be happy. Make your own model. One shoe simply doesn’t fit all. Just because I dropped out of college, I don’t suggest that others drop out of college — I think college is great for most people. I know that no one’s life is going to be exactly the same as mine, so doing as I did or doing as I say is not going to be the answer. Take other people’s experiences as inputs so you can create your own model. Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school — to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.
as told to Kate Torgovnick May.
Featured image: iStock.Tis the season to be nerdy. And in Chicago, they’re going all-in on the geeky holiday season, with a production of Charles Dickens’s classic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol done entirely in Klingon. The lonely curmudgeon Scrooge is known here as SQuja’, and he learns the true meaning of the season, only with more fighting, Bat’leths and Star Trek references. While it sounds like a farce, it’s actually quite sweet and seasonally appropriate. At its core, the Klingon Christmas Carol is a story of values seen from the perspective of another culture — even if that culture’s completely made-up. A Klingon Christmas Carol isn’t parody, it’s mythology.
SQuja’ is a Klingon money lender who’s a total coward. He refuses to fight and doesn’t embody the Klingon ideals of courage and honor. Over the course of the production, SQuja’ is visited by the spirits of dead warriors so he can see how his cowardice affects him and his family, and in the end he resolves to become a better, stronger and more honorable Klingon.
“I’m not a big fan of Christmas, period; I’m sort of like SQuja’,” the show’s props master Marc Malnekoff told Inverse. “Seeing it from a different point of view, which is the Klingon point of view, it’s not about being charitable, it’s about honor.”
Theater group Commedia Beauregard debuted A Klingon Christmas Carol in Minneapolis in 2007. It originally started as a joke, but has since morphed into a full-scale production, moving to Chicago in 2010, where it’s been performed ever since. This year, Orion Couling’s E.D.G.E. Orion Theatre Company took over producing A Klingon Christmas Carol after beating out six different Chicago-based theater companies competed to produce the show.
It isn’t exactly the Christmas Carol that has been the basis for countless more straightforward adaptations. In fact, you could argue it’s the exact opposite. In the original story, a mean and aggressive person learns how to be friendly, but the Klingon one features a quiet and non-confrontational man learning how to fight back. Even though it’s a different take on the tale, there are some parallels in how each version strives to bring out the best in a bad person.
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But why Klingon? After all, it’s a fictional language, and wasn’t even used until Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Marc Okrand, who first invented some Klingon phrases for The Motion Picture, continued to develop it, turning it into a complete language later on (he also assisted in expanding the grammar in A Christmas Carol). This grew into the Klingon Language Institute, an active online community with thousands of speakers all around the world. There are annual conferences and lectures, there are Klingon-translated copies of Shakespeare. Klingon is even being added to Duolingo as one of the app’s first fictional languages.
The cast members all had to take a two-week course in Klingon before starting rehearsals. The instructor knew they were mainly learning it so they could correctly recite their lines, but Aly Grauer, who plays the Vulcan Narrator, said he treated the actors like students learning to be fluent in Klingon. Couling adds that it definitely changed how the cast treated the play. They weren’t just some actors memorizing a bunch of guttural phrases, but instead a group of actual Klingons.
“When I walk into the space and I listen to the actors … I can’t understand anything that anyone is saying,” Couling said. “They’re laughing and they’re joking and they’re creating within the world, and it’s an alien world to me and they have to explain it to me. And thats incredible.”
Technically, it’s all fake, but to fans of A Klingon Christmas Carol, it doesn’t really matter. After all, as Grauer pointed out, Greek mythology was originally seen as religious text, but now it’s just as fictional as A Christmas Carol. Even though Greek gods have become more myth than fact, people still read and study The Odyssey, not because it’s real, but because it’s a good story. The way Klingon speakers see it, the language and this production become real through the people who share the culture and believe in what it represents.
“When does it stop being make-believe and when does it take on its own life?” Grauer asks, rhetorically. “Once you give something a voice like that, you don’t have a choice. It is what it is. If there’s a language, and there’s people speaking the language, it kind of doesn’t matter if the culture is made up. That piece of culture is alive.”A day after Congress sought to curb federal spending, including funding for California's high-speed rail project, the Bureau of Land Management approved plans for DesertXpress, a high-speed train that is initially planned to go between Las Vegas and Victorville, and later further west to Palmdale.
BLM's November 18 announcement authorizes DesertXpress the right of way to construct and operate the rail line on public lands. The dedicated passenger-only railroad falls on "previously disturbed lands" in existing utility corridors, according to the federal agency. Critics have been wary, however, as the line travels abut Mojave National Preserve and into the Ivanpah Valley.
BLM's total acreage for permanent right-of-way along the 200-mile corridor consists of 821 acres of public land and an additional 95 acres for temporary construction. The project will also takeover 2,800 acres of private land.
Earlier DesertXpress approvals came in October from the Surface Transportation Board and in July from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The BLM announcement came after congress passed a spending bill cutting federal funding of high-speed rail projects for the 2012 fiscal year. While the decision by Congress and the approval by BLM are not related, it may stall any thought of considering how the two projects would connect in Palmdale (that is if the California project ends up going through the Antelope Valley city).
Despite high-speed rail critics, other states are considering linking to the projects. Utah is looking to form a working group to survey rail and secure federal funding to study a connection to DesertXpress. "We need to study whether a connection makes sense," Senator Ben McAdams told The Salt Lake Tribune. "We are the crossroads of the West. And we don't want to be left behind."One evening, during an off-night amidst the Sixers' preseason, Nerlens Noel's cellphone vibrated. It was a text from T.J. McConnell.
"We can be like Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire on the pick and roll," McConnell's message read, complete with a video of a patented alley oop from the Seven Seconds Or Less era. "He's always trying to learn something and watching film and then he sends it over to my phone," Noel said, "I like that about him."
Noel and McConnell couldn't be more different. After many projected him as the No. 1 overall pick, Noel was the sixth selection in the 2013 NBA Draft. McConnell, a star collegiate player but with no professional fanfare, went undrafted this June.
Noel stands at 6'11, with a freakish 7'4 wingspan and world-class athleticism harnessed in his springy legs. McConnell is just 6'2 and, while quick-footed, won't be mistaken for an Olympian anytime soon. Noel is considered a foundational player to the Sixers' polarizing rebuild, primed to sign a maximum contract when he hits restricted free agency. McConnell is working on a four-year, partially guaranteed minimum contract.
Somehow, the two have formed a close bond. It's an interesting dynamic: While Noel is already entering his third season as a professional, the rookie McConnell is two years his senior.
"Me and Nerlens definitely have a special connection," McConnell said. "He's just in my ear, showing me film, telling me what I can do better. And I'm doing the same for him. The best thing about him is he listens to what I have to say, even though I'm a rookie."
Their connection was on full display in the early goings Monday night against Cleveland. McConnell found Noel for three-straight buckets during the Sixers' first-quarter burst, including a nice alley-oop off the pick-and-roll.
McConnell found Noel for another easy jam in the second quarter. He finished with 12 dimes overall.
The McConnell-Noel relationship became apparent during the preseason. Possession after possession, McConnell would be in Noel's ear during stoppages in play, offering words of advice or small encouragements and a slap on the butt. "I try to be a motivating guy and tell them I got their backs," McConnell said.
"T.J. is definitely one of the most communicative point guards I've ever played with," Noel said.
"I think point guards are born," Brett Brown added. "It's hard to coach how to be a point guard in regards to mentality and intellect and feel. [McConnell] is a true point guard. And that's something that we need on our roster."
McConnell reminds Brown of another undrafted point guard who scrapped his way into the league.
"I've spent a long time with [Matthew] Dellavedova when I coached the Australian Olympic team and, you know, nobody thought Dellavedova was going to be an NBA player," Brown said. "And there are lots of similarities to me with T.J. where he just has an enormous heart and he plays with tremendous spirit. For us, because we're trying to uncover point guards, it's a really great opportunity for him and I think the timing is right."
Three games into the season, McConnell has out-performed the Sixers' lone other healthy point guard, Isaiah Canaan, in terms of creation and ball control. McConnell has tallied 20 assists and just 6 turnovers compared to Canaan's 5:7 assist to turnover ratio.
All 30 teams deemed T.J. McConnell undraftable in June, but he's proven, for now, he can belong at this level. "People said I wouldn't be here," McConnell said. "But sorry to break it to you, I'm here."Pygame Zero (docs) is a library I'm releasing today. It's a remastering of Pygame's APIs, intended first and foremost for use in education. It gives teachers a way to teach programming concepts without having to explain things like game loops and event queues (until later).
Pygame Zero was inspired by conversations with teachers at the Pycon UK Education Track. Teachers told us that they need to be able to break course material down into tiny steps that can be spoon-fed to their students: our simplest working Pygame programs might be too complicated for their weakest students to grasp in a single lesson.
They also told us to make it Python 3 - so this is Python 3 only. Pygame on Python 3 works already, though there has been no official release as yet.
A Quick Tour The idea is that rather than asking kids to write a complete Pygame program including an event loop and resource loading, we give them a runtime ( pgzrun ) that is the game framework, and let them plug handlers into it. So your first program might be: def draw (): screen. fill ( 'pink' ) That's the complete program: screen is a built-in and doesn't have to be imported from anywhere. Then you run it with: pgzrun my_script.py Image loading is similarly boilerplate-free; there are a couple of ways to do it but the one we recommend: # Load images/panda.png (or.jpg) and position its center at (300, 200) panda = Actor ( 'panda', pos = ( 300, 200 )) def draw (): screen. clear () panda. draw () More appropriate to sounds and static images, the images/ and sounds/ directories appear as built in "resource package" objects: def draw (): screen. blit ( images. background, ( 0, 0 )) def on_mouse_down (): sounds. meow. play () We use introspection magic to call the event handlers in the script with whatever arguments they are defined to take. Each of the following will "do the right thing": def on_mouse_down ( pos ): print ( "You clicked at", pos ) def on_mouse_down ( button ): print ( "You clicked the", button. name, "mouse button" ) def on_mouse_down ( button, pos ): print ( "You clicked", button, "at", pos )
Batteries Included Pygame Zero is also useful for more seasoned developers. Though the APIs have been designed to be friendly to novices, they also help you get up-and-running faster with a larger project. The framework includes a weakreffing clock, a property interpolation system, and a built-in integration of Christopher Night's pygame-text. These are the kinds of things you want in your toolkit no matter how expert you are. It's not hard to "reach behind the curtain" into Pygame proper, when you outgrow the training wheels offered by Pygame Zero.
Portable and distributable I've discovered in previous Pyweeks that sticking to Pygame as a single dependency is just the simplest way to distribute Python games. OpenGL may offer better performance but users frequently encounter platform and driver bugs. The AVBin used by Pyglet has been buggy in recent Ubuntu versions. So Pygame gives much better confidence that others will be able to play your game exactly as intended. Pygame Zero has been built to constrain where users store their images, sounds and fonts. It also disallows them being named in a way that will cause platform portability problems (eg. case sensitivity). Hopefully this will help schoolkids share their Pygame Zero games easily. I'd be interested in pursuing this to make it even easier, for example for users without Python installed, or with a hosting system like a simplified pip/PyPI.After the Revolution against British domination, no other event has been seen so important and decisive for the American Nation as the Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865.
One of the most important battles of this conflict was without any doubt Gettysburg, fought between the Army of the Potomac (Union) and the Army of Northern Virginia (Confederacy) and lasted from July 1 – 3, 1863. General Lee commanding the confederate forces sought the chance to ease the pressure on the city of Vicksburg, besieged by the unionists. Instead, his was defeated by Maj. Gen. George Meade, halting the invasion of Pennsylvania and forcing his army to retreat back to Virginia.
In order to commemorate this important historical event, we are giving a great discount on the entire Scourge of War Series!
Take Gettysburg 150th Anniversary Collection, Gettysburg, Pipe Creek, Antietam, Chancellorsville and Brandy Station 50% off!The offer lasts from June 30th to July 3rd and is valid for both digital and physical editions of the games!
IMPORTANT! Scourge of War: Waterloo, Quatre Bras, Wavre, Ligny are not part of this offer.Two prominent mid-rotation starters have already been dealt this month, with the Orioles acquiring Scott Feldman (and giving up another starter in Jake Arrieta) and the Dodgers picking up Ricky Nolasco. The Red Sox, Indians, Rangers, Nationals, Diamondbacks, and Dodgers could be in the hunt for starting pitching, with other contenders potentially jumping in on the better names. Let's see what the market offers as the July 31st trade deadline approaches.
Rentals
Matt Garza (Cubs), Tim Lincecum (Giants), Josh Johnson (Blue Jays), Phil Hughes (Yankees), Jason Marquis (Padres), Edinson Volquez (Padres), Erik Bedard (Astros), Aaron Harang (Mariners), Mike Pelfrey (Twins), Joe Saunders (Mariners)
These available starting pitchers will be free agents after the season. Garza appears a lock to be dealt, and seems likely to command a top 50 prospect or equivalent young player as the centerpiece. With over $7MM remaining at the deadline, trading Lincecum would be complicated. Johnson and Hughes would likely generate solid interest on the market.
Controllable Starters
Yovani Gallardo (Brewers), Kyle Lohse (Brewers), Bud Norris (Astros), Joe Blanton (Angels), Kevin Correia (Twins), Lucas Harrell (Astros), Barry Zito (Giants), Kevin Slowey (Marlins), Carlos Villanueva (Cubs), John Danks (White Sox), Vance Worley (Twins), James McDonald (Pirates), Alfredo Aceves (Red Sox), Ricky Romero (Blue Jays)
All of these players can be controlled beyond 2013 given their contracts or arbitration status, not that teams would necessarily be thrilled by the prospect. Gallardo and Norris seem to be the names to watch here.
Currently On The DL
Jake Peavy (White Sox), Jason Vargas (Angels)
Peavy is projected to return from a displaced rib fracture Saturday against the Braves, so he could make three starts to prove his health prior to the deadline. He's under contract for next year, and would jump to the top of the short list of potential difference-makers. Vargas had surgery to remove a blood clot in his left armpit and is expected to return before the deadline.
Other Possibilities
Cliff Lee (Phillies), James Shields (Royals), Ervin Santana (Royals), Jeremy Guthrie (Royals), R.A. Dickey (Blue Jays), Jeff Samardzija (Cubs)
These pitchers are not currently believed to be available, but it wouldn't be a total shock to see one of them traded this month. Lee is the best pitcher named in this post, though he has no-trade protection and is owed more than $70MM through 2015. The Royals probably are not inclined to gut their rotation, though it would make sense to entertain offers for Santana if they are beyond the value of a supplemental round draft pick, as he is eligible for free agency after the season. Dickey and Samardzija are controllable beyond this year, but it would be silly for their teams not to listen.
For the large-salaried players such as Lincecum, Danks, and Zito, keep in mind that trades can happen in August as well if they clear waivers or are claimed.
Check out our other posts in the trade market series here.MTA Chairman and CEO Tom Prendergast. | MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann MTA: We have no plans to close the subway
The MTA isn't planning to shut down the subway in advance of the coming snowstorm.
"We have no plans to 'close the subway,’” emailed MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz, after POLITICO New York asked him how much notice the MTA would give Mayor Bill de Blasio should it in fact decide to do so.
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But if the MTA decided it needed to do so, Ortiz said, "we would do so in consultation with county and city governments."
Last year around this time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, ordered it shut down the subway in advance of what was then expected to be a serious storm.
"We found out just as it was being announced," de Blasio said at the time. "We did not get a lot of advance notice."
Earlier on Thursday, a reporter asked de Blasio if he’d spoken to the governor about the likelihood of another subway shutdown.
“I don’t think we’re in that situation right now,” he said. "I’m going to be talking to the governor further about it. There’s been a lot of conversation since last year between City Hall, the governor’s office, MTA — I think we all learned some good lessons from that situation.”
Although the MTA isn't planning a shutdown, it also didn't preclude the possibility of one, should circumstances change.
“We will make every effort to keep our services up and running so that our customers can get to where they need to be,” said MTA chairman Tom Prendergast in a statement. “We have a tremendous investment in equipment, manpower and experience. However, we will only provide service as long as it’s safe to do so. There may come a point throughout the winter months when it is no longer prudent to roll out buses or send trains onto some outdoor sections of the lines.”
In the meantime, the MTA urged riders to “use extreme caution while navigating the system,” and said that it had cancelled all scheduled weekend work.
In a press release, the MTA also boasted of its “ice-busting equipment,” " jet-powered snow-blowers” and "262,500 pounds of calcium chloride."
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the PATH trains, the cross-Hudson crossings and the region’s major airports, also touted its preparedness.
"The airports, bridges, tunnels and PATH also have snow desks where key personnel analyze weather reports and deploy staff and equipment,” its press release read.
Nevertheless, the Port Authority warned that some airlines will inevitably cancel flights. With that in mind, the Port said that it has lots of cots available for stranded passengers.Swansea University scientists working at CERN have again made a landmark finding, taking them one step closer to answering the question of why matter exists and illuminating the mysteries of the Big Bang and the birth of the Universe.
In their paper published in Nature the physicists from the University’s College of Science, working with an international collaborative team at CERN, describe the first observation of spectral line shapes in antihydrogen, the antimatter equivalent of hydrogen.
Professor Mike Charlton said: “The existence of antimatter is well established in physics, and it is buried deep in the heart of some of the most successful theories ever developed. But we have yet to answer a central question of why didn’t matter and antimatter, which it is believed were created in equal amounts when the Big Bang started the Universe, mutually self-annihilate?
“We also have yet to address why there is any matter left in the Universe at all. This conundrum is one of the central open questions in fundamental science, and one way to search for the answer is to bring the power of precision atomic physics to bear upon antimatter.”
It has long been established that any excited atom will reach its lowest state by emitting photons, and the spectrum of light and microwaves emitted from them represents a kind of atomic fingerprint and it is a unique identifier. The most familiar everyday example is the orange of the sodium streetlights.
Hydrogen has its own spectrum and, as the simplest and most abundant atom in the Universe, it holds a special place in physics. The properties of the hydrogen atom are known with high accuracy. The one looked at in this paper concerns the so-called hyperfine splitting, which in the case of hydrogen has been determined with a precision of one part in ten trillion. This transition is used these days in modern navigation and geo-positioning.
The team have made antihydrogen by replacing the proton nucleus of the ordinary atom by an antiproton, while the electron has been substituted by a positron. Last year, in ground-breaking work published in Nature, the team used UV light to detect the so-called 1S-2S transition between positron energy levels. Now, the team has used microwaves to flip the spin of the positron. This resulted not only in the first precise determination of the antihydrogen hyperfine splitting, but also the first antimatter transition line shape, a plot of the spin flip probability versus the microwave frequency. If there is a difference between matter and antimatter, it could be found in tiny differences between this line shape in hydrogen and antihydrogen.
The Swansea team are:Tune-in on 6.1.16 to Watch Comedians
Unleash the Fall Lineup of D&D Products
There are always funny and interesting people hanging out at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles and the NerdMelt Showroom has been a host to hundreds of comedians over the years. Now we’re going to set up a table back there with Matthew Mercer at the helm to play Dungeons & Dragons and see what happens.
On June 1, we’ll stream D&D Live from Meltdown featuring comedians playing through a brand new story with characters they’ve created with the D&D story team. D&D Live from Meltdown will be hosted by Alison Haislip on Wednesday, June 1 at 4pm PDT and broadcasted live on the D&D Twitch channel.
The adventuring party will continue throughout the summer with a new regular weekly series debuting on the Nerdist Twitch channel. More details on the cast and what characters they’ll be playing will be announced soon!
Matthew Mercer, veteran voice actor and leader of the popular series Critical Role, will be the Dungeon Master after working hand-in-hand with the team at Dungeons & Dragons to develop the adventure. Alison Haislip (G4, ABC’s Battlebots) will serve as host for D&D Live from Meltdown, unveiling new D&D products and corralling the shenanigans on stage including interviews with Chris Perkins, Mike Mearls, Rob Overmeyer (executive producer of Neverwinter) and other D&D creators.
Tune-in to the Dungeons & Dragons Twitch channel – twitch.tv/wotc_dnd – on June 1 at 4pm PDT for the exciting unveiling of the new storyline and the accompanying line of products from partners including miniatures, apparel, online play aids and video games from WizKids, Gale Force 9, We Love Fine, Fantasy Grounds and Cryptic/Perfect World.
For more information on Dungeons & Dragons, visit https://www.dungeonsanddragons.com.
Discuss this and all things D&D related in our forums as well.
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Sennacherib’s Aqueduct at Jerwan
Thorkild Jacobsen and Seton Lloyd.
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The presence of stone masonry at Jerwan, about thirty miles northeast of Mosul, had been known, but thorough study of it was impossible without the excavation that was undertaken by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute in 1933. The masonry proved to belong to an aqueduct built by Sennacherib of Assyria not long after 700 b.c., a type of structure unknown elsewhere before Roman times. The canal to which the aqueduct belonged has been traced by the Expedition from the gorge of the Gomel River, where stand the well-known “Bavian inscriptions,” to the Khosr River above Nineveh. Seton Lloyd gives architectural descriptions of both the aqueduct at Jerwan and the canal head in the Gomel gorge, and Thorkild Jacobsen deals with the cuneiform records found at Jerwan.Businessman Jeffrey Spector, who was diagnosed with inoperable tumour on his spine that would have led to paralysis, used film to discuss assisted dying
A businessman with an inoperable tumour has killed himself at an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland – after spending his last seven days making a film for his widow and three children.
Jeffrey Spector died on Monday, six years after he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour that was growing near his spinal column.
Doctors had warned him the condition would eventually lead to paralysis and death and so Spector said he decided he wanted to be in control of the final stages of his life.
When his illness began to get worse he decided that he had no option but to travel to Switzerland due to UK law. He said: “Assisted suicide is illegal in the UK so it had to be Switzerland.”
How could end-of-life care services be improved? Read more
He added that he decided it was time when his symptoms increased in severity. “I put one date off so that my daughter could do her exams – but I was going downhill and was finding it hard to use my hands. I had no pressure in my fingers.
“I felt the illness had crossed the red line and I was getting worse. Rather than go late, I am jumping the gun. I call it the least worst option, which is best for my family in the long term.”
Spector, who was the director of a number of advertising and internet firms in Blackpool, Lancashire, chose to be joined by a film crew for the last week of his life. His decision to be filmed has echoes of the death of Guernsey-based hotelier Peter Smedley, whose assisted death in 2011 was screened in a documentary by the late Sir Terry Pratchett for the BBC.
Spector, whose family joined him at the Zurich clinic, described his condition as “a walking timebomb” as he could be struck with neck-down paralysis at any moment.
In an interview released by Dignitas, Spector said he was not scared of death and added: “Never judge someone until you have worn their shoes.
“I know I am going too early. My family disagree, but I believe this is in their best interests.” Stating he wanted to be “in control of the final stages of my life”, he said: “I was a fit and healthy person and my life has been turned upside down.
“What started as backache in 2008 developed into an illness that led me to having to make this most awful decision. Friends, and most of all my family, have urged me not to go through with it.”
Spector first discovered he was ill when he complained of having a sore back and stiff neck. He collapsed at a hotel after attending a friend’s retirement party and sought medical advice. He said: “I thought I had overdone things. My legs went in the hotel room. I got back home and booked in for an MRI scan.
“The phone call from the clinic asked me to go for another scan, which revealed a large tumour high up in my spine in and around the spinal cord.
“My surgeon was confident he could remove the tumour but tests revealed it would be too dangerous. I woke up thinking it would be out, but he told me he could not even take a biopsy.”
Instead, surgeons removed bones elsewhere in his back to relieve pressure caused by the tumour, but it continued to grow.
Spector added: “Had it been lower down the spine, and I lost the use of my legs, I would have been distraught but I could cope. Where it was meant total paralysis from my neck down.”
As the tumour grew, Spector visited the Dignitas clinic and decided that he would kill himself before the tumour’s advance meant he would be unable to do so.
He said: “I know I am going too early but I had consistent thoughts without peer pressure. It had to be a settled decision by a sound mind. If I am paralysed and cannot speak, then what hope is there? I am a proud person – a dignified person, independent and self motivated. It is me who is doing this.”
In the UK, anyone convicted of assisting a suicide can face a 14-year jail term. Pressure group Dignity In Dying, which counted Pratchett as one of its patrons, have long campaigned to change the law.
Labour peer Lord Falconer proposed a bill stating that if someone has a prognosis of less than six months to live, they should be allowed to have an assisted death subject to a number of safeguards and checks. His private member’s bill was debated in the House of Lords in June 2014 and reached the committee stage in parliament in January. However, due to opponents delaying its progress, the bill did not reach the Commons before parliament was dissolved ahead of the general election.
“Some people will criticise me, but do not judge me,” said Spector. “I believe in my human right to dignity. I want the ability to have a cup of tea and hold a phone – I want to be able to do those things myself.
“I believe what I am doing is in the best long term interests of my family. They disagree, but they do accept I have my own opinion.”
A family friend said on Monday: “Jeffrey was not for changing his mind. He did not want to be unable to walk or talk.
“From the outside he appeared as normal – chatty, driving his car, but inside he knew he was getting worse. People have tried to talk him out of this, his own family have begged him.
“But if Jeffrey Spector could not be the Jeffrey Spector we all knew, because of this tumour, this was his way out.”Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
Following several recent scandals, it has now emerged that the Catholic church has bought a €23 million (£21 million) share of an apartment block in Rome which houses the biggest gay sauna in Europe.
Just a day ahead of the papal conclave to elect the next Pope, this latest development has caused embarrassment to senior Vatican figure Cardinal Ivan Dias, who stays in a 12-room apartment on the first floor of the building, just above the ground-floor entrance to the sauna.
The 76-year-old is due to take part in the election at the Sistine Chapel tomorrow, but has been left red-faced following the revelation that the entrance to his apartment is just yards from the entrance to Europe’s biggest gay sauna, Europa Multiclub.
As well as Dias, who is widely considered particularly conservative, there are 18 other apartments in the block, many of which house priests.
An Independent report questioned whether the former archbishop of Bombay may have offered spiritual guidance to attendees of the sauna, given that in the past he has said that gay and lesbian people can be “cured” of their “unnatural tendencies” through the “sacrament of penance”.
Since resigning on 28 February, Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica published an article claiming that Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to quit was in part finalised by a Vatican report showing that the Holy See was affected by outside influences, including a “gay lobby”.
La Repubblica newspaper has now noted that the presence of “Italy’s best known gay sauna in the premises [as] an embarrassment”.
In other embarrassment for the church, in a statement issued by the Catholic church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien addressed allegations made against him by five priests within the church, and admitted that his “sexual conduct” has been “below the standards expected” of him.
The sauna’s website promotes a bear night, with a video in which a man strips down before changing into a priest’s outfit. It says Bruno, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul”.
Readers on Italian gay websites made jokes at the cardinal’s expense. One person said: “’Oops, I took the wrong door, I thought it was the chapel.’…If you can’t go to the gay sauna for fear of being seen what do you do if you have millions of Euros stolen from Italians? You buy the apartment block with the sauna inside.”
The purchase of 2 Via Carduccio reportedly went through in 2008.The Basic Idea
Implementation 1
If the underlying distribution is not uniform, then the time complexity can be as bad as $O(n)$.
If the underlying distribution is not uniform, it's difficult to implement this algorithm (although the mathematical theory still works out).
Implementation 2
The distribution is not what we originally assumed.
The distribution is what we originally assumed, but there is still a small probability that the key lies outside the range.
Results
Conclusion
The second implementation has the same theoretical performance as binary search, but it outperforms binary search in practice.
The second implementation outperforms the first interpolation search for pretty large array sizes.
The second implementation can easily be generalized for searching through other distributions, such as usernames in a database.
The first implementation has the best theoretical performance, but it takes a while to overcome binary search and the second implementation of interpolation search.
Both versions of interpolation search work well when the cost of an array lookup is much greater than the index computations on the CPU.
If you have taken an introductory computer science course, you've probably seen the binary search algorithm - an algorithm to efficiently find the index of an item in a sorted array, if it exists. You might not have heard of interpolation search, however. Interpolation search is an alternative to binary search that utilizes information about the underlying distribution of data to be searched. By using this additional information, interpolation search can be as fast as $O(log(log(n)))$, where $n$ is the size of the array. In this post I am going to talk about two implementations of interpolation search. First, I will discuss the algorithm as described on Wikepedia, then I will describe my own version of the algorithm that has a better worst case time complexity than the first and performs better in practice than the traditional binary search and interpolation search algorithms.Interpolation search models how humans search a dictionary better than a binary search, because if a human were to search for "Yellow", they would immediately flip towards the end of the dictionary to find that word, as opposed to flipping to the middle. This is the fundamental |
enough to stave off relegation - to persuade the Premier League big boys to make a move. In 1995, when about £10m would have been the going rate, there was only one candidate with the financial clout for that. Batistuta was a long-term target for Sir Alex Ferguson, even before he came to Old Trafford and nearly blew a hole in the torso of Mark Bosnich from 30 yards.
United first emerged as a possibility in 1998, when Batistuta’s loyalty to Fiorentina was given a thorough examination. "I would like to go to England but I don't know," he said before the World Cup in France. "There are various teams that interest me, but the most important thing for me would be that they would allow me to fight for the championship. Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal, no problem, they are all very good. In two or three years, it is a possibility.”
The prospect of moving to Old Trafford was raised again in early 2000, before he decided to stay in Serie A and join Roma, where he would finally win the Scudetto he craved. “If I ever leave Fiorentina I would very much like to go to Manchester United,” he told the Observed, “because out of the three best teams in Europe - United, Lazio and Barcelona - Manchester, in my opinion, is the best.” The biggest obstacle to the move - apart from Fiorentina’s stubborn refusal to sell while Batistuta was at his peak - was United chairman Martin Edwards, who revealed in 2013 that “[Ferguson] was very keen on Gabriel Batistuta at one stage but his personal terms didn’t fit in with our wages structure at that time.” Putting aside the issue of luring Batistuta to England in the first place, there can surely have been no world-class striker better suited to the Premier League. His bombastic, shoot-on-sight style wouldn’t have taken long to adapt, which would have been bad news for aspiring Goal of the Month winners.
English defences certainly didn’t cause him too much concern. Before he reduced Old Trafford to awe-struck gasps in 2000, Batistuta had made Nigel Winterburn look rather inadequate at Wembley as he cruised past him to hammer a trademark finish beyond David Seaman.
In an era dominated by all-round centre-forwards, willing and able to score any type of goal, Batistuta would have comfortably enjoyed the same goalscoring success as Alan Shearer or Les Ferdinand in the Premier League. His gloriously indelicate approach to scoring goals would have flourished even in the most unglamourous of surroundings; after all, hitting the ball as hard as you can is a tactic that works just as well at Selhurst Park as it does at the San Siro. The body of evidence from Batistuta’s career, all the way from his formative years in Buenos Aires to his twilight months in Qatar, suggests he would have settled into the Premier League groove without much melodrama. Even if goalscoring records didn’t tumble - Shearer would have surely clung on to those - there’s something about Batistuta’s warrior-like persona that would have ensured club-legend status: at Ipswich, Manchester United or anywhere.Hi guys, I'm in the negotiation stages with a freelance client for a sizable job. I presented a contract to them in which one of the terms is that the agreement shall be interpreted and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of California (my state). They asked me to make a few changes in the contract, one of them being changing the state where the agreement is enforced to Florida, which is the state where they are and their new company is incorporated. I'm not a lawyer and don't think it's worth paying one to figure this out (I'd rather walk away at this point). Do you think this is a red flag? Or is it customary to ask for this? Do I have to go to Florida if there's any sort of dispute? Thanks!Foreign student cheats expose shonky online trade
Updated
Deakin University has suspended an overseas student for cheating as it warns that students are increasingly using shonky online services to buy essays and other course work.
To protect the privacy of the students involved Deakin University is not giving many details of the most recent incident.
But ABC Radio's The World Today understands that in a class of about 100 students in the Business and Law Faculty, the work of about 30 students raised concerns.
Further investigations left about a third of those students under suspicion of cheating and ultimately one of them was suspended.
But it is warning them academic standards are more important than revenue and they are likely to suffer shame and financial loss if they are kicked out of their course.
Professor John Catford is a deputy vice chancellor at Deakin University and is responsible for the university's academic programs.
"There has been a growth in contract cheating where you actually buy online someone to write an assignment for you," he said.
"This is particularly problematic in the UK at the moment and in many other countries and it is now becoming apparent here in Australia too."
Professor Catford says it appears most of the websites offering essays and other course material online are based overseas.
"Salaries are low. There may well be graduates that are prepared to do this work. One of the issues in fact is that the cost actually prohibits quality," he said.
He says assignments sell online for about $100 or $200, but most of the dodgy works would not pass when submitted.
"I think what universities are doing now is being much more sophisticated in the assessment task, so it would be very difficult for someone overseas to answer a particular question if they don't for instance have local information data, particularly if it requires that sort of context to actually write the assignment in," he said.
Severe penalties
Professor Catford says the penalties for cheating are severe and international students could be kicked out of the country.
"Particularly for contract cheating where this is by design to be deceitful, then it's very likely not only will they fail but they will actually be excluded from the university and for an international student, that means they then lose their visa, they're not allowed to reapply for another three years or so through the Department of Immigration," he said.
"They may well have spent quite a lot of money on their course and they've got to manage the shame when they return home.
"So it's a very significant issue if a student is caught cheating, deliberately cheating and the penalties could affect them for the rest of their lives frankly."
The number of international students coming to Australia has dropped significantly in the last couple of years because of safety concerns and tighter visa conditions.
But Professor Catford says academic standards are a higher priority than revenue at his institution.
"What we need to make sure is that we select students that we feel have got a good chance of succeeding," he said.
"My personal feeling is that we shouldn't compromise on this. Academic standards is not something that we can compromise on.
"If the consequence is that international students will go to another country where standards are loose and lax, well so be it. We can't compromise the brand and the product here in Australia."
The president of the Council of International Students of Australia, Aleem Nizari, says more needs to be done to help students from overseas.
"There is a bigger problem here than just accessing those online sites. I think the students are being exploited here with different traps in terms of initial offers," he said.
"Or just assisting students in improving writing skills, in helping with plagiarism and how to avoid plagiarism and assistance with accurate referencing skills.
"But the issue is I think, why are the students going to these services in the first place? Are there not enough learning skills to help within these institutions and why are they feeling so uncomfortable about submitting their own work?"
Topics: university-and-further-education, education, community-and-society, immigration, melbourne-3000, vic
First postedThe state of Michigan could be Bernie Sanders’ last, best chance to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hold on the Democratic presidential race.
The Midwestern industrial state, which holds its primary Tuesday, is the ideal audience for Sanders’ campaign message about “unfair” trade agreements, income inequality and a “rigged economy.”
“This is ground zero for trade,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich. “People are frustrated. It’s been almost 15 years, and they’re not better off than they were,” said the first-term Democrat, who is backing Clinton.
Yet Clinton has consistently led in polls — a Monmouth University Poll out Monday showed her up 13 points. “If he can’t win in Michigan, where can he win besides these small caucus states?” said Susan Demas, publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, a political analysis newsletter. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver is calling Michigan “a critical showdown.”
Mississippi also holds a primary on Tuesday, and Clinton is favored there.
The city of Detroit has gone from one of the country’s richest in the 1960s to one of the poorest. The once-thriving automotive hub is pocked by blighted homes and crime and has more children living in extreme poverty than any of the nation’s 50 largest cities. Manufacturing job losses devastated neighboring communities, sowing more than 20 years of resentment among white, working-class Democrats over the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Sanders is hitting Clinton hard on the trade issue, including a recent ad picturing abandoned homes and factories. NAFTA was championed by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, though the former first lady is trying to distance herself from a number of those policies.
Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman said the outlook for Sanders is bleak. “The Democratic race is fundamentally over at this point,” he said, estimating Sanders would have to win three-fifths of remaining party delegates just to draw even with Clinton. Delegate-rich states next up on the calendar, including Florida, also favor Clinton.
“Sanders is still in the race to make the point, but it’s not a close contest. Michigan will further drive that point home,” said Wasserman.
After losing Southern primary states with large black voter populations to Clinton — as well as Massachusetts — Michigan is among Sanders’ final opportunities to prove that his economic message has broad appeal and that he can make inroads with minorities. Up to 30% of the Democratic electorate is expected to be African American.
According to Demas, Sanders missed a critical opportunity in a Sunday night debate in Flint to capitalize on his economic message by standing behind his vote against a 2009 government bailout that many in Michigan credit for saving the automotive industry and 4 million jobs.
“It was always going to be difficult for him to close the gap,” said Demas. “His answer on the auto bailout was almost disastrous.”
Sanders defended his vote by saying most of the money in the bill went to Wall Street banks. “I will be damned if it was the working people of this country who had to bail out the crooks on Wall Street,” he said. On Monday, Sanders clarified that he supported a $14 billion auto bailout until it migrated into a Wall Street package, accusing Clinton of a “disingenuous” attack to “deflect” attention from her own record on trade.
Michigan could expose some of Clinton’s longer-term vulnerabilities. Some of the state’s most powerful unions, including the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, traditional Democratic allies, haven’t endorsed a candidate. Many union rank-and-file backed her husband in 1992 and 1996 but are now supporting Sanders or Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
“She’s also competing with Donald Trump, who’s made this a strong issue and not backed down on the currency trade issue,” said Dingell. “There’s a lot of pent-up anger, and Donald Trump let’s them release it,” she said.
Sanders may be indirectly helping Trump. At campaign rallies, he has repeatedly slammed Clinton on trade, listing it as a key area where they disagree. Sanders says he led opposition to NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, which he says resulted in the loss of millions of middle-class jobs and “a race to the bottom.” His campaign, in a March 3 news release, dubbed Clinton the “outsourcer-in-chief.”
Clinton has been trying to distance herself from the 1990s-era policy. In the Flint debate, she tried to distinguish her record from that of her husband's. As a senator, she voted against a Central American trade agreement, the only multinational pact that came before her, she said. More recently, she’s come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Nearing closer to the nomination, Clinton has begun to discuss the role Sanders would need to play in unifying the party. During a town hall forum Monday in Grand Rapids, she talked extensively about how she encouraged her voters to back Barack Obama in 2008.
“I had a lot of passionate supporters who did not feel like they wanted to support then-Sen. Obama. I worked as hard as I could. I nominated him at the convention. I made the case, because he and I shared a lot of the same views,” she said.
“We have differences, but those differences pale in comparison to what we see going on with the Republicans right now,” said Clinton.
Clinton’s supporters acknowledge a Michigan loss is unlikely to deter Sanders. Several testy exchanges in the Flint debate highlighted festering tensions between the two, and Sanders is flush with campaign donations to keep him going.
“I think Hillary Clinton will win Michigan,” said Dingell. “But I think Sen. Sanders plans on staying in this race for a while.”
Contributing: Nicole GaudianoLater this month Jon Jones hopes to defend his light heavyweight title against Quinton Jackson at UFC 135 in Denver. The road to this fight has been filled with accusations of espionage and talk of injuries. In the above video, Jon Jones makes it clear that he doesn't see this as any different of a fight than any other on his record.
Jones has adopted a "warrior" persona. He states that he isn't concerned with belts or recognition. While this may be overstatement on his part, it is hard to argue that he hasn't reinvented himself over and over again. Quintion Jackson will be facing a tough Jon Jones on the 24th.
Jones is riding a four fight winning streak into this fight. He's dominated the likes of Ryan Bader and Mauricio Rua to become the man on top and he doesn't want to lose his spot in the division. Jackson is trying to reestablish himself as the top dog of the division since dropping the title to Forrest Griffin at UFC 86. He's currently on a two fight win streak with decisions over Lyoto Machida and Matt Hamill.Over the last year we’ve been recruiting developers who’ve already built apps for various Open Web and HTML5 platforms: apps for native platforms built with PhoneGap, Appcelerator Titanium or hand-coded wrappers; HTML5 apps built for Amazon Appstore, Blackberry Webworks, Chrome Dev Store, Windows Phone, and WebOS; and C++ apps translated to JavaScript with Emscripten. We’ve supported hundreds of developers and shipped devices all over the world to test and demo Firefox Apps. If you have a well-rated, successful HTML5 app on any platform we urge you to port it to Firefox OS: We’re betting it will be worth your while.
In November, Firefox OS launched in Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. Earlier this month we launched in Italy. In 2014, we launch in new locales with new operators, with new devices in new form factors. We anticipate more powerful cross-platform tools in 2014, and closer integration with PhoneGap and Firefox Developer Tools. It is the best of times for first-mover advantage.
Here’s a look at just a few successful ports. We spoke with skilled HTML5 app developers who’ve participated in “app port” programs and workshops and asked them to describe their Firefox app porting experience.
Captain Rogers, by Andrzej Mazur; Reditr by Dimitry Vinogradov & David Zorycht; Aquarium Plants by Diego Lopez
Aquarium Plants (Android w/ hand-coded native wrapper)
App: Aquarium Plants
Developer: Diego Lopez
Original platform: Google Play Store
Time:
Aquarium Plants is written with our own JavaScript code and simple HTML5 code: we just used two common JavaScript frameworks (Zepto.js and TaffyDB.js). It took me about 3 hours or less. Most of the time was reading forums and documentation.
Recommendations:
It is extremely easy to build/port apps for Firefox OS. It is great that we can use web tools and frameworks to create native apps for Firefox OS. I recommend that other developers start developing Firefox Apps; it is almost effortless and a great experience.
Challenges:
The only challenge I had was finding out how to build the package. It was amazing when I realized that building for Firefox OS was as easy as creating a zip with the app files and manifest.
Calc (iOS w/ hand-coded native wrapper)
App: Calc
Developer: Markus Greve
Original platform: iOS w/ hand-coded native wrapper
Time:
It was really easy. That’s why I would sign the claim “Write Elsewhere, Run on Firefox OS.” I think it took about two evenings with night #1 getting the app to run and night #2 doing some fine-tuning for display size of the simulator and Keon. Afterwards another evening for app icon and deployment to the Marketplace ;-).
Recommendations:
I would recommend that developers give it a try to see how easy it really is. I think Mozilla.org is doing a great job and your support for developers is excellent. I already made a short presentation about how to create FirefoxOS Apps as a documentation of my experiences. You can see it here: A Firefox OS app in five minutes (in English). There’s also a blog post called App Entwicklung fur den Feuerfuchs that documents my experience in German.
Challenges:
1. I use OSX 10.9 Mavericks, and the Simulator crashed with the old plugin and ran more stably with Firefox 1.26b and app-manager.
2. The need to have a subdomain per app — it seems there’s an open issue with this.
3. Data types in JSON Manifest (I tried “fullscreen”: true instead of “fullscreen”: “true”). My fault: Solved by sticking to the documentation.
4. I have the feeling that the icon sizes are different in the documentation to the sizes really needed for the Marketplace. Also, it’s not sensible to offer a Photoshop-Template for a 60×60 pixel Icon when you need much bigger files elsewhere (256×256 for the store I think). It would be better if you provided a template for 1024 and the user then shrank the images afterwards.
5. Suggestion: The correlation between navigator.mozApp.checkInstalled() and.install() could be explained more comprehensively.
Calcula Hipoteca (Amazon Appstore)
App: Calcula Hipoteca
Developer: Emilio Baena
Original platform: Amazon Appstore
Time:
It was easy. I took a few hours.
Recommendations:
You are doing good work with this platform.
Challenges:
I had problems with manifest.webapp, I think that I missed having more documentation about this type of file.
Captain Rogers (HTML5 Desktop)
App: Captain Rogers
Developer: Andrzej Mazur
Original platform: HTML5 Desktop
Time:
The whole process of porting Captain Rogers for the Firefox OS platform took me only two weeks of development with an additional two weeks of testing and bug-fixing. In the core concept the game was supposed to be simple so I could focus on the process of polishing it for Firefox OS devices and publishing it in the Firefox Marketplace.
Challenges:
There weren’t any big problems, because basically building for Firefox OS is just building for the Web itself. Firefox OS devices are the long-awaited hardware for the mobile web — it is built using JavaScript and HTML5 after all. My main focus on making the game playable on the Firefox OS device was put on the manifest file. I had some problems with getting the orientation to work properly, but during the Firefox OS App Workshop in Warsaw I received great help from Jason Weathersby and at the end of the day the first version of the game was working very smoothly and a few days later it was accepted into the Firefox Marketplace.
For optimizing the code I recommend this handy article by Louis Stowasser and Harald Kirschner — it was very helpful for me. Also, the Web Audio API is still a big problem on mobile, but it works perfectly in Captain Rogers, launched on the Firefox OS phone.
Recommendations:
The main message is simple: if you’re building HTML5 games for Firefox OS, you’re building them for the Open Web. Firefox OS is the hardware platform that the Web needs and in the long run everybody will benefit from it, as the standards and APIs are battle-tested directly on the actual devices by millions of people.
If you want to know more about HTML5 game development I can recommend my two creations: my Preparing for Firefox OS article and HTML5 Gamedev Starter list. You should also read this great introduction by Austin Hallock. The community is very helpful, so if you have any problems or issues, check out the HTML5GameDevs forums for help and you will definitely receive it. It’s a great time for HTML5 game development, so jump in and have fun!.
Cartelera Panama (Appcelerator Titanium)
App: Cartelera Panama
Developer: Demostenes Garcia
Original platform/wrapper: Appcelerator Titanium
Time:
It was pretty easy to get up to speed on the development flow for Cartelera. The development for Firefox OS is easy, since it’s well documented and HTML5 + JavaScript makes it *really* easy to make apps.
Challenges:
Our UX/UI team at Pixmat Studios is very centered on usability, and that’s why we choose Titanium over PhoneGap (better user experience) so our main challenge was to make it look as a real Firefox OS application. In the end, we decided to go with real Firefox OS Building Blocks, instead of using Titanium for the UI. We decided to:
Extract all the business logic for the App (which handles the schedules, movies, listings, etc.) to its own Git repository/module. Then we reuse everything on Titanium and Firefox OS, using native user experience for all the three platforms we now accept.
Another issue we had was to actually implement an OAuth client on our phone in a good way. However Jason Weathersby pointed out good resources on that matter for us.
Recommendations:
Firefox OS and the environment (debug, etc) is easy for a regular web developer, so we didn’t need extra knowledge for making real mobile apps.
Use Firefox OS Building Blocks for UI. It’s easy to get a native UI experience with no fuzz.
Firefox OS at the Mozilla MDN will be your best friend :-).
GitHub has some good projects to learn from, so create an account (if you still don’t have one) and look for demo projects.
Fresh Food Finder (PhoneGap)
App:Fresh Food Finder
Developer: Andrew Trice
Original platform/wrapper: PhoneGap
Time:
PhoneGap support is coming for Firefox OS, and in preparation I wanted to become familiar with the Firefox OS development environment and platform ecosystem. So… I ported the Fresh Food Finder, minus the specific PhoneGap API calls. The best part (and this really shows the power of web-standards based development) is that I was able to take the existing PhoneGap codebase, turn it into a Firefox OS app AND submit it to the Firefox Marketplace in under 24 hours!
Recommendations:
Basically, I commented out the PhoneGap-specific API calls, added a few minor bug fixes, and added a few Firefox-OS specific layout/styling changes (just a few minor things so that my app looked right on the device). Then you put in a mainfest.webapp configuration file, package it up, then submit it to the Marketplace. If you’re interested, you can check out progress on Firefox OS support in the Cordova project, and it will be available on PhoneGap.com once it’s actually released. (Editor’s note: Look for release news in early 2014.)
Picross (WebOS)
App: Picross
Developer: Owen Swerkstrom
Original platform: WebOS
Time:
Picross was installed and running on FxOS within minutes of getting my hands on a device.
Challenges:
I did have to make some touch API tweaks, but that just meant some quick reading.
Recommendations:
My favorite quote was “You’re not porting to FirefoxOS, you’re porting to the Web!” Also, Firefox OS (and Firefox browser) Canvas support is sensational. My next game will use Canvas, for sure. In my case, the “porting” path was really simple. My game already ran in a browser, and it had originally been designed to run on the Palm Pre, a device with the exact same resolution as the lowest-end FirefoxOS phone. But the concept of installing an app involves nothing more than visiting a website: that’s what really made it painless, and that is what’s really unique about FirefoxOS. It has an “official” app marketplace, but unlike every other smartphone ever made, it doesn’t _need_ one! As a user, this is liberating. I can install any web app, from any site I want. As a developer, the story’s even better. I don’t even need Mozilla’s permission to publish an app on this platform. I don’t need to put my device into a special developer mode, or buy any toolkit, or build on any specific platform. If I can put up a website, I’m good to go.
Even though I just called it “unnecessary”, the Firefox Marketplace has given me nothing but good experiences. I don’t need to bundle up, sign, and upload any package — I just enter a URL and type up some descriptive blurbs. Review times have always been short, and are even quicker now than when I started. When I submitted Halloween Artist, it was approved almost immediately, and the reviewer suggested that I write up a blog entry for Mozilla Hacks about how I’d put it together. This is both a traditional “marketplace” with the featured apps etc, and a community of geeks celebrating interesting code and novel ideas. That is absolutely the world I want my apps to live in.
Before I went to the Mozilla workshop, I was considering what approach to take for an action/adventure game that I’m still working on. I was torn between writing some C OpenGL code, waiting for the not-yet-released-at-the-time SDL 2.0, or, as a longshot, doing at least some prototyping in HTML5 canvas. After learning that Canvas operations on a FirefoxOS phone basically go right to the framebuffer, and after trying some experiments and seeing for myself the insane performance I could get out of these cheap little ARM devices, I knew I’d be ditching C for the project and writing the game as a web app. I’d highly recommend investigating Canvas for your next game, even if you’ve mostly done Flash or SDL etc. before.
Reditr (Chrome Dev Store)
App: Reditr
Developer: Dimitry Vinogradov & David Zorycht
Original platform: Chrome Dev Store
Time:
It took us about a week to port everything over from Chrome to Firefox OS.
Challenges:
One challenge we faced when creating Reditr for Firefox OS was the content security policy (CSP). One of the great things about web applications for users is that they can see an entire overview of the permissions that a given app requires. For developers though, it can take some time to learn how to create a content security policy. For Reditr, it took us several days of trial and error to learn how the security policy effected our app.
Recommendations:
Make sure you understand how your app deals with the content security policy. Check to see if the APIs you use have oAuth support since this can help remedy CSP issues.
Speed Cube Timer – Blackberry Webworks
App: Speed Cuber Timer
Developer: Konstantinos Mavrodis
Original platform: Blackberry Webworks
Time:
It took about half an hour to make the exported web app compatible with Firefox OS. (Insanely fast, don’t you think? :) )
Challenges:
No real challenges here that I can recall of. Everything was almost a piece of cake!
Recommendations:
My recommendation to fellow devs would be them to port their HTML5 apps to Firefox OS as soon as possible! Porting a Web app has never been easier. Firefox OS is a promising OS that shows the great power of Web Development!
Squarez (C++)
App: Squarez
Developer: Patrick Nicolas
Original platform: C++ with Emscripten
Emscripten and C++ usage:
I have always preferred statically typed and compiled languages as they fit better with my way of organizing software. There are several options with Emscripten, and I have decided to write the game logic in C++ and the user interface in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. All the logic code is in C++, and for multiplayer mode, server can reuse everything and only has roughly 500 additional lines of code.
Time:
The game has always been a web project: the initial development, from scratch, took nearly 1 month. Porting it to be a Firefox application only took a couple of days, in order to make the manifests and icons. Performance tweaking has been a complex task and took nearly as much time as the rest of development.
Challenges:
Squarez is the first game I have ever written and it is the first time I have used Emscripten, that was the first challenge. Writing a web application is not really a challenge any more, because good quality documentation is available everywhere. Second challenge was tweaking performance, once I had received the Geeksphone Keon, I saw that the game was so slow that it was almost unplayable. I have used performance tools from native compiled code and both desktop Firefox and Chromium to find the bottlenecks.
Because of Emscripten JavaScript generation, it was not very easy to track the faulty functions, I had to deal with partially mangled names in profile view. The following step was to optimize CSS, and I have only found tools to check time spent in selector processing. It is impossible to know which specific animation is taking time, I had to use very manual methods and try disabling individual ones, guess what is taking time and change it blindly.
Recommendations:
My recommendation for other developers is to choose technologies they like; I wanted structured and statically typed code, so Emscripten/C++ was a great solution. I would also discourage creating an application that only works in Firefox OS, but take advantage of standards to make it available to any browser and have Web APIs used to enhance the application. If you want to also include a link to the code repository, it is available at squarez.git. Everything is GPLv3+, fork it if you want.
Touch 12i (Windows Phone)
App: Touch 12i
Developer: Elvis Pfutzenreuter
Original platform: HTML5 for Windows Phone (and other platforms)
Time:
It took one day to do the bulk of the work, and another day for final details, including registration in Marketplace. Later, I added payment receipt checking which took me the best part of a day since it needs to be well tested. But this effort could be reused readily for another app (Touch 11i).
Challenges:
In general, porting was very easy. I put it to work in one day. The biggest problem was the viewport: that works differently in other platforms (all Webkit-based). For Firefox, I had to use a CSS transform-based approach to fit the calculator in screen. Touch 12i is an HTML5 app that runs on Windows Phones and it works in the same way for Android and iOS too: a “shell” of native code with a Web component that cradles the main program. Currently the Firefox version is the only one that is “purely” HTML5. (I used to have a pure Web-based version for iOS as well, but this model has been toned down for iOS.) I’ve written a detailed blog post called Playing With Firefox OS, about my experience participating in the Phones for App Ports program.
And that’s a wrap. Thanks for reading this far. If you’re a Firefox OS App porter, a web developer or simply a curious reader, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send us a note at appsdev@mozilla.com.Australians didn't vote for Tony Abbott's arch-conservative agenda. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The knighthood for Prince Philip gained such a hold out in the suburbs because it crystallised – in one absurd gesture – just how out of kilter Abbott is from currentAustralian values. There's a reason Turnbull is popular and Abbott and his conservative experiment are not. Australians didn't vote for the conservative experiment that was snuck in after the Coalition was elected in 2013. They didn't vote for an undeclared agenda of austerity, social conservatism and unfair social targeting. That was all unstated before the election and then implemented with breakneck – and break-promise – speed. Abbott's woes are a direct result of that break of "faith" with voters (a term he uses a lot). Presumably, the conservative vision was never put to voters in 2013 because the conservatives knew it wouldn't be accepted.
Instead, it was politically pragmatic at the time for the Liberal Party to imply, or even directly promise, to retain Labor Party policies that were popular with the electorate – such as school funding, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and better broadband. A smart, politically pragmatic government would then have kept these policies (as promised) but rebranded them, put their own stamp on them, so they could declare them Liberal achievements and capitalise on the policy groundwork and public acceptance that was already in place. Instead, a more ideological government chose to start again and try to, in the space of eight months, use one very purposeful budget to put through a very different vision of Australia. That didn't work and now conservatives need to stop thinking about what they'd like to achieve in ideological terms – stopping the clock or winding it back to recreate a world that they personally would like to live in – and start thinking instead about what voters want. It's such a simple idea, so fundamental to democracy – that political representatives represent voters' interests and not their own ideological dreams. Because the reality is that it is the conservatives who are out of place in the Liberal Party, not the moderate, small 'l' liberals. Because the reality is that it is the conservatives who are out of place in the Liberal Party, not the moderate, small 'l' liberals.
The uber-conservatives in the party would think the Menzies Liberal government of 1949 to 1966 was too left wing, but he managed to hold on to power for 17 years. The Menzies government instituted immigration policies that today's Liberal conservatives would view as far too lax. His government created social security programs and higher education policies that they would consider far too generous. The Holt/Gorton/McMahon governments that followed Menzies from 1966 to 1972, also had a heavy migration program, continued social security policies, designed policies to assist people with disabilities and made advancements in Indigenous representation. To today's conservatives, these policies – and Malcolm Fraser's Liberal government of 1975 to 1983 – also look too left wing. Fraser's government created anti-discrimination commissions, SBS, established a National Women's Advisory Council and the Institute of Multicultural Affairs and had a focus on conservation and the environment. Liberal parties have had most success when they advocate individual freedom, not just in a negative sense – the absence of constraints on freedom of choice – but as a positive freedom where government plays a role in breaking down barriers that stop people from flourishing.
Conservatives turned their backs on their party's long history of promoting positive freedom. As their experiment has failed, they should now step out of the way and let the party get back to politics 101 – designing policies that voters want. Of course, there will always be limits to giving voters what they want, including economic circumstances, but the personal ideological preferences of some MPs shouldn't be one of those limits. Not every policy involves big money and there always were limits. A good government explains those and prioritises effectively. If parties put as much time, energy and money into policy development as they do into media management and advertising, there is huge scope to come up with policies that engage the electorate, solve problems and make a real difference to how people live. For the Liberal Party at the moment, it is especially vital to give the eight non-Liberal-National senators holding the balance of power something to vote for that they can proudly associate themselves with. Of course, one of the biggest challenges to all of this, is that the Liberal Party doesn't just represent voters. It also has close connections with business. It is pushed and pulled between what business wants – including its direct financial donors such as mining companies, private hospitals and the tobacco industry – and what voters want. This is a balancing act just as the Labor Party is pulled between union interests and voters. But voters must come out No. 1 in these weightings and policies have to reflect their interests. So, far from being a liability because he seems "too left" to conservatives, Malcolm Turnbull represents an opportunity because it is the conservatives who are both a demonstrated liability and out of step with their own party history and philosophy. If Turnbull does become leader, the party needs to see him not just as a salesman for a faulty product, but to give him a proper chance in policy terms because he represents what a real Liberal Party could be. And, electorally, it could be a force to be reckoned with. Sally Young is an Age columnist and associate professor of political science at the University of Melbourne.October 3, 2013 by Kate Harrington
Good news for Austinites fed up with waiting for big transportation fixes: starting this December, the city is getting at least a little more mobility in the form of a bike share program.
Austinites were asked to vote this summer on where the new bike share locations should be, and more than 9,000 people weighed in. Voting on those locations has now closed, and the first stations are set to open in December. Austin’s bike share will launch with 100 bikes and 10 downtown stations, with plans to expand up to 400 bikes and 40 stations by spring of 2014.
Bike sharing has taken off in cities including New York City, Chicago and Denver; it’s environmentally friendly, good exercise and affordable. Bike Share of Austin, the nonprofit that is running the program, hasn’t yet said what the rates for Austin program will be. But the organization has pointed potential users curious about cost to B-Cycle, a bike sharing program in other cities. B-Cycle gives riders options ranging from a $8 day pass to an $80 annual pass.
Bike share programs in other cities have had a pretty big impact: in Denver, 43 percent of B-Cycle users said they replaced car trips with bike rides and in Paris, the bike sharing program Velib reduced Paris traffic by 5 percent in its first year.
Will you use Austin’s new Bike Share program? Leave a |
4114-pi2b0 1/1 Running 0 5m
You can see that the port name is the same as the pod name – cool!
And that pod has an IP address on the same subnet as the nova instance. So let’s inspect that.
Expose a service for the pod we launched
Ok, let’s go ahead and expose a service for this pod. We’ll expose it and see what the results are.
[[email protected] ~]$ kubectl expose deployment demo --port=80 --target-port=8080 service "demo" exposed [[email protected] ~]$ kubectl get svc demo NAME CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE demo 10.0.0.84 <none> 80/TCP 13s [[email protected] ~]$ kubectl get endpoints demo NAME ENDPOINTS AGE demo 10.0.0.4:8080 1m
And we have an LBaaS (load balancer as a service) which we can inspect with neutron…
[[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-loadbalancer-list -c name -c vip_address -c provider neutron CLI is deprecated and will be removed in the future. Use openstack CLI instead. +------------------------+-------------+----------+ | name | vip_address | provider | +------------------------+-------------+----------+ | Endpoints:default/demo | 10.0.0.84 | haproxy | +------------------------+-------------+----------+ [[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-listener-list -c name -c protocol -c protocol_port [[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-pool-list -c name -c protocol [[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-member-list Endpoints:default/demo:TCP:80 -c name -c address -c protocol_port [[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-member-list Endpoints:default/demo:TCP:80 -c name -c address -c protocol_port
Scale up the replicas
You can now scale up the number of replicas of this pod, and Kuryr will follow along in suit. Let’s do that now.
[[email protected] ~]$ kubectl scale deployment demo --replicas=2 deployment "demo" scaled [[email protected] ~]$ kubectl get pods NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE demo-2945424114-pi2b0 1/1 Running 0 14m demo-2945424114-rikrg 0/1 ContainerCreating 0 3s
We can see that more ports were created…
[[email protected] ~]$ openstack port list --device-owner kuryr:container -c Name -c 'Fixed IP Addresses' [[email protected] ~]$ neutron lbaas-member-list Endpoints:default/demo:TCP:80 -c name -c address -c protocol_port
Verify connectivity
Now – as if the earlier goodies weren’t fun, this is the REAL fun part. We’re going to enter a pod, e.g. via kubectl exec and we’ll go ahead and check out that we can reach the pod from the pod, and the VM from the pod, and the exposed service (and henceforth both pods) from the VM.
Let’s do it! So go and exec the pod, and we’ll give it a cute prompt so we know where we are since we’re about to enter the rabbit hole.
Before you continue – you might want to note some of the IP addresses we showed earlier in this process. Collect those or chuck ‘em in a note pad and we can use them here.
Now that we have that, we can verify our service locally.
And verify it with the pod IP
And verify we can reach the other pod
Now we can verify the service, note how you get different results from each call, as it’s load balanced between pods.
Cool, how about the VM? We should be able to ssh to it since it uses the default security group which is pretty wide open. Let’s ssh to that (reminder, the password is “ cubswin:)" ) and also set the prompt to look cute.
Great, so that definitely means we can get to the VM from the pod. But, let’s go and curl that service!
Voila! And that concludes our exploration of kuryr-kubernetes for today. Remember that you can find the Kuryr crew on the Openstack mailing lists, and also in Freenode @ #openstack-kuryr.
This post first appeared on Doug Smith’s blog. Superuser is always interested in community content, contact editor AT openstack.org
Cover Photo // CC BY NCMOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin told U.S. President Barack Obama that Moscow reserved the right to protect its interests and those of Russian speakers in Ukraine if they come under threat, the Kremlin said.
In a statement posted online on Sunday, the Kremlin said Obama had expressed concern about the possibility of Russian military intervention in Ukraine after the upper house of parliament authorized Putin to deploy the military in Ukraine.
“In response to the concern shown by Obama... Putin drew attention to the provocative, criminal actions by ultra-nationalists, in essence encouraged by the current authorities in Kiev,” the statement said.
It said Putin had underlined that there are “real threats to the life and health” of Russians in Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin stressed that if violence spread further in the eastern regions of Ukraine and in Crimea, Russia reserves the right to protect its interests and those of Russian speakers living there,” it added.
Protesters opposed to the new authorities in Kiev staged rallies in a number of cities on Saturday in the mostly Russian speaking regions of southern and eastern Ukraine. Crimea is Ukraine’s only region with a majority ethnic Russian population.
The Kremlin said Putin also had telephone conversations with French President Francois Hollande and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Putin told Ban Russia would resort to “whatever measures are necessary in compliance with international law” if violence is committed against Russian speakers in Ukraine.
Putin also underlined to Hollande what he said was the real threat facing Russian citizens in Ukraine since Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovich was deposed by leaders Russia has poured scorn on.As expected, the reaction from some of the more extreme Trump supporters on social media was horrific to put it kindly. Calling the South American undocumented immigrants violent criminals, animals, dogs, vermin, and an infestation. The lack of ability to see these people as fellow humans who in many cases were just trying to make a better life for their family was frankly depressing.
Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of examples of Trump supporters who felt terribly for these people but simply prioritized our national safety above their lives. While I disagree with these people, I can understand their feelings.
In the eyes of some of these Trump supporters however, these people had been reduced to a status that was somewhere just shy of human. They were utterly unable to distinguish the fact that these asylum seekers were real people who felt that they were in such danger or desperation that they needed to pack up their family and what little they could carry, and flee to another country. Leaving everything and everyone they know behind. To those extreme Trump Supporters, these people were no longer people, but simply a scourge, an evil, a group to be removed for the good of the country. Nothing more.
This process of "othering" can in it's worst cases lead to individuals who become violently radicalized against people outside of the social group with whom they identify. This is the mechanism which was weaponized by the Nazi's during the holocaust, leading to the ostracization, then internment, and then eventually death of 6 million Jewish people. Lest you think we are past this kind of horrific activity, it's still in use to this day in places like Darfur, where a policy of ethnic cleansing has resulted in the deaths of nearly a half of a million people.
Unfortunately, this tendency towards othering (at least to some degree) is part of the fabric of our humanity. Humans have always tended towards our tribal nature in one way or another. From packs of hunter-gatherers millennia ago, to todays nations, religions, and even sports teams. It's our nature to seek out groups of like-minded people with whom you can identify. It’s one of the major reasons sports are so influential in our culture. We all yearn for a team to root for and a team to vilify. But as our culture becomes more global, and the world gets smaller, it becomes much more important to make sure we do as much as we can to not insulate ourselves. and to treat our "others" with empathy.
Unfortunately, the more I look, the less empathy I see.
Studies have shown that Liberal/Progressively Minded people tend to be generally speaking more empathetic than conservatives, who tend to be more pragmatic. But that liberal sense of empathy is trumped (pun intended) by our affiliations to our political groups. So, I’m sorry Liberals, but we are just as guilty in this death of empathy as anyone else.
The group liberals show the least empathy towards is none other than the Trump supporting Republicans themselves. They are our “other”.
In fact, I bet some of the more liberal minded among you read the earlier parts of this article thinking to yourself about how terrible and evil those Trump loving Republicans are. After all, how can anyone who is capable of thinking things that horrific have morals? How could anyone agree with their stance? The people who do agree must be just as bad, Right? How nice would it be to turn on that nightly news and not have to hear the horrible things that President Trump and his supporters say on a daily basis? I mean nothing that they say is of any real worth right?
Perhaps, you've even thought about how this country would be better if they were just gone altogether. Never to be seen again?
Congratulations! You’ve become exactly who and what you hate.
Don't feel bad. This path is a slippery downhill slope. It’s not hard to make one mistake, and slip a little, or make another, and slip even farther. Falling until you no longer recognize where (or perhaps even who) you are.
It’s easier than ever these days to find yourself hating and then slowly dehumanizing the people you disagree with.
That means that in these most trying times, it’s more important than ever to remember that the people you argue and disagree with are still people. People with loves, hatreds, interests, families. You can disagree with them, dislike what they say, dislike what they stand for. Heck you can dislike them entirely as people. But please never forget that they are just that. People.
And maybe, just maybe, we can try to remind those that we disagree with that WE are people as well. We all could do with a bit more empathy. I’d hate to see it die out for good. Because, when it does, I fear we will not be far behind.
Now some food for thought:The Junta’s Soft Landing
With Burma’s government holding a rare election in November, it’s fair to wonder whether the military junta has real changes in store for the beleaguered country. Last Friday, a Burmese official at the United Nations even went so far as to insist that the leader of the Burmese opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi, will have a chance to cast a ballot. Unfortunately, the full evidence suggests that the regime isn’t inclined to initiate any deep reforms after 48 years of autocratic rule: Although Suu Kyi will be able to vote, she was barred from running for office, and her imposed house arrest has yet to be lifted.
Nonetheless, Burma’s rulers may be paving the way for their own eventual eclipse.
Even flawed elections can make a meaningful difference to the people of Burma. Indeed, things could hardly get worse for them. For the duration of the junta’s rule, the Burmese have been plagued by terrible government and a barely functioning economy: They have suffered rulers who were insecure in their hold on power, but who were capable of easily enriching themselves through natural resources like timber and opium.
One of the reasons that Burma’s economy is in such dire shape is that the junta has felt that economic growth would imperil their rule. The military junta, after all, hadn’t merely imposed itself on an anarchic society — it overthrew a popular democracy. Starving the country of dynamism has been one of the ways that the military has managed to consolidate its rule against the specter of an uprising among Burma’s minorities.
By introducing mild liberal reforms, the junta now wants to shift from near-constant crisis management to the cultivation of longer-term legitimacy and stability for the current regime. That’s what these elections are more-or-less explicitly about — in contrast to the country’s last elections, which were held 20 years ago, in 1990. Then, the junta was taken by surprise by the victory of Suu Kyi. The regime’s response was to reverse the results, and rescind all of its nascent democratic reforms at the time.
This time, military leaders are making sure in advance that the outcome will be to their liking. Aung San Suu Kyi has been barred from running for president, 25 percent of legislative seats have been reserved for the military, and a powerful national defense and security council has been established that will be free of democratic oversight. Already, more than 20 high-ranking officials in the junta have resigned from the army to re-invent themselves as civilian candidates under the banner of a new party, Union Solidarity and Development Association.
It’s clear that the regime is less interested in establishing a democracy than in resisting pariah status on the international stage and forestalling discontent at home. Whether they’re motivated by the bite of sanctions, the restiveness of domestic ethnic minorities, or the discontent of a younger generation of officers among the junta, Burma’s rulers want to restore some measure of legitimacy for themselves — without, of course, loosening their grip on the country’s levers of power.
But loosen it they eventually will. History shows that gradual, half-hearted reforms of this sort are exactly how many autocracies successfully transition to democracy. Rulers gradually liberalize laws while ensuring that they maintain their privileges and status, come what may. Chile’s move to democracy, for example, was facilitated by protections that the new constitution gave to Pinochet and other leading generals. The process of political reform in 19th-century Britain was also smoothened by the ability of existing elites to protect their interests via the House of Lords. And the world’s longest-running constitutional democracy — the United States — got its start because its “founding fathers” were convinced that the establishment of indirect elections for senators and the president would prevent radical, popular reforms. But, in all the above cases, the new openness produced a spurt of economic growth that eventually dislodged the old ruling class from its privileged perch over society.
An instructive comparison is also offered by the experiences of Egypt and Iraq since the 1950s. In Egypt, Colonel Nasser initiated a new tradition: Rulers were still invariably drawn from the military ranks, but they would henceforth present themselves as civilian presidents — highly restricted elections would even be set up to validate their rule. Iraq did nothing of the kind. While the Egyptian economy has achieved sustained growth since the 1950s, Iraq is probably poorer today than it was then. Egypt is still unfortunately far from being a full democracy, but far fewer of its citizens are in poverty than they were 50 years ago, and many more of them are educated.
Flawed as Burma’s current reforms are, they are unlikely to be the country’s last. Once a process of liberalization has begun, it usually continues, however gradually. One instructive example is Taiwan. The island was long a one-party state dominated by Chiang-Kai Shek’s Kuomintang. The group decided in the mid-1990s to introduce constitutional changes that would establish the country’s first real elections, confident that the Kuomintang would continue to rule comfortably. They did, in fact, win the first election handily, but the process of competition forced the party to move away from its militarized roots and eventually allowed an opposition to flourish and challenge its monopoly. The gradual process also allowed the ruling and the opposition to normalize their relationship, so that the new leaders weren’t fueled by revolutionary rage, and the old leaders were prepared to tolerate having lost their authority.
Taiwan’s experience offers a portrait of the most optimistic scenario for Burma — that the new constitution and the upcoming elections will be the beginning of a process of gradual reform that improves the economy and political participation, while avoiding a serious backlash against the ruling generals. The alternative path to political change — a push for radical reform that destabilizes the country and potentially produces a civil war — is much more grim and, unfortunately, all too plausible.Bob Nathan Senior VP, Amana Licensed Products “Our challenge has been to educate both our sales team and national retailers with respect to the Amana heritage of high quality design, exclusive technology innovations, and relevance for today’s consumers. We approached SnS Design to help us develop an animation sales tool that could be used to train our Amana sales team, and be used by our retail partners to convey the compelling health benefits of the exclusive Amana UV air purifier technology featured across the entire Amana room air conditioner line. The Amana branding team partnered with SnS Design to craft a dynamic product animation that combined photography, animation, text, music, and informative voice over. The resulting animation was so effective in communicating the exclusive family health benefits of the integral UV air purification technology that two of our larger customers will be running a looping DVD of the animation at hundreds of retail locations in 2011.”
Mr. H.G. Choi GM- R&D (Home Appliances) LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd “Nisha was involved in new range of refrigerator design project from developing the Concepts to Drawing Finalization. This includes the details, engineering parameters, 3D modeling and 2D CAD drawings of each component. She is a very good team leader and has managed the whole project very well. She has a keen eye for design and delivered quality work by meeting all the target deadlines. During her four months project tenure, we found her to be a sincere, punctual, energetic and hardworking individual.”
Ezra Hedaya Director of Product Development Compact appliances Haier America “SnS Design developed a new refrigerator door design and completely changed the conventional refrigerator look. SnS’s creative and pro-active approach helped us expedite our development process and delivered exactly what we were looking for.”
Andrew Ziegler Director, Product Management Amcor, Inc. “SnS Design’s industrial design team partnered with us to develop product innovations that are both functional and fashionable for today’s consumer. SnS’s product design solutions perfectly positioned our product portfolio to appeal to the primary home interior purchaser…women. I would highly recommend Nisha Sawhney for her commitment to design excellence, professionalism, and attentiveness at every stage of the product development process, for on-time project success.”
Edi Baur AG, Switzerland – Brush making since 1983! “Working with SnS Design was a very professional experience from the very start until we handed over the designs for manufacturing. The very professional work ethic and understanding of market situations as well as the efficiency how SnS Design operates, brings added value to us and our customers. We were able to hand over our ideas to development and when we got the designs back it was easy to make the needed changes and adaptations because SnS Design understands the meaning of working close even over a very long distance. We would place any design order again with SnS Design and will recommend it to any of our Partners. Really great work and efficiency – top notch designing with very reasonable rates and quick realization of a sharply timed project!”
Michael Benjamin President & Chief Executive Officer Temptu “SnS Design designed our new, most powerful portable compressor “Temptuair” to set a new standard in the professional makeup Industry. SnS Design did great work in designing a compact, user friendly, state of the art portable compressor. They worked with us through the high and low times till the final design completion and stayed within the given constrains. The compressor has been designed inside out with accommodating all the internal components and also reducing the over all manufacturing cost. Nisha helped make Temptu into Apple computer compared to all the competition which are viewed as PC’s in the professional makeup Industry.”
Michael G. Tobin J. Michael Cantore J. Emmett Towey No Mess Press “We had the pleasure of working with Nisha and SnS Design in developing the No Mess Press. It was from a random Internet search for an industrial designer that we met Nisha but we couldn’t have been happier. She was able to take our vision and turn it into a reality. The best part is that Nisha and SnS Design made themselves available anytime for us. It was nice to work with a partner who shared the same passion for the idea. Because of the help of SnS Design we are confident the No Mess Press will be sold around the world very soon.”
Francis Joseph Director, Michael Aram Exports Pvt. Ltd. “We are pleased to certify that Nisha is a talented designer who has consistently delivered more than satisfactory results. She is honest, hard-working and is a good team player.”
Max Brown Co-founder GrenlightAC “It was essential that we design The ChargeBar so it was functional, yet user friendly. We found the designs and concepts from Nisha Sawhney, owner of SnS Design, to be exactly what we were looking for. She understood our objectives and was able to deliver a smart looking, functional product.”
Koichi Fujiwara President Hironen Co.,Ltd. “Yes, I recommend Nisha as a professional product designer and as a project leader. Usually industrial designers are not good at dealing textile goods but she challenged and made it. She was patient and flexible as well as creative. It is a great virtue for designers to communicate well with the clients. Also she managed well with the market research, graphics & logos, brandings, trade mark registrations, etc. We accomplished the difficult international project in the long run.”
J. Henry Scott Chief Executive Officer ZIPZ “SnS Design was integral in taking our Zipz wine concept from a new idea to an actual revolutionary product. She was involved in every step from initial face to face meetings to product design graphic design and renderings in both 2D and 3D onto manufacturing files. Nisha also had excellent prototype associates who worked very quickly and cost effectively with us. Finally, Nisha created a most fantastic animation for us to use as a selling tool for investors, buyers and end users. Our experience with SnS Design and Nisha was excellent. I would recommend her company to anyone looking for that “it factor” in creativity that is so needed in todays competitive marketplace.”
Dov Ehrman Director, Creoh Trading Corp “Nisha Sawhney is an excellent and talented designer. She has been working with us since 2003 on variety of projects, her work has increased our revenue as well as our clientele. She has been a valuable member of our team and understands the need of speed to market with quality design. I highly recommend her as a product and packaging designer.”
Louis Holder Chief Executive Officer Innovaci Inc “Nisha and SnS came highly recommended to us by a company that previously had great success working with her team. SnS is a small but innovative product design firm conveniently located in New York City. Nisha is the genius who has done wonders with the graphic design work for the AireSpa product. I was instantly impressed with Nisha’s excellent eye for detail, her creativity and her cutting edge approach to graphic design. Her small but capable firm adds a personal touch to every project and are very responsive to your needs. Nisha along with the SnS team have an endless imagination, a fresh youthful outlook and amazing talent. Her commitment to getting the job done, on schedule, and within the budget promised, is what sets SnS apart from other graphic design firms in the market. I highly recommend SnS to any company that is in the hunt for a graphics design firm that will go the extra mile in their dedication, give their customers exactly what they are looking for, and create the highest quality product design.”
Natalia Youssef Tim Youssef Co-founders, Basketeer LLC “SnS Design has been invaluable in helping us bring our concept to commercially viable product and prototype. Nisha and team delivered a full suite of services from traditional industrial engineering and design, to sourcing manufacturers, to even referring potential marketing and distribution partners. We couldn’t be more pleased and would recommend SnS unreservedly.”
Justin Wolff President NaturaLIGHT “It has been a tremendous pleasure working with Nisha. As an entrepreneur, I very much appreciated her deep contacts not only with designers, but with suppliers and distributors. On top of all that, Nisha has been both thorough and quick to respond to my inquiries, and always made me feel part of the design process. I would highly recommend her to anyone considering new or innovative product designs.”
Andrew Ziegler Senior Product Manager, Product Innovation & Engineering Haier America “In today’s competitive marketplace, innovation is key to differentiating one’s brand from the competition. Our challenge is to develop industry leading product platforms that incorporate innovative features with minimal cost up to our national retail customers. SnS Design has been an invaluable design partner, enabling us to deliver value and design excellence to our channel partners. Our collaboration in the design development of a new A/V speaker inspired portable air conditioner line resulted in a superior product that had tremendous sell through success with our retail customers. Innovative industry leading features included ergonomic EasyClean control panel, MagnaClik™ magnetic remote control storage, Braille enhanced remote control, and sophisticated piano black designs that blend harmoniously with today’s interiors. SnS Design helped us realize our vision for developing barrier free, high performance consumer products.”
Henry C. Chan, Esq. Wilson & Chan, LLP “We have found a fantastic team at SnS Design with whom we can depend on to understand our business, design, and web development strategies to transition our target audience into clients. SnS Design does a beautiful job because they care about our relationship – the SnS Design team wants to be kept in our mix – and we place great value on that.”An increasingly open and transactional grid edge is forcing the U.S. Department of Energy to shore up electricity network defenses withblockchaintechnology.
Last month, the DOE embarked on a multimillion-dollar push “to develop blockchain cybersecurity technology to help secure distributed energy resources at the grid’s edge,” according to a press release from Guardtime, one of the parties involved in the project.
Michael Mylrea, senior manager of cybersecurity for electricity infrastructure at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), another of the project partners, said a key goal of the work was to develop a keyless signature infrastructure (KSI) based on blockchain.
This would be used to verify exchanges within a grid edge energy-delivery system, he said. “Grid edge devices lack visibility, control and security to conduct real-time energy transactions with the required security, speed and scale,” he said.
The KSI would form part of a keyless infrastructure security solution that could be plugged into a distributed control and sensing software platform, called VOLTTRON, which PNNL developed for the DOE.
Besides PNNL and Guardtime, the DOE is working with Washington State University, Tennessee Valley Authority, Siemens and the Department of Defense’s Homeland Defense and Security Information Analysis Center on the three-year project.
The DOE is carrying out the work under its Cybersecurity for Energy Delivery Systems program, which it said is designed “to enhance the reliability and resilience of the nation's energy infrastructure.”
PNNL is currently finalizing a field work proposal for the project, Mylrea said. “Modernization has increased the size and speed requirement for electricity infrastructure, significantly expanding the cyberattack surface for the grid,” he told GTM.
Currently, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Reliability Standards focus on the bulk grid and provide inadequate security requirements at the distribution level, he said.
At the same time, there are signs the energy sector is being increasingly targeted by cybercriminals.
In 2014, the U.S. energy sector had more cybersecurity incidents than any other industry tracked by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
And in 2016, hackers cracked Ukrainian grid control center defenses and shut down almost 60 substations responsible for delivering 200 megawatts of power to the north of the nation’s capital, Kiev.
Wired said the hackers “were skilled and stealthy strategists who carefully planned their assault over many months.”
Trying to avoid such incidents using traditional grid and operational technology IT defenses might “reduce functionality and increase costs to achieve security gains,” Mylrea said.
“This project is unique in that it potentially increases the efficiency and scalability of a more distributed grid, while at the same time making it more cyber-resilient,” he said.
Alex Miller, co-founder of energy blockchain startup Grid+, said the DOE’s work could help protect against fraud in grid edge transactions.
“Blockchain would help a lot in this domain because it provides a highly structured and immutable audit trail, complete with the identity of every actor in the system,” he said. “Any data alteration of any kind is extremely easy to detect. This makes fraud extremely difficult.”
Coincidentally, recent months have seen a rush of startups using blockchain technology as the basis for energy trading platforms.
In addition to Grid+, which completed a presales campaign last month, an Australian company called Power Ledger recently raised AUD $34 million (USD $26.5 million) in an initial coin offering (ICO), a form of cryptocurrency stock market launch.
In Europe, meanwhile, a blockchain energy trading platform provider called WePower unveiled details of an ICO at a CryptoFriends Netup event held in Barcelona this month.
Alongside growing interest in blockchains, the energy sector is seeing increasing concerns over cybersecurity.
Researchers in the Netherlands have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in solar inverters, and DNV GL, the standards body, has made cybersecurity a centerpiece of its recommended practices for grid-connected energy storage systems.
Against this backdrop, said Francois Sonnet, co-founder of ElectriCChain, an energy generation data project, “I believe that the DOE would [gain an] advantage by working on cybersecurity with blockchain, as it is essentially un-hackable.”If you are thinking of writing a web service or a client based on a WSDL, you can easily generate the code for PHP or any other language using tools likes wsdl2php or other wsdl2xxx category tools. Then you don’t need to really worry about what is the schema of the WSDL or any other finer details. But sometime it may useful to know how different schema constructs are generated in PHP level so you can have a good idea when you are using them. This post describes How inheritance is used in XML Schema and how it is mapped to PHP code from wsdl2php tool in WSF/PHP.
There are several ways that one schema type can inherit another type. Here are some names use to refer them.
SimpleType Restriction – Forming simple type by restricting another simple type
SimpleContent Extension – Forming complex type by extending a simple type
ComplexContent Extension – Forming complex type by extending another complex type
Note that here the word ‘type’ always refers to a schema type.
It is not straight forward to do a one to one map from these schema structures to a PHP or some other language. But wsdl2php tool does that keeping the simplicity and preserving the original meaning. Lets see how it is done for each of the above mentioned methods of inheriting.
SimpleType Restriction
You can create a simple type by restricting some values of another simple type. Here is an example.
<!-- derivedType from applying simple type restriction for xs:string --> <xs:simpleType name = "derivedType" > <xs:restriction base = "xs:string" > <xs:enumeration value = "a" /> <xs:enumeration value = "ab" /> <xs:enumeration value = "abc" /> <xs:enumeration value = "abcd" /> </xs:restriction > </xs:simpleType >
Here the derivedType is a string, but it can only have values “a”, “ab”, “abc” and “abcd”. This restriction have used the “enumeration” (which we call a facet) to restrict the possible values. You can use other facets like length, minLength, MaxLength and so on. Here are the complete list of facets in the schema specification.
So lets see hows this is mapped to a PHP code. Here we assume this type is used in an schema element called ‘input’.
/** * @var string * NOTE: $input should follow the following restrictions * You can have one of the following value * a * ab * abc * abcd */ public $input ;
Note that here it does not say anything about the ‘derivedType’. Rather it says it is of type “String” which is a PHP type and in addition it has some restrictions, or rules when assigning values.
Although it could have been possible to use getters and setters to impose these rules, this uses just a comment about the rules because this way it is really easy the use the variable.
Say we have another type (say derievedType2) restricting the ‘derievedType’, that type will have the combination of restrictions of both types.
Here is the xml schema representation of the ‘derievedType2’.
<!-- derivedType2--> <xs:simpleType name = "derivedType2" > <xs:restriction base = "tns:derivedType" > <xs:maxLength value = "3" /> <xs:minLength value = "2" /> </xs:restriction > </xs:simpleType >
And if input2 have that type, the php code will look like this, (Note that it has the combination of rules).
/** * @var string * NOTE: $input2 should follow the following restrictions * You can have one of the following value * a * ab * abc * abcd * Your length of the value should be * Greater than 2 * Less than 3 */ public $input2 ;
I have highlighted the additional rules compared with $input, so you can see the difference.
SimpleContent Extension
Simple Content extension is extending a simple type to make a complex type. Say we have an element (say with the name “mystring”) and it has “xs:string” simple type.
<xs:element name = "mystring" type = "xs:string" />
And here is a valid xml with this schema.
<mystring > this can contain only string </mystring >
So if I say I’m going to make a complex type extending this simple type you may think that I’m going to add element in to that. In fact I will create a complex type by adding an attribute.
<mystring myint = "3" > this can contain only string </mystring >
The schema to this xml will be something like this. (Note that I have assumed there is an schema element named “mystring” with the type “myStringType”)
<xs:complexType name = "myStringType" > <xs:simpleContent > <xs:extension base = "xs:string" > <xs:attribute name = "myint" type = "xs:int" /> </xs:extension > </xs:simpleContent > </xs:complexType >
The PHP generated code for this schema is something like this,
class myStringType { /** * @var int */ public $myint ; // The "value" represents the element'myStringType' value.. /** * @var string */ public $value ; }
So as you can see it creates a PHP class for that schema type with member variables for each attributes and finally for the value of the parent type. So in order to represent the above mentioned xml, you will use the following PHP code.
$type = new myStringType ( ) ; $type -> myint = 3 ; $type -> value = "this can contain only string" ;
Next we will look at the inheritance with complexContent Extension.
ComplexContent Extension
This is to create a complex type by inheriting another complexType.
<!-- the parent type --> <xs:complexType name = "parentType" > <xs:sequence > <xs:element name = "demo3" type = "xs:int" /> <xs:element name = "demo4" type = "xs:string" /> </xs:sequence > </xs:complexType > <!-- the child type --> <xs:complexType name = "childType" > <xs:complexContent > <xs:extension base = "tns:parentType" > <xs:sequence > <xs:element name = "demo1" type = "xs:int" /> <xs:element name = "demo2" type = "xs:string" /> </xs:sequence > </xs:extension > </xs:complexContent > </xs:complexType >
So here the childType will inherit the ‘demo3’ and ‘demo4’ elements from the parent type. We will see how is the PHP generated code looks like.
class parentType { /** * @var int */ public $demo3 ; /** * @var string */ public $demo4 ; } class childType extends parentType { /** * @var int */ public $demo1 ; /** * @var string */ public $demo2 ; }
It has uses the PHP inheritance to reprensent the schema inheritance. And the nice thing is you can use the childType for the places you have to use the parentType. That is the theoy we learn at the inheritance class of other languages (Java, C++) too.
So say there is another complexType (say “anotherChildType”) inheriting from the type “parentType” and one another complexType (say “nextLevelChildType”) inheriting this time from “childType” (which in fact inheriting from the “parentType” as mentioned above).
So our types tree would be something like this.
--- parentType | +-------- childType | | | +------------- nexLevelChildType | +-------- anotherChildType
And lets say there is a schema element called ‘input3’ with the type parentType. Then the generated variable for the input3 element will be like following code segment.
/** * @var (object)parentType * Or one of following derived class(es) * childType * nextLevelChildType * anotherChildType */ public $input3 ;
This comment tells you that you can actually use the inherited types in place of the parent type according to your preferences.Posted Thu Jan 12, 2017 6:57 PM
Newly available — an incredible trove of material from Mark Reid, creator of the award-winning computer game Getaway!, which was published by Atari Program Exchange in 1982. An interview with Mark was published in episode 19 of the Player/Missile podcast.
it's at https://archive.org/...GetawayArchives
ALL kudos for this project go to Mark Reid — for saving this information in the first place, then sharing it with the Atari community — and to Rob McMullen (@playermissile here on AtariAge; @atari8bitgames on twitter) |
Grabovski played a shutdown role, the Leafs second scoring line was basically MacArthur-Kadri-Frattin for quite some time until Lupul returned and the line turned into Lupul-Kadri-Kulemin, a unit which no doubt did some serious damage.
This summer the Leafs threw big money at David Clarkson to round out the top six forwards while adding some jam to the group, and it’s pretty safe to say the Leafs top six wingers will be Kessel, JVR, Lupul and Clarkson to start the season.
I thought it was interesting of the Leafs to allocate so much cap space to the wings and for Gordon to then bring up their track record with us at MLHS. With that, I wanted to see how the Leafs stacked up against teams across the league. Here are the results based on the 2011-12 and 2013 seasons (max GP/player within these parameters is 130):
Teams Top Six Wingers Goals/Points/Games Total Goals Total Points Games PPG Total Cap Hit Pittsburgh Neal 61/117/120 179 395 510 0.77 $14,600,000 Kunitz 48/113/134 Dupuis 45/97/134 Jokinen 25/68/122 Boston Eriksson 38/100/134 163 379 508 0.75 $20,750,000 Lucic 33/88/127 Marchand 46/91/121 Iginla 46/100/126 Chicago Kane 46/121/129 149 365 471 0.77 $23,775,000 Hossa 46/108/121 Sharp 39/89/102 Bickell 18/47/119 New Jersey Elias 40/114/129 146 364 491 0.74 $17,850,000 Jagr 35/89/118 Clowe 20/64/116 Ryder 51/97/128 Winnipeg Wheeler 36/105/128 161 354 497 0.71 $18,250,000 Kane 47/90/122 Ladd 46/96/130 Setogouchi 32/63/117 Toronto Kessel 57/134/130 167 345 431 0.8 $20,150,000 JVR 29/56/91 Lupul 36/85/82 Clarkson 45/70/128 Edmonton Hall 43/103/106 143 339 444 0.76 $20,812,500 Eberle 50/113/126 Perron 31/67/105 Hemsky 19/56/107 Capitals Ovechkin 70/121/126 151 337 485 0.69 $17,705,129 Johansson 20/68/114 Johansson RFA Brouwer 37/66/129 Erat 24/82/116 Dallas Benn 28/96/112 124 336 459 0.73 $17,500,000 Whitney 35/106/114 Cole 44/74/129 Peverley 17/60/104 Colorado Tanguay 24/76/104 115 330 460 0.72 $16,075,000 O'Reilly 24/75/110 Parenteau 36/110/128 Landeskog 31/69/118 Flyers Hartnell 45/78/114 163 325 488 0.67 $13,875,000 Simmonds 43/81/127 Voracek 40/95/126 Read 35/71/121 Detroit Zetterberg 33/117/128 131 324 497 0.65 $17,337,878 Alfredsson 37/85/122 Franzen 43/87/118 Abdelkader 18/35/129 Tampa Bay St. Louis 42/134/125 110 310 384 0.81 $15,500,000 Purcell 35/101/129 Malone 26/56/92 Killorn 7/19/38 Minnesota Parise 49/107/130 136 302 414 0.73 $20,518,462 Heatley 35/74/118 Pominville 44/107/129 Coyle 8/14/37 NYR Nash 51/101/126 144 300 467 0.64 $15,625,000 Callahan 45/85/121 Hagelin 24/62/112 Pouliot 24/52/108 San Jose Marleau 47/95/130 136 288 489 0.59 $18,660,000 Burns 20/57/111 Torres 22/44/118 Pavelski 47/92/130 Calgary Cammalleri 33/73/110 132 284 448 0.63 $15,050,000 Hudler 35/77/123 Stempniak 23/60/108 Glencross 41/74/107 Carolina Semin 34/98/121 119 283 433 0.65 $19,075,000 Tlutsy 40/74/127 Ruutu 22/43/99 Skinner 23/68/86 Vancouver Sedin 42/107/119 131 282 449 0.63 $16,200,000 Burrows 41/76/127 Booth 17/33/74 Hansen 26/66/129 Ottawa Ryan 42/87/128 134 280 470 0.6 $13,500,000 Michalek 39/74/100 MacArthur 28/63/113 Greening 25/56/129 NYI Moulson 51/113/129 132 277 459 0.6 $10,933,333 Bouchard 17/42/80 Okposo 28/69/127 Grabner 36/53/123 Kings Brown 40/83/128 135 270 442 0.61 $12,585,227 Williams 33/92/130 Carter 47/67/103 Frattin 15/28/81 Columbus Gaborik 53/103/129 123 269 449 0.6 $21,600,000 Umberger 28/58/125 Dubinsky 12/54/106 Horton 30/54/89 Phoenix Vrbata 47/90/111 123 265 486 0.55 $10,800,000 Doan 35/77/127 Boedker RFA Boedker 18/50/130 Korpikowski 23/48/118 Montreal Pacioretty 48/104/123 117 257 409 0.63 $16,833,333 Briere 22/65/104 Gionta 22/41/79 Bourque 25/47/103 Buffalo Vanek 46/102/116 107 246 416 0.59 $18,455,357 Stafford 26/48/126 Leino 10/31/79 Ennis 25/65/95 Florida Fleischman 39/96/130 103 244 386 0.63 $15,094,167 Versteeg 25/58/81 Kopecky 25/59/127 Huberdeau 14/31/48 Nashville Stalberg 31/66/126 102 225 435 0.52 $11,250,000 Hornqvist 31/57/100 Wilson 22/54/93 Smith 18/48/116 St. Louis Steen 23/55/83 90 214 358 0.6 $12,854,167 Oshie 26/74/110 Stewart 33/66/127 Tarasenko 8/19/38 Anaheim Perry 52/96/124 85 174 330 0.53 $12,991,667 Palmieri 14/28/60 Silfverberg 10/19/48 Penner 9/31/98
Note: Not every team has a clear cut group of top six wingers. If I wasn’t sure about who to fill out the group with, the general rule of thumb I went by was taking the next highest scoring winger on the team; to me, that best indicates the fire power a team has. For example, with Pittsburgh I’m betting Beau Bennett eventually claims the final top six winger spot, but going into camp that spot is up for grabs between a bunch of players such as Bennett, Matt D’Agostini and Jussi Jokinen (yes, I realize he played mainly center in Pittsburgh, but he can do both). I wrote in Jokinen since he was the highest scorer. Even for the teams where I’m fairly confident about the composition of their top six wingers — like Yakupov in Edmonton over Hemsky — I stuck with the guy who has more points to better represent the scoring prowess of teams across the league.
Quick thoughts:
– First thought: If the Bolland line is the excellent shutdown unit the Leafs seem to think it can be, the Leafs should win enough games. They have good goaltending and can clearly score, so they should be in good shape if they have those two things and an excellent shutdown line to complement them. That seems to be the plan.
– The Leafs’ 0.80 PPG ranks them second to only Tampa Bay’s 0.81 in scoring by top 6 wingers. Their $20,150,000 allocated to their top 6 wingers is sixth most league wide. Their 167 goals stand second to only Pittsburgh.
– Would be nice if Lupul could stay healthy. He’s missed 48 of the last 130 games.
– Kessel is unbelievable. If you didn’t catch this stat, he is tied with Martin St. Louis for the most points by a winger over the last two years.
– You can see why the Ducks want Teemu Selanne back.
– New Jersey probably surprised quite a few people with their ranking. Their top six is old, but they still know how to score. The Devils have a strong one-two punch down the middle with Zajac and Henrique, plus they have Schneider now. I believe they will be better than people think.
– Winnipeg’s problem is goaltending, but most people have known this for a while.
– For one reason or another, I thought Ottawa would be higher. Ryan is a big name, MacArthur is a decent scorer and Michalek has been good when healthy, but who the final top six winger will be is unknown. Michalek hasn’t been able to stay healthy either which has hurt them.
– Not that it’s all the current GM’s fault, but Columbus sure spends a lot of money on subpar(?) production from their top six wingers.
– Even though the top three teams on this chart are elite, I don’t necessarily believe there is a strong correlation between having a high scoring group of wingers and winning. That said, it’s nice to see those teams rank well because the Leafs are clearly putting their eggs in this basket.Origin
Hope Pym
Hope Pym is the daughter of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, and twin to Henry Pym Jr. (aka Big-Man). Hope became obsessed when the newest team of Avengers appeared, feeling they were disgracing the memory of her father (who died as an Avenger) and mother (who died "of a broken heart"). She used her fortune to arrange for an unknown individual to become Ion Man, sending him to assassinate Cassandra Lang. Hope felt Cassandra was a mockery of her parents and that she, herself, should have been the one to carry on the legacy started by her father when he first appeared as the original Ant-Man. Ion Man failed in his attempt and was temporarily dispersed by Mainframe.
Creation
Hope Pym was created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz and first appeared in A-Next issue 7 (1999) as part of the MC2 Universe. As of yet, there is no 616 or'main Marvel Universe' counterpart of Hope Pym.
Major Story Arcs
The Revengers
The Red Queen
Hope arranged for the formation of the Revengers and she and Henry, using their parents' security codes invaded the Avengers Mansion. There, they captured Tony Stark, Clint Barton, Edwin Jarvis and Scott Lang and ambushed the Avengers. She then set about torturing Cassandra Lang, planning to kill the Avengers, convinced she could lead a better team. Her brother, Henry, turned against her and after the two teams fought it was he who stopped her from initiating the Mansion's self-destruct, which would have killed both the Revengers, the Avengers and their allies.
Sometime later, Hope recruited Magneta, the'mistress of magnetism' to replace her brother, Henry and launched another attack on the Avengers, who were left weakened following the events of Last Hero Standing. After two unsuccessful attempts to destroy the Avengers during Last Planet Standing, both Killerwatt and Sabreclaw defected to the assembled heroes to prevent the planet's destrution. Meanwhile, Hope led the Revengers and other villains (and civilians) in looting the ravaged New York City.
Versus the America Dream
Red Queen vs America Dream
With her team's ranks reduced to only herself and Ion man, Hope changed her strategy, this time deciding to target a single member of the Avengers, American Dream. Using American Dream to track down the criminal Silikong, allying with him and his army of crystal monsters created from illegal immigrants and the homeless. Red Queen offered to acquire more 'volunteers' for his army, in exchange for turning the captured American Dream into one of his crystal creatures and sending her to destroy the Avengers. When American Dream escapes and the Avengers stop Silikong's army of creatures, Red Queen and Ion Man battles American Dream only to be defeated once more.
Alternate Realities
Earth-616
Wasp (Earth-616)
Nadia Pym is daughter of Hank Pym and his first wife, Maria Trovaya. After her mother death, Nadia was taking in by the Red Room. She later escapes from the Red Room and becomes the new Wasp. (note: Nadia's name translates as "Hope".)
In Other Media
Film
Evangeline Lilly as Hope
Hope Van Dyne appears in the Ant-Man movie, portrayed by Evangeline Lilly. Hope is the only child of the superhero couple Ant-Man and Wasp. Hope was bombarded by fame and scrutiny at a young age. Sadly, Hope's parents split up and Janet Van Dyne tragically dies soon after. Hope adopts her mother's maiden name, goes to work for her father at his company but she still holds a grudge against Pym for all that happened to her mother.
Eventually, Hope and Pym's protege Darren Cross manage to take control of Pym's company away from him. Pym becomes a recluse while Hope works with Cross in redeveloping the Pym Particles. Once Hope figures out that Cross is using the Pym Particles to start a new age of warfare, she turns to her father and his reluctant partner Scott Lang in finding a way to stop Cross. At the end of the film, Pym and Hope have a father/ daughter moment. In the mid-credits scene, Hank presents Hope with an unfinished prototype Wasp suit that he had been designing for her mother prior to her death. He suggests that he and Hope finish it together, hinting that Hope will become the new Wasp.
Evangeline Lilly as the Wasp
Evangeline Lilly reprises her role in the 2018 sequel, which sees Hope don the now-finished Wasp costume to carry on her mother's legacy.
Television
Avengers: Secret Wars
Hope as the Wasp
Hope Van Dyne appears as the Wasp in Season 4 of Avengers Assemble, renamed Avengers: Secret Wars. She is voiced by Kari Wahlgren.
Ant-Man shorts
Wasp in the shorts
Hope Van Dyne appears as the Wasp in the retro Ant-Man animated shorts aired on Disney XD, which are produced by Passion Pictures. She is voiced by The Big Band Theory star Melissa Rauch.
Games
Marvel: War of Heroes
Marvel: War of Heroes
Hope appears in several cards in the mobile card game Marvel: War of Heroes. Her cards are:
[Angry Daughter] Red Queen
Lego Marvel's Avengers
Lego Avengers
Hope Van Dyne is a playable character in the Ant-Man DLC pack.
Marvel Contest of Champions
Hope Van Dyne in Marvel Contest of Champions
Wasp (Hope Van Dyne) is a playable character in the game. She is a science type of champion.
Marvel Avengers Academy
Hope Van Dyne In Marvel Avengers Academy
Hope is a playable character in the game. She is voided by Taylor Morgan Mars.
Live
Marvel Live
The Hope Van Dyne version of Wasp is one of the main characters in the revamped version of the Marvel Universe Live stage show.
Merchandise
Marvel LegendsHow I Stopped My Dog’s Leash Aggression
By: Alex Andes
If you’ve ever had a leash reactive dog, you have probably experienced the same feeling of dread that I did before going on a walk. My dog, Penny, was attacked on-leash by an off-leash dog on a hiking trail, and as an already anxious and insecure dog, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I now had on my hands an otherwise perfectly human and dog-friendly dog who turned into Cujo when she was attached to a leash.
I quickly grew tired of trying to avoid contact with all living creatures on walks, and I was determined to help Penny enjoy her walks again. Flash forward a few years and I now have a completely different dog on my hands. She’s not completely perfect on walks, and never will be, but she is completely manageable and we can now enjoy our time outside together.
How did I do it? How can you do the same with your leash reactive dog?
Check out my top 5 tips for curbing your dog’s leash reactivity. No two dogs are the same, but you can certainly tailor some of these ideas to your unique situation.
1) Drop the quick fixes.
Having a leash reactive dog is frustrating. I get it. It's embarrassing to have to apologize to other dog owners when your dog goes over threshold. But your ego should never get in the way of safe, humane training. Remember--this is a fear-based behavior. If you lose your temper, you're only contributing to your dog's fear.
I was able to eliminate Penny's leash reactivity without the use of shock collars, prong collars, choke collars, or any other type of punitive device.
I never popped or jerked her on the leash, and I never raised my voice at her. I simply tried to understand her fear and worked to change the way she perceived the things that scared her.
I highly recommend a no-pull harness that clips both at the chest and on the back. This will help you better manage your dog, and I have found it is much less stressful for a reactive dog than a regular collar or a head halter. Try Victoria's Positively No-Pull Harness.
2) Teach the “Look at That” Cue—and find a great trainer to help you!
I’m fortunate to have a wealth of incredible dog trainers in my circle. I have to give a few shoutouts to all the fabulous Atlanta-area trainers that have helped me with Penny along the way—Meredith Minkin, Mara Whitacre, Donna Elliott, and of course, Victoria.
So what techniques do I use to keep Penny’s leash reactivity in check? I use present-tense because any behavior that is rooted in insecurity and fear (as most aggression is) requires ongoing work.
The first technique I use is the “look at that” cue. The moment that Penny learned and understood this cue was the moment that I finally saw light at the end of the tunnel.
When she sees a stimulus (such as an approaching person or dog), her first instinct now is to look at me. This takes pressure off of her, and she doesn’t feel like she needs to control the situation by barking or lunging at them. I then give her the “look at that” cue, and she looks at the trigger, then back at me, where she is rewarded with praise or a high-value treat.
Most leash reactive dogs will not be able to focus entirely on you as the stimulus passes. That’s why the “look at that” cue is so valuable. It gives the dog a chance to keep an eye on the stimulus, but the dog doesn’t feel the need to control the situation using aggressive display.
I taught Penny to "look at that" with the help of a clicker, but you could use a word like "yes!" to mark the behavior you like. Here are the basics of the "look at that" training we did:
We started at extreme distances where she could barely see the other dog, and every time she looked in the direction of the dog, I clicked, would wait for her to look at me, and then reward her with a treat. We then walked away from the stimulus--most leash reactive dogs simply want distance put between them and the other dog or person. Timing is crucial here!
We gradually decreased the distance between Penny and the other dog, and continued the same exercise. If she reacted, we knew we had moved too quickly, and added distance again.
Penny is highly food-motivated, and her desire for a treat overpowered her fear of the stimulus. I highly recommend using high-value treats like hot dogs or veggie burgers, and heating them up before training. Your dog won't be able to resist them!
3) Know your dog’s triggers and limits.
Penny's leash reactivity improved in phases. First, she stopped reacting to adults passing by. Then, she stopped reacting to children and unusual objects like strollers and bicycles. Then it was small dogs. Then larger dogs. I knew that I had made a breakthrough when she was able to walk past two lunging, leash reactive dogs without reacting herself.
Your dog may still have triggers for the rest of his life. Always be aware of your dog's body language when a potential trigger approaches.
I know that Penny is much more comfortable on a wide hiking trail than she is on a walk on my neighborhood street. Your dog is going to have limitations and preferences--respect them.
There will be problem-solving and tweaking involved. I first tried to use the "look at that" cue with Penny in a "sit," but she was extremely uncomfortable being still as a trigger approached. I was able to figure out that she was much more comfortable if we kept moving forward.
4) Set your dog up for success.
Many owners get impatient during this type of training. It took years to get Penny to this point. There were days when I was close to tears because I was so frustrated with her setbacks. But if you set your dog up for success, these moments will happen much more infrequently.
Don't push your dog farther than he's ready to go. Start with short walks and enlist the help of a friend to practice your "look at that" cue from a distance.
Be cognizant of the people and dogs around you. Your dog will let you know if he's uncomfortable.
Avoid your dog going over threshold when at all possible. This means being highly aware of your surroundings and your dog's body language. It's much better to turn around and avoid a trigger your dog isn't ready for than it is to test the waters too soon.
If you do have a setback (and I promise that you will), don't take your frustration out on your dog.
5) Simplify.
One of the best pieces of advice that Meredith, one of the trainers I worked with, gave me was this--"trust your dog." Trust your training and trust your dog. If you have dealt with leash aggression for a long time, your first instinct is likely going to be to tighten up the leash and brace for an explosion every time a stimulus passes. One of the hardest lessons for me was learning to pass potential triggers with a loose leash. Once I saw how much calmer Penny was when she saw that I was not phased, I was able to trust her and trust the training so much more. Your dog will never succeed if you don't give him the chance to--I think it's time give him that chance!
Find a great positive trainer to work with your leash reactive dog--your dog will thank you for it!
Positively Expert: Alex Andes Alex Andes is the owner and head trainer of Peach on a Leash Dog Training & Behavior Services in Atlanta, GA. /peachonaleash
@peachonaleash
peachonaleash.com/
JOIN THE CONVERSATIONIf what Erdogan said on TV today is correct, there is no longer much doubt about the answer to this question. According to Erdogan, the officers who detained the chief of general staff, Hulusi Akar, on July 15 offered to put Akar in contact with Gulen. As of this writing, Akar has not made any statements confirming this. (See update on this at the end of this entry.) But if he does, it will be manifest that responsibility for the coup attempt reaches all the way to Pennsylvania. It will be very difficult for the U.S not to extradite Gulen, subject, of course, to (some huge) fair trial concerns back in Turkey.
What evidence, other than Erdogan’s word, is there that Gulen is behind the coup attempt?
Years ago when my wife Pinar Dogan and I first began to investigate the bogus documents in the Sledgehammer case, we were stuck by how quick many observers were at assigning blame: “it’s the Gulenists’ work of course,” they would say, “this is the kind of thing they do.” We did not know much about the Gulen movement at the time. So we hesitated, and in our early writings we listed Gulenist involvement as only one of the possibilities.
Over time, we learned a lot. The evidence that Gulenists were heavily involved in – and quite likely stage managed – Sledgehammer and many other similar sham trials accumulated. By now it should be clear to any objective observer that the Gulen movement goes much beyond the schools, charities, and inter-faith activities with which it presents itself to the world: it also has a dark underbelly engaged in covert activities such as evidence fabrication, wiretapping, disinformation, blackmail, and judicial manipulation.
In late 2013 the fight between Erdogan and the Gulen movement became public. Ever since, the AKP has purged suspected Gulenists from many state institutions and closed down their largest media and business operations. There was one state institution which had remained immune from these purges: the army. Perhaps because the top brass were reluctant to relive a trauma similar to the Ergenekon-Sledgehammer, none of the suspected Gulenists in the military had been touched.
But that was about to change. In the run-up to the July 15 coup attempt, a few officers were detained for allegedly fabricating evidence in the infamous Izmir espionage case. There were indications that a much larger sweep was being readied. And rumors were flying that in August’s Supreme Military Council meeting a large number of Gulenists would be finally be discharged.
Traditionally, Turkish coups are produced by Kemalist secularists. But hardline secularists have lost their control of the military thanks to the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials during 2008-2011, which led to their imprisonment and discharge. Their ranks had been filled by officers more pliant to Erdogan (and, in all likelihood, to Gulen himself). An analysis by Hurriyet’s Sedat Ergin found that a disproportionate number of the new appointees were involved in the July 15 coup attempt.
It is possible that many remaining Kemalist officers below the very top ranks still harbored considerable animosity towards Erdogan. But another consequence of Ergenekon and Sledgehammer was that these trials shattered any sense of secularist solidarity and esprit de corps in the military. They sowed fear and suspicion among the ranks: you couldn’t tell who was informing on whom and had to watch your back. I find it inconceivable that a cabal of Kemalists would have been foolhardy enough to get together to plan a coup, and even if they did, that they would not have been found out by Gulenists hiding among them.
And in any case, there was no reason for Kemalists to act now or to rush into what was clearly an ill-planned coup. The Ergenekon and Sledgehammer verdicts had been reversed and Erdogan had long distanced himself from these trials, explicitly acknowledging they were plots against the military. Erdogan was also reversing many of his foreign policy actions that must have grated on the military: he had just reconciled with Russia and Israel and was pulling back on Syrian adventurism. Before the coup, there was not the slightest hint of tension between the government and the military establishment.
For its part, the Gulen movement has a long history, going back to the 1980s, of trying to place its sympathizers in the military ranks. And while the high command systematically tried to purge them, it is quite likely that the Gulenists were able to outwit them. To evade suspicion, Gulen is said to have instructed his sympathizers to go to great lengths, including not letting their wives wear the headscarf – a telltale sign of religiosity in Turkey – and even to drink alcohol. The steady stream of document leaks that enabled the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials, as well as the mysterious way in which investigations of these leaks have been blocked, also suggests the presence of a large number of Gulenists in the military.
All of this points to the Gulen movement as the immediate culprit behind the coup attempt. Gulenists had both the capability and the motive to launch the coup. The timing – just after military officers began to be detained and before a major sweep – also supports this theory. Many have suggested that the Gulenists decided to move early and quickly because they learned that the impending sweep had been moved forward. This is plausible, and also helps explain why the coup attempt seemed rushed and poorly planned. Under this theory, the botched coup was a last-gasp, desperate attempt to reclaim their one final remaining institutional bastion and ensure their survival in Turkey.
My best guess is that the coup was planned and organized by Gulenists but that they were joined by quite a few others as well. The joiners may have had diverse motives: personal ambition, hatred of Erdogan, or simply the belief that they were obeying orders from the higher-ups.
One of the curious aspects of the coup attempt is that it had no public face or apparent leader. I know of no coup attempt, in Turkey or elsewhere, successful or otherwise, where a clear leader was not obvious or did not emerge very quickly. In Turkey, the clearest instances of failed coup took place in the early 1960s, and these attempts were spearheaded by a well-known renegade, Colonel Talat Aydemir.
This lack of a public face is a lot less anomalous from the standpoint of Gulenist modus operandi. Gulenists always prefer to operate in the shadows, behind the scenes, and never take direct ownership of operations they launch and control. They have never formed (or explicitly joined) political organizations or parties, even though they clearly have political aims, choosing to operate within existing political parties instead. In Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, the bogus documents that led to the trials were first leaked to a “liberal” newspaper (Taraf), which thereafter acted as a front. When public support for the trials waned, leading Gulenists kept arguing that it was Erdogan who pushed for the prosecutions.
Similarly, it looks like Gulenists were hoping to remain behind the scenes and have others appear as leaders if the coup were to succeed. The putchists asked chief of general staff Hulusi Akar to lead the coup before they detained him (he refused). The declaration they drafted and that was read on state TV has a definite Kemalist tone, which suggests they wanted to make it look like the typical secularist coup. They might have hoped to be the power behind the throne once the coup succeeded, just as they shaped a large part of Erdogan’s agenda during 2007-2012.
Some of the evidence that has emerged since the coup also points to Gulenist involvement. Akar’s aide-de-camp, who was among the putschists, has confessed to being a closet Gulenist. His testimony is tainted by the fact that he was apparently badly beaten after being captured, but it is quite detailed, names names, and rings true. One of the soldiers who tried to capture Erdogan in the hotel he was vacationing had a hand-written note on him with religious invocations attributed to “H.E.” (an acronym for “Hoca Efendi,” the appellation Gulen’s disciples use for him). A police officer who had previously been removed on suspicions of being a Gulenist sympathizer was captured in one of the putschists’ tanks, wearing military camouflage.
None of these pieces of evidence (or others presented by the pro-government media) is completely dispositive on its own – especially with respect to Gulen’s own culpability. There is always the possibility that this was a rogue, pre-emptive operation by a number of Gulenists along with others, carried out without the knowledge or blessing of Gulen. Gareth Jenkins, who knows the Turkish military perhaps even better than it knows itself, is inclined to think so and is skeptical that this was a Gulenist operation planned from the top.
Erdogan’s claim about putschists’ attempt to put Akar in touch with Gulen, if true, would of course belie this scenario. But beyond that, it is well known that the Gulen movement is a highly hierarchical organization. People who have followed it closely over the years (such as Hanefi Avci or Rusen Cakir) report that very few important decision take place without Gulen’s blessing. There is certainly no tradition of autonomous, independent decision-making or dissent in the movement. It would be surprising if Gulenist officers had planned this on their own, without seeking at least the assent of their spiritual leader.
Then there is the objection that a violent military coup lies outside the modus operandi of the Gulen movement. This is true, and it is one of the things that made me cautious early on about Gulenist responsibility. Gulenists have engaged in a wide range of dirty tricks, but they have been rarely accused of armed action of explicit violence. Firing on unarmed civilians and bombing the parliament seems not the kind of thing that they would do. But then again, it is the first time that their sympathizers in the military have been called into action.
Gulenists may have eschewed assassinations in the past, but their past operations have not lacked ruthlessness. They have a disturbing record of targeting, slandering, harassing, imprisoning their perceived opponents – military officers, journalists, police commissioners, politicians -- leading on a few of occasions to their deaths.
The case against Gulen is not shut and dried. There are many things about the coup attempt that remain unclear and mysterious. If the government has serious evidence beyond what I have discussed here, it has been very coy about releasing it and sharing it with the public.
At present, the argument that Gulen was the mastermind behind the coup attempt rests mostly on circumstantial evidence. But among all the scenarios that one could come up with, it remains the only one that makes at least some sense.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this, a journalist close to the AKP claimed that the officer who proposed to put Akar in contact with Gulen was General Hakan Evrim, commander of the air base that apparently served as the headquarters of the putschists. And newspapers have now published images of Akar's complete testimony to the prosecutors, in which Akar describes what happened when putschists descended upon his office. The relevant part of the testimony reads: "...upon which, Hakan Evrim said something along the lines of 'if you'd like we can put you in touch with our opinion leader [kanaat onderi] Gulen'. I rebuffed him by saying I wouldn't talk to anyone."
In Turkey, any and all kind of documentary evidence can be forged, and it is possible that these images are doctored as well. But they look real to me. And even though Akar is clearly beholden to Erdogan at this point, I doubt that the government would choose to put such words in his mouth. In all, the statement greatly strengthens the possibility of a direct link between putschists and Gulen.No Rest for the Weary: Children in the Coal Mines
For early twentieth-century Progressive reformers committed to social justice, widespread child labor—especially in coal mines, textile mills, and department stores—was particularly disturbing. And as with other Progressive crusades, the exposé was a favorite tool. Probably the most influential and certainly the most widely read of the Progressive-era exposés of child labor was John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906). Spargo was a British granite cutter who became a union organizer and socialist and gained his formal education through extension courses at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1901, he emigrated to the United States where he became a leader of the conservative wing of the American Socialist Party. In the following excerpt, Spargo described work at the coal breaker, the area outside the mine where coal was sorted and graded, mostly by young children.
Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.”
The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners' consumption.
I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid [clear], |
ak said sales for the two prior weeks were down 2.2%. Credit: AP
How the Categories Fared Apparel Women's: Down 2.4% Men's: Up 2.3% Electronics (including appliances) Black Friday: Up 15% Midseason: Up 5.8% Finished at: Up 2.7% E-commerce Black Friday: Up 30% CyberMonday: Up 40% Finished at: Up 22.4% Luxury Midseason: Up 10.8% Finished at: Up 7.1% Gasoline Entire season: Up 30% to 35% Source: MasterCard Advisors' SpendingPulse
YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) -- It looks as though most U.S. retailers won't be getting the merry green holiday they'd hoped for.Despite a last-minute sales bump last weekend, the overall holiday retail scene continued its overall plodding underperformance compared to last year, with only a few bright spots. Among them: Amazon's proclaimed best-year ever and overall solid online sales.ShopperTrak estimated the "Super Saturday" weekend from Dec. 21-23 saw an 18.7% surge in sales over the previous year, led by almost $10 billion spent on Saturday alone. However, ShopperTrak said sales for the two weeks leading up to the weekend were down 2.2%."As we anticipated, Super Saturday weekend was indeed a significant event for retailers," Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, said in a news release. "Retail traffic was slow during the first part of the week, but last-minute shoppers swamped stores on the weekend, allowing retailers to breathe a sigh of relief.... Based on this performance, it appears our forecast of a 3.6% gain for the holiday shopping season is right in line."Overall estimates of spending gains for the season had ranged from 3.5% to 4.5%, but the final tally looks like it may be closer to the low end. MasterCard Advisors' SpendingPulse, which reports total U.S. retail sales across all payment forms, estimated a 3.6% increase for the period between Black Friday and Dec. 24. Its report characterized holiday spending for 2007 as surging around Black Friday, lagging midseason, and rallying to the finish."Overall, sales came in just above the lower end of the range we were expecting, maintaining the slower, modest growth we've been seeing throughout the year," said Michael McNamara, VP-research and analysis for MasterCard Advisors, said in the spending report. "Anyone who was looking for this holiday season to kick-start a new wave of growth would find these numbers falling short of expectation."Traditional offline retailers have been feeling the pinch. Target Corp. this week warned that its December sales would likely fall below expectations and said its previous estimates of a slight gain may actually be flat or a small loss.And even the uptick in online sales -- a solid mid-20% range of gains -- is still below last year's gains, which were closer to 30%. Tempering the results is the fact that online shopping still accounts for less than 10% of total retail spending."Retailers' cross-channel cohesion... the 'buy online, pick up in-store' options and the ability to check inventory online were factors, but some of the biggest gainers are ones that operate online only," said Sucharita Mulpuru, principal analyst at Forrester Research. She mentioned Amazon and Buy.com as likely success stories this season. They succeeded with attention to detail and customer service, she said, with everything from offering the ability to pay with alternate methods and including customer reviews to positive checkout experiences and minimal clicks for customers.Amazon indeed declared on Wednesday that 2007 was its "strongest ever" in 13 holiday seasons, reporting it sold 5.4 million items between Nov. 15 and Christmas. Other Amazon holiday-sales achievements this year included: sales of Nintendo Wii video-game consoles at 17 per second when in stock; enough GPS units sold to create a trail from New York to Philadelphia; and enough Hannah Montana wigs sold to outfit the entire audience at her Dec. 20th concert in Providence, R.I.Of course, retailers could draw more sales this week before the month officially draws to a close. The National Retail Federation characterized the season so far as "modest" gains, but cautioned that it's not over yet. NRF spokeswoman Kathy Grannis said the week after Christmas can amount to as much as 15% of a retailers' total holiday revenue. The day after Christmas is ranked as the sixth busiest of the year, she said. And there are still gift cards to redeem."No one is throwing in the towel just yet because there are still a lot of sales to be made this week," she said, "and not only seasonal, but also in new spring merchandise as well."The private sector remained the engine of growth. While federal agencies and local governments continued to lay off workers, businesses added 257,000 net new jobs in January. The biggest gains were in manufacturing, professional and business services, and leisure and hospitality.
Despite the promising numbers, various indicators create an ambiguous picture of the overall economic recovery.
Layoffs appear to be slowing as fewer people are filing claims for unemployment benefits, and factory orders have picked up.
Small businesses, though, are still not hiring much. And while sales of existing homes have started to rise, home prices continue to fall. Incomes are not growing and consumer spending is still restrained, and could come under further pressure with gas prices edging higher in recent months and as consumers revert to building up savings.
Seasonal factors may have inflated January hiring numbers in some industries, like restaurants or construction.
Steve Blitz, senior economist for ITG Investment Research, said the report nevertheless revealed strong increases in manufacturing and related job categories, like transportation and warehousing and wholesale trade. “You’ve got to give credit when things are moving in the right direction,” said Mr. Blitz, who has been cautious in heralding a recovery. “This is not a process that is going to be done in a month or two months or a year. It could take five or 10 years to get there.”
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Others were unconvinced that the recent pace of job growth would be sustained, pointing to moderate consumer spending and mild economic growth, 1.7 percent last year.
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“The problem is that there is this bifurcation here in the numbers,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “On the one hand we see rather impressive job growth, but on the other hand we’re also seeing other economic indicators that are telling us that the economy is fundamentally weak.”
Mr. Baumohl added, “We’re going to have to really very carefully dig deep below the surface for these and a lot of other economic statistics to find a consistency of what is happening in the U.S. economy.”
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The unemployment rate appeared to be falling because people were genuinely securing jobs rather than merely leaving the work force. The Labor Department adjusted its data to account for new population estimates from the 2010 Census.
Accounting for those adjustments, the labor force had a net gain of 250,000 people in January from a month earlier. Although the pool of unemployed people has been shrinking, the number remains high — 12.8 million — about equal to the population of Pennsylvania, and long-term unemployment is one of the most crushing legacies of this recent recession. For January, the Labor Department reported that 5.5 million people had been out of work for six months or more, about 43 percent of the jobless.
And according to an analysis of December’s job numbers released this week by the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative, nearly a third of the jobless have been unemployed for a year or more.
Underemployment is another stubborn problem. The number of people working part time because they cannot find full-time work was 8.2 million in January. Including that group and the 1.1 million who stopped looking for work altogether, and the broader measure of unemployment was 15.1 percent.
“You have an interesting situation where you have some permanent part-time workers,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. “These people are in jobs and the jobs are not likely to become full time.”
Sandy Pochapin, a 54-year-old former marketing manager, was laid off for the second time last May from a small business in Newton, Mass. Just before the start of the year she picked up a part-time job as a media consultant at an advertising agency. Her husband, a real estate lawyer, has also experienced severe cutbacks in his income.
The couple, who are now paying three times what they were paying for health care before Ms. Pochapin lost her job, have cut back on dinners out, and she said that replacing her eight-year-old Toyota Highlander was “not in the cards.” More painfully, the couple have dipped into their college-age son’s educational fund to keep up with mortgage payments and other expenses.
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Ms. Pochapin, a member of several networking groups, compiles job leads and recently sent out a list with more openings than she had ever seen. “I would say things are picking up,” she said. “But where they’re picking up is not where people who have been unemployed long term have skills.” She noted many openings for jobs in mobile marketing and for digital media specialists.
Indeed, one of the perennial complaints of employers is that they cannot find qualified workers. Ancestry.com, a genealogy Web site in Provo, Utah, has openings for 150 engineers, data mining specialists and developers of mobile apps. “While we find a lot of people who are unemployed,” said Eric Shoup, a senior vice president, “they are not the people who bring the skill sets we need for our business.”
He said the company did virtually all its hiring away from other companies.
Economists are beginning to worry about the self-fulfilling nature of long-term unemployment. “It’s almost starting to look like there are two job markets,” said Cliff Waldman, the economist at the Manufacturers Alliance, a trade group. “Long-term unemployment is very sticky.”Way back in 2006, my cohort Michael "Gabe" Krahulik introduced the Penny Arcade Podcast, "Downloadable Content", thusly:
Sometimes people ask us “how do you guys write the comic?” The answer is that we sit around and look at game news and we talk about it until we start laughing at something. It sounds boring and I think it probably is.
Apparently it wasn't boring
In fact, it turns out "Downloadable Content" was one of the most popular projects we've ever done. People loved the; back when when we put the episodes up on iTunes, they were #1 in Comedy. Of course there was much more to it than "us guys" sitting around looking at news with a mic on. What we thought people would hate - just how nonlinear the comic-creation process is - was what they seemed to like. How conversations would spiral off into space, collect strange minerals, and then return to inform the strips. How "real life" would suddenly come up and influence the topic.
“Downloadable Content” stopped in 2009 because it was always a hobby - Kiko, one of our designers, edited the podcasts in his spare time. He doesn't really have that anymore. We started doing episodes of Penny Arcade: The Series dedicated to the writing process, and while people liked them, they didn't do what DLC did, which was to put you in the room and leave you there. We want to get back to that, in a way you can depend on. We want it to be a regular part of the site, the real deal.
Tell me more
Okay, I will.
Our first Kickstarter was an endeavor that changed how we make Penny Arcade pretty dramatically, and we got a ton of great feedback from it. One thing people were very clear on was that some of our "stretch goals" should have been their own Kickstarters. We figured it out. Or, you figured it out, and then told us. So, this project is for "Downloadable Content" alone, and all stretch goals will either further reward backers or make this specific project better.
For example: The first stretch goal is an original theme song written and performed by myself (Tycho, occasionally also Jerry) and Kris Straub. That’s fresh. The second stretch goal improves a backer reward. If we get super stretchy, or elastic or whatever, we can "enlengthen" this season. And so on.
Here's the basics, though: we need some dedicated recording hardware, and an audio guy to edit the episodes. Together, these things will keep the turnaround smooth and make the process reliable. After pledging, you will also feel good inside. And outside. You'll feel good on your skin.
The content which will be available to download
If funded we'll produce a season of 20 original episodes of "Downloadable Content”, which works out to roughly one episode a week. The first episode will launch immediately after the Kickstarter ends; backers will receive a direct download link to it and all successive episodes. Each episode will be between 20-60 minutes, edited for the soul of wit. Backers get them first, and after two weeks every episode (barring those exclusive to backers) will go up as pay-what-you-want.
Stretch Goals
We have them. This image will be updated as needed.
(CW)TB out.Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly reportedly said that the Trump administration may let legal challenges defeat Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), according to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly reportedly said that the Trump administration may let legal challenges defeat Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), according to Fox News
Fox News reported Friday that Kelly’s comment about the program came during a private meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) earlier this week.
DACA permits people who enter the U.S. illegally as children to stay on temporary visas rather than face deportation.
Fox News reported that since March, 770,477 individuals have been granted temporary status through DACA waivers.
Some Twitter users on Friday called for the end of the DACA program, which reportedly needs to be defended in court if the Trump administration does not rescind it fully by September 5.
Deport ALL illegals (DACA, anchors). Send to BACK of LEGAL immigration line, behind families waiting to come here LEGALLY. Please end DACA. — RC (@TiensToi) July 14, 2017
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Other people on the social media platform voiced doubts about the need to eliminate the controversial initiative.
Daca is a tough call. Why can't we say by a certain age. Assimilation is easier for Daca is a tough call. Why can't we say by a certain age. Assimilation is easier for https://t.co/Rrg5qc68Pn about after four you stay? July 14, 2017
So just let DACA end and donate to those that may get deported?
Are there any other options to fix this? — Bobbo (@bobcsko) July 14, 2017
Kelly’s remarks reportedly came as officials in 10 states are threatening to file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of DACA.
Former President Barack Obama created the program via executive order in 2012, and critics have since argued he overstepped limits of presidential power.
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Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a vocal critic of illegal immigration, told Fox News Friday that he welcomes legal challenges to DACA.
“Hats off to the state Attorneys General that have brought this,” he said of the possible lawsuits.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), however, criticized Kelly as the most “unknowledgeable member of the Cabinet that I’ve ever met in my 25 years here.”
“[He’s] trying to make a fool out of us by trying to say, ‘Oh, it’s the courts,’” he said.
President Trump has repeatedly vowed to take a harder stance against illegal immigration but has voiced uncertainty about the ultimate fate awaiting DACA.
“It’s a decision that I make, and it’s a decision that’s very, very hard to make,” he told reporters on Air Force One this week.Is the Democratic National Committee looking into the possibility that Hillary Clinton will step aside? Or will it perhaps even force her to?
Cokie Roberts said on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday that Democrats are “angry at the lack of transparency” after Clinton’s collapse on a New York City street on Sunday.
“It was hours after the pneumonia diagnosis was revealed after seeing this incredibly damaging video of her being helped and stumbling into a van,” Roberts said.
“Look, there’s a reason why the campaign’s not transparent, obviously, it gives Trump ammunition and he’s been setting her up for this for months.
“Back in January, he started saying she didn’t have the strength and stamina to be president and he knew at some point that she, like all candidates, would get exhausted,” Roberts said.
“But the fact that it comes now, when the polls are tightening, and Democrats were already saying that Hillary was the only candidate who could not beat Trump. And it’s taking her off of the campaign trail, canceling her trip to California today.
“It has them very nervously beginning to whisper about trying to have her step aside and finding another candidate,” Roberts said.
Her statement seemed to floor the Morning Edition host.
“That is no small thing to say. I mean, is that a real thing?” he said.
Roberts replied it was “unlikely to be a real thing,” but continued, “I’m sure it’s an overreaction from an already skittish party.
“But you know, they have looked at what happens in that circumstance and the Democratic National Committee chair convenes the committee and they vote,” Roberts said.
“Now, ironically, the candidate everybody looks at is Joe Biden, who is older than Hillary Clinton,” she said.
Roberts added “we assume” Clinton will resume her schedule as the campaign claims.
“But there is enough unhappiness that this kind of,” talk is going on, she said.
Hear her whole statement here:
Roberts’ statement is an extension of what former MSNBC and Al Jazeera anchor David Schuster reported on Sunday.
In a series of tweets, Schuster said, “Expect emergency DNC meeting to CONSIDER replacement.”
Clarification from dem operatives @HillaryClinton pneumonia: Expect emergency DNC meeting to CONSIDER replacement. #HillarysHealth — David Shuster (@DavidShuster) September 11, 2016
He also quoted an unnamed “top Dem” saying the party can “plead” with Clinton but that “DNC bylaws are clear her nominee status now totally up to her.”
Top dem: "we can make contingencies, argue, plead with @HillaryClinton, but DNC bylaws are clear her nominee status now totally up to her." — David Shuster (@DavidShuster) September 12, 2016Whatever else people say about Joe Hockey’s unloved federal budget, it does have one irrefutable merit: it kills off the myth that Australian politics is driven by polling. For more than a decade now, there’s been a persistent idea that the state of Australian politics is somehow the people’s fault, that fear of focus groups keeps politicians hamstrung in what they can say, that party programs remain myopic for fear of being seen as “out of touch”. But beyond the cargo cult that surrounds Newspoll’s two-party preferred figures, public opinion is an irrelevance. Out in the wilds of policy, popular will is a nuisance, to be massaged, contained or bullied; or, if these don’t work, ignored. When a budget this unpopular is delivered, it’s at least refreshing to know that popular opinion has been comprehensively discarded. In a way, it’s a relief.
What Australians want, according to more qualitative polling, is a much more protectionist, statist but socially liberal nation than the one in which we live. The record levels of disaffection aren’t just caused by an unforgiving media environment or broken promises. They’re a sign that the views of the political class are diverging from those of mainstream Australia. People are retracting from politics – but it’s also retracting from them.
In the United States, what you might call the “bore in the bar” theory of democracy – that it’s all bullshit – is starting to look more persuasive. In academia, it’s called the “Economic Elite Domination” model: the unhappy idea that democracies are oligarchies in drag. This theory was once unpopular but is now resurging, partly on the back of disquieting research by two American political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page. After an analysis of 1779 legislative outcomes over a 20-year period, the researchers determined that “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence”.
Little or no independent influence. Stew on that for a moment.
Gilens and Page found that once you account for the preferences of “affluent” citizens, “the apparent connection between public policy and the preferences of the average citizen may indeed be largely or entirely spurious”. Seen this way, the shrivelling public involvement in politics isn’t a retreat from modernity and community, but a rational appraisal of how things are. After all, why give legitimacy to a system that just ignores you?
Australia isn’t the US, at least not yet. Our system lacks many of the pressure points of the American system where influence can be exerted: we don’t have unfettered political donations (not officially anyway) or congressional deadlocks; lobbyists don’t yet write legislation as a matter of routine; and our system of compulsory, preferential voting means the disenfranchised can’t get so fed up they quit politics altogether, even if record informal votes show many would like to. But we are becoming very fed up.
This is what happens now when the subject of “politicians” is brought up in a focus group. It’s described here by the public affairs researcher Scott Steel (aka blogger Possum Comitatus), but it could have come from almost any focus group held in the past few years:
“Let’s talk about politicians.” [Groans, chuckles and guffaws are the response every single time, regardless of age, gender or more complicated demography.] [More laughter.] “Give me a few words that you reckon most accurately describes politicians today.” “Just in it for themselves.” “Lying [expletives].”
“The two most popular expletives,” says Steel, “are ‘bastards’ and ‘dickheads’. Except for old ladies over 70 – they particularly like the word ‘mongrels’.”
This is our version of what the Canadian professor of politics Neil Nevitte calls “the decline of deference”. You can still catch some of that vestigial deference when elderly people call politicians “Mr”. But now those same senior citizens are also calling them mongrels.
How did it get to this? In her Quarterly Essay Great Expectations, Laura Tingle outlines some of the difficulties facing contemporary politicians. They’re weak in the face of a modern, globalised economy, but suffer intense media scrutiny at just this moment of impotence. Both the public and their representatives now have no clear, shared idea of what government is supposed to do in a deregulated market, and instead expect it to do everything. Everyone ends up disappointed. Shrinking revenues and an ageing population will “require us to forge a much more explicit new settlement, a much clearer social contract than the one we have had to date”. That this contract will end with Australia as a low-tax, small-government nation open to the world is taken as a technocratic inevitability.
The trouble for the political class is that this version of Australia is the opposite of how most of us want to live. Australians are suspicious of immigration. The public is extremely hostile to privatisation and foreign investment. We want the government to take measures, up to and including nationalisation, that will protect local jobs and manufacturing. We want more spending on health care and are willing to pay higher taxes to fund it. We support regulation, and we think big business has far too much power.
These positions are shared to a surprising extent across the political spectrum. Our leaders are frustrated by this dogged counter-vision, and the way the public clings to it. “The head members of both major parties,” as Guy Rundle puts it in an article for Crikey, “share a mutual sympathy at the stupidity of their own supporters in rejecting neoliberalism.” On the other hand, on social issues of gay marriage, voluntary euthanasia and abortion, these same leaders are decades behind “ordinary” Australians.
This dissonance helps explain why the last two election campaigns were so shambolic. They were failed sales jobs, repetitive, mendacious and joyless attempts to win over slivers of the population. The most recent, in 2013, managed to limbo even under the abysmal standard of the 2010 campaign. Several political veterans described it as the worst they had ever seen. The Labor stalwart and commentator Barry Jones, not a man for hyperbole, called it a “policy vacuum” and “the worst in our modern history for the debased quality of political discourse”. For an event supposedly tailored to what the people wanted, it left them completely dissatisfied.
When Kevin Rudd, back in the prime ministerial chair, announced additional government subsidies for apprentices’ toolboxes, no one thought it was because of a nationwide spanner shortage. It was a Hail Mary play three weeks deep, a sorry attempt to regain some traction with “blokes”. Special tax zones in the Northern Territory? Sure. Move a naval base to Queensland? Why not? But there was no detail. Like the Coalition’s Green Army of young workers and Direct Action plan to tackle climate change, these ideas came with a kind of in-built obsolescence, marked “for campaigning purposes only”. In effect, they were decoys.
The real policy platforms of the parties, particularly the Coalition, were the opposite – designed to be implemented, but kept hidden during the campaign. For the Coalition, that’s partly a feature of being out of office: since the failure of John Hewson’s ‘Fightback’ campaign in 1993, oppositions that take comprehensive, fully costed and detailed policy platforms to an election are considered deluded. Also, if voters had known what was in the budget, there would have been mayhem.
As the former Liberal senator Michael Baume advised in 2012: “Instead of having to defend the wide-ranging reforms of a complicated package … Abbott needs simply to be acknowledged as a credible alternative to a discredited Gillard government.” The kind of election Baume had in mind is a sorry one, an unpopularity contest won by the least unelectable.
If voters had known what was in the budget, there would have been mayhem
As our major political parties become more unstable – professionalised and no longer anchored to their traditional social values or bases – polling has become a sort of de facto electoral process. Advisers obsess over not giving the people what they don’t want, in a competition between leaders who contend: “you’re not sure who I am, but at least I’m not them”. Sometimes, like the Real Julia, their identity becomes unclear even to themselves. As politicians assure the electorate that they’ll never do anything unpopular, dishonesty has become routine.
Citizens have always grudgingly accepted that politicians lie, and they are willing to elect candidates who offer them scant policy detail. But when politicians lie about even that scant policy detail, it’s no longer clear exactly what elections in Australia are for. They’re not endorsements of judgement, because the judgement relies on trust. They’re not endorsements of policy, because we don’t know what it is. They are opening up a democratic deficit we can’t levy our way out of.
Instead of fronting up to the electorate, governments now invent a whole category of external bodies: commissions of audit, reviews, people’s assemblies, future summits. They create a kind of pseudo-consent, the illusion of consultation, objectivity and changed circumstances. They mimic the representative format of parliament, but do it in a way that’s both predictable and disposable. Unpopular policies already well planned seem to come from some external body, which is then quickly disbanded, and the government looks benign in comparison. Tony Abbott’s personal maxim that “it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission” has become our system of government.
The people referred to during the Howard years as “ordinary Australians” are dismayed by this process. But how much real power over policy they’ve lost is unclear – it’s possible they never had it in the first place. We don’t know. There’s no local equivalent of that Gilens and Page paper. Some domestic research shows politicians are at least concerned about the same issues as we are, even if their solutions might be different. These kinds of enquiries are scant, though. One participant in a Productivity Commission roundtable on population growth bitchily notes, “Australia lacks a culture in which social science research is valued as an important public resource.” We don’t know, in other words, and we don’t care.
For now, the only way to measure the gap between policy and the public is to look at the broader polling itself. The popular will is not an easy thing to synthesise this way. Gleaned from questionnaires, it’s often confusing and contradictory, hoodwinked by question wording, stymied by ignorance. Anyone who has been phone-polled (“How do I feel about Gladys Berejiklian?”) will recognise its limitations. It is not a platform for the creation of policy by itself. But however crude and confused it might be, an analysis of polling en masse does map the co-ordinates of disenfranchisement. It gives a voice to the largely silent half of a “national conversation”.
A national conversation. © Commonwealth of Australia
You also can’t undertake this trawl without dragging over a natural tension in democracy: just because something is popular doesn’t make it wise. Some of modern democracy’s earliest architects were very cautious about the idiocy of crowds, and warned against mainlining populism. “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage,” wrote the American founding father John Witherspoon. Instead, most countries settled on representative democracy, where candidates reflected the wishes of their constituents, but not always. It’s the philosophy contained in Edmund Burke’s famous line: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” But he didn’t have to worry about Newspoll.
The sentiment is still recognisable in contemporary Australia. In the late 1990s David Marr interviewed the independent senator Brian Harradine, who held the balance of power in the upper house. Marr confronted him with a survey that showed majority support for euthanasia. So why was he stopping it? Harradine pointed out that a majority wanted the death penalty as well, 30 years after it was abolished. “Later I checked his figures and found he was right,” wrote Marr. It left a lasting impression on him, and he spent the Howard years thinking about “the false model of democracy as perpetual popularity contest”.
There are some places, but not many, where that model doesn’t look so false. Switzerland is one. Under the Swiss system of direct democracy, citizens can bring referenda by petition, have representatives removed mid-term and strike down laws they disagree with if they have the numbers. It’s a very stable and politically engaged country, but one that has developed inequities that are almost unique. At the local level, one administrative division refused to give women the vote until 1990, when an embarrassed federal court finally forced their hand.
It’s telling that the issue that attracts the most Swiss referenda is immigration. More than ten votes have been contested on the question since the 1970s. In recent years their results have ratcheted up towards intolerance. In 2009, a measure was passed that banned minarets on mosques, despite the opposition of the federal government. Earlier this year, the country imperilled its place in the passport-free Schengen travel zone by putting a quota on immigration from the European Union.
Australia would likely have remained a much smaller country had it been left up to the people. As George Megalogenis has put it, “immigration is the defining issue in the battle of wills between politicians and the polls, because voters, if given the chance, will always prefer fewer arrivals”. Right now, polling consistently shows that 40–50% of Australians think immigration rates are too high, while only 5–10% think they’re too low. Two decades ago, opposition to immigration was much more fierce. On some polling, desire for it to be stopped altogether reached as high as 70%. When Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott each established “small Australia” policies in 2010, they were altering a bipartisan position that had led to a sustained period of high immigration. They also weren’t alone – economic uncertainty has made immigration more electorally problematic all over the world.
Did Australians accept relatively high levels of immigration for so long because they’re tolerant? Australians themselves don’t think so – half think we’re a racist country. Instead, Paul Keating invented a strategy that was then expanded and perfected by John Howard: placate the business community with high levels of immigration, and crack down on asylum seekers to create the appearance of control. Kevin Rudd’s alteration of this gambit caused extreme anxiety among his colleagues.
“To state the obvious,” Julia Gillard wrote to him in a private email immediately before her leadership challenge in 2010, “our primary is in the mid-30s; we can’t win an election with a primary like that and the issue of asylum-seekers is an enormous reason why our primary is at that low level. It is an issue working on every level – loss of control of the borders feeding into a narrative of a government that is incompetent and out of control.”
The public has long been opposed to asylum seekers arriving by boat. Malcolm Fraser’s decision in the mid 1970s to take in Vietnamese boat people might be one of the most politically unpopular ever undertaken in Australia – it had less than 10% support when enacted. Even Fraser started talking about deportation once significant numbers of onshore arrivals started. The golden age of asylum policy in Australia wasn’t golden, and it was never popular.
But despite the heat on talkback radio, there’s some doubt about whether or not the issue of boat people is as decisive as Gillard thought it was. Around a third of people rate it as one of the most important issues, but it seems to have little effect on voter intention.
There’s another reason governments take to refugees with such relish: this is one of the few areas where they can demonstrate resistance to globalisation without confronting vested interests or the economically powerful.
Australians of all political affiliations loathe privatisation. Both major parties propose it continually.
When vested interests are involved, the decision-making process is very different, and the strength of public opinion can be safely discarded. Immediately before the Iraq War in 2003, only 6% of Australians supported military involvement without UN backing. But it’s impossible to imagine Peter Costello writing John Howard a vexed email about that. The Australian’s Paul Kelly, the same person who had described Howard as “‘the most knee-jerk, poll-reactive, populist prime minister in the past 50 years”, wrote that the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators “merely want Howard to behave according to the populist parody of him that they have created”. Somehow Howard was able to prevent his knee from jerking this time.
It’s the same in the economic sphere. Take privatisation. Australians of all political affiliations loathe it. The public remains unconvinced of the benefits of selling public assets, with support falling over time. Twenty-nine per cent support the imminent sale of Medibank Private and 54% oppose it, according to Essential Media polling conducted in January this year. Ideas such as selling the Snowy Hydro scheme and the Australian Rail Track Corporation, as suggested by the National Commission of Audit, are opposed by between 50% and 70% of the population. But privatisation is evergreen. Both major parties propose it continually, especially at state level.
When it comes to industry assistance, all the parties manage to not listen to their voters. The Greens, for example, are in favour of industry assistance, even though their supporters are among the most heavily opposed when it comes to bailouts for the car industry and airlines. But nationally, there was majority support for auto industry subsidies, even costly ones, right up to the point the industry collapsed.
Government subsidies for agriculture, renewable energy and manufacturing are very popular, while only a third of people think mining is in need of a leg up. If Qantas remains in trouble, half think the government should bail it out, either by partial or outright ownership. The word “nationalisation”, not uttered in political circles in a generation, is still a live concept in the community.
We support tariffs, subsidies, heavy regulation and barriers to entry. Joe Hockey’s recent decision to block the foreign ownership of GrainCorp reflected how politically poisonous such deals are for the Nationals, but opposition in the community was powerful and widespread, and not just in regional areas. There is almost unanimous support for rejecting foreign ownership of farmland for crops and livestock.
There’s a huge community constituency for gambling reform, but very little political support outside of the independents. Over 60% support mandatory pre-commitment technology, according to Essential Media polling. A majority oppose the building of a second Sydney casino, and majorities think online gambling, poker machines and sports betting need more regulation. Politicians have huge incentives to ignore this groundswell. Gambling interests donate heavily to political parties, and state governments collect vast amounts from gambling. In New South Wales and Victoria, it comprises almost 10% of taxation revenue.
In the past decade we’ve moved from being a society that wants less tax to being one that is willing to pay a little more, as long as the money is spent on social services. That really means healthcare spending, which has become almost an obsession as the population ages.
Support for other kinds of social spending is mixed. Welfare recipients are treated with suspicion (unless they’re middle class), and the arts and foreign aid are lower priorities. Spending on public transport is always listed as important in the community, and just as routinely ignored at state and federal levels. For a long time now Australians have believed that big business |
South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
You can also get a sense of who was thought to be white by considering whether Americans considered a particular marriage to be an interracial marriage; You can also get a sense of who was thought to be white by considering whether Americans considered a particular marriage to be an interracial marriage; only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage as late as 1958. Yet Anglo-American whites were not ostracized by polite society for marrying Irish Americans or Italian Americans. Famous Jewish Hollywood stars such as George Burns not only married Gentiles, but openly partnered with them in their careers. We know that light-skinned Cubans were considered white at least as of 1950 because (despite the trepidations of the studio) the public accepted Lucy and Ricky, in a way they would never have accepted a black-white or Chinese-white couple. American Indians were considered non-white, but if they assimilated and married whites their children were generally accepted as part of white society. Did you know that Will Rogers was 9/32 Cherokee?
When I’ve pointed this out to people, they often rejoin that people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often referred to the “Irish race,” the “Italian race,” the “Jewish race.” That’s true, but they also referred to the “Anglo-Saxon race,” and the “Teutonic race,” the latter two generally considered to be superior. The racist pseudo-science of the day divided Europeans into various races by nationality or perceived nationality, and often created a hierarchy among those groups. But that was a racist hierarchy within the white group, not evidence that these groups weren’t considered to be white. This point is often obscured by the whiteness studies crowd, because racism within a white hierarchy conflicts with their understanding of American racism solely being about “whiteness.”
One can also find racist literature attacking “ethnic” Americans in terms that are consistent with the more conventional form of American racism, such as references to the need to exclude “swarthy” Jews and Italians from the United States. But these critics focused on perceived swarthiness precisely to try to persuade Americans that contrary to accepted norms, these groups were not in fact “white” and should be treated like non-whites.
Note that this does not mean that the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Arabs, and so on didn’t face discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority and occasionally even violence. They did. But historically, they were also considered white.
UPDATE: The comments are interesting, and show that the whiteness studies view has had such strong influence that many people can’t conceive of the idea that Irish, Italian, Polish, Slovak, Jewish, Greek and other immigrants to the United States could have faced a tremendous amount of discrimination from the Northeastern European establishment and yet still have been considered white. Nor do folks seem to understand that “ethnic” whites could have been considered to be white, but also been subject to racism, because people believed that there were subraces within the white category.Ben Simmons of the LSU Tigers reacts to a dunk against the Kentucky Wildcats on Jan. 5 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. LSU defeated Kentucky 85–67. Stacy Revere/Getty Images
Ben Simmons’ college basketball career ended with a press release. On Sunday, a day after Louisiana State University closed out its regular season with a 71–38 loss to Texas A&M, head coach Johnny Jones announced that the Tigers would decline all invitations to postseason tournaments—including the second-tier NIT—so the team could “utilize this time to get better and start preparations for next season.” Given that 38 points was the lowest single-game output for a Division I team all year, this was akin to dropping a turd in a punch bowl, then pre-emptively declining to take a drink.
A little more than two months ago, Magic Johnson called Simmons the best prospect since LeBron James. Now, the LSU freshman—who will reportedly sign with James’ agency in advance of June’s NBA Draft—is leaving college having played in the same number of NCAA Tournament games that LeBron did.
Though LSU’s 19–14 season turned into a joyless slog some time around mid-February, it would be absurd to call Simmons himself a disappointment. Among other superlatives, he became the first power-conference player in at least 20 years to average at least 10 rebounds and four assists per game. The only guy at a major program who came close to reaching those markers: Michigan State’s Draymond Green, who is now the second-best player on the best NBA team of all time.
The 6-foot-10 guard-forward-center also produced at least one play each night that just didn’t make sense. My favorite Simmons highlight came in a December nonconference game against North Florida. Early in the first half, the Australian freshman drove into the lane, where he was surrounded by all five Ospreys defenders. With no obvious passing lanes available, Simmons flipped the ball backward and over his head to a wide-open teammate for a corner three. It was beautiful and strange, and the play-by-play announcer didn’t even notice that a 19-year-old had just done something stupidly wonderful.
In moments like that one, it was obvious that Simmons didn’t belong on a college court. That fact was just as obvious during LSU’s 33-point beatdown at the hands of Texas A&M, albeit for different reasons. Having watched almost every minute Ben Simmons played this season—this LSU fan skipped the end of that A&M game, for reasons of sanity preservation—I’m convinced that everyone would’ve been better off if he’d never shown up on campus.
On account of his status as the presumptive No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, Simmons’ brief tenure in an LSU uniform was essentially a seasonlong scouting combine. Every play he made, or didn’t make, was a referendum on his future pro career—whether he was too unselfish or tried hard enough on defense or could ever fix his jump shot.
This all made for great content for the ESPN family of networks and Internet properties, which broadcast 30 LSU games this season. It also provided ample fodder for NBA draft pundits, who flirted with moving Simmons down their boards any time he failed to look like John Havlicek and Oscar Robertson put together. This running commentary on his NBA potential revealed the true purpose of his four-month undergrad basketball internship. Ben Simmons wasn’t playing college basketball. He was creating tape for pro scouts.
Simmons went to school because the NBA made him do it. In 2005—10 years after Kevin Garnett ushered in an era of prep-to-pro players that included Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, and the aforementioned LeBron James—the league and its players association agreed to bar players from going to the league straight out of high school. (Though Simmons grew up in Australia, he moved to Florida a few years ago to attend Montverde Academy, a prep school.) David Stern, who was then the NBA commissioner, had said in 2001 that “a couple of years more of seasoning would increase [players’] maturity” and would send “messages to kids who are practicing their skills who should think about getting an education rather than coming right to [the] NBA.” While the onus was placed on the players themselves to set a good example, the NBA—and its unofficial minor-league partner, the NCAA—has profited from all that extra seasoning. As Stern explained in 2012, “We would like a year to look at them … to see how the players do against first-class competition in the NCAAs and then teams have the ability to judge and make judgments, because high-ranking draft picks are very, very valuable.”
Simmons’ season was exactly this: a demonstration of value. He led LSU in points (19.2 per game), rebounds (11.8), assists (4.8), steals (2.0), and blocks (0.8). Thanks mostly to his passing skills, he made everyone around him look better. Nobody on his team did Simmons the same favor.
Sometimes, LSU looked great. The Tigers beat Kentucky by 18 back in January, and a few weeks after that they led then No. 1 Oklahoma for nearly all 40 minutes before losing by 2 on a 15-footer in the waning moments. In that game against the Sooners, Simmons shot the ball just once in the last 10 minutes. That time, the critics were right: He could’ve been more aggressive. Maybe he was afraid to shoot, due to a lack of confidence in his balky jumper. But Simmons’ coach and his teammates could also never quite figure out how to put him in a position to succeed.
LSU’s point guard, Tim Quarterman, spent the whole year dribbling sadly around the perimeter and failing to make entry passes. Simmons’ partner in the post, Craig Victor, blocked just 16 shots all season and finished third in the NCAA in personal fouls per game. Keith Hornsby, the team’s best shooter, missed 13 games with a sports hernia. LSU’s second-best player, freshman Antonio Blakeney, had a 10-game stretch in the middle of the year during which he averaged just 6 points a game. They played at times as if they were nothing more than the props in someone else’s basketball drill.
There wasn’t much coaching, in any case. Johnny Jones could not put together a credible defense—according to KenPom.com, the Tigers are a remarkably terrible 145th in the country in defensive efficiency. Simmons often failed to guard anyone, in part because his team had no chance to win if he went to the bench with foul trouble. On the other end of the floor, LSU’s half-court offense tended to devolve into the following set play: Stand around for 20 seconds. Throw the ball to Ben Simmons, who would then back up to half court before driving into the lane and passing the ball out for a contested three-pointer with one second left on the shot clock. Clang.
It all would’ve been a whole lot easier if Simmons could have just passed the ball to himself. But nothing about his season was easy, because the likely No. 1 pick in this year’s draft didn’t play the one-and-done game in the usual way.
While it deprives the world’s best young players of an NBA paycheck, the league’s prep-to-pro ban does give college basketball fans the chance to root for stars like Derrick Rose, Anthony Davis, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Those three guys all suited up for John Calipari, whose Memphis and Kentucky teams have served as the NBA’s unofficial development league—a way station where top prospects can team up with other great players and benefit from systems that deploy their talents effectively.
Simmons’ season wouldn’t have been nearly as depressing if he’d made the same decision. The Aussie transplant, who came to LSU because his godfather is an assistant coach for the Tigers, did not join a glorified pro franchise. In one sense, he had a true college basketball experience: If Simmons didn’t belong on a college court, his teammates certainly did. At the same time, he apparently didn’t take school seriously—he was benched for the first few minutes of a game for academic reasons and wasn’t eligible for the Wooden Award because he didn’t maintain a 2.0 GPA.
The age rule lives on because it works too well for everyone who isn’t the player himself. The NBA gets a prized employee a year closer to his prime. The NCAA gets a year of free but highly marketable top-level basketball. Fans get a potential star playing under the banner of old alma mater. ESPN gets several dozen two-hour blocks of television programming. No one but the athlete is truly inconvenienced, and everyone is happy so long as the internal tensions of the arrangement are never stretched to their limits.
In his one NCAA season, Ben Simmons accomplished what Derrick Rose, Anthony Davis, and Karl-Anthony Towns couldn’t: He made those internal tensions visible. He was the Great Heightened Contradiction. The NCAA got a year of unpaid labor out of someone who plainly would rather have been collecting a paycheck. Fans got a mediocre season whose scattered highlights only made the dreariness stand out more. And the NBA got its year of scouting, sure, but to what end?
For all the nitpicks and finger-wagging, LSU’s desultory season won’t affect Simmons in any material way: He’ll still probably go No. 1 in the draft, and he’ll still get an enormous shoe deal, and in all likelihood he’ll still be the star people projected him to be a year ago. Ben Simmons made some great passes, and he swooped through the air for some spectacular dunks. But in the end, nothing he did in college mattered at all. It was a worthless exercise, one whose only value lay in demonstrating the stupidity of the rule that made it necessary.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 NCAA Tournament.Money may not grow on trees, but gold does—or at least it accumulates inside of them. Scientists have found that trees growing over deeply buried deposits of gold ore sport leaves with higher-than-normal concentrations of the glittering element. The finding provides an inexpensive, excavation-free way to narrow the search for ore deposits.
Scientists have long had clues that trees and other vegetation pulled gold from the soil and transported it to their leaves, but the evidence wasn’t clear. The gold particles could have stuck to the leaves after being blown there as dust, for example. To bolster the case that the gold came from soil beneath the trees, researchers conducted a series of field studies and lab tests.
At one site in Western Australia, the scientists gathered leaves, twigs, and bark from eucalyptus trees growing above a known gold deposit. The deposit is about the size of a football field and lies 30 meters or more below ground, but at today’s gold prices it’s too small and sparse to be worth excavating. The team gathered the same parts from trees growing 200 meters away from the ore. Although background concentrations of gold in vegetation are typically less than 2 parts per billion (ppb), dried leaves from the trees growing above the ore deposit—but not those 200 meters away—had gold levels up to 80 ppb, says team member Mel Lintern, a geochemist at CSIRO’s Earth Science and Resource Engineering division in Kensington, Australia. (CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, is Australia’s national science agency.)
Likewise, field tests by Lintern’s group at a site in southern Australia showed that eucalyptus trees growing above a deposit lying 35 meters underground had 20 times more gold in the gummy substances coating their leaves than did trees that grew 800 meters away. Previous studies had noted anomalous concentrations of gold in the leaf-coating substances, Lintern says, but researchers couldn’t discount the possibility that the tiny particles of the metal had stuck to the leaves after being carried there by winds.
That’s where the team’s new study gleams. By growing seedlings in greenhouses insulated from airborne dust and watering them with gold-laced solutions, the researchers demonstrated that trees actually pick up the metal from soil and deposit it within their leaves. The scientists report their findings today in Nature Communications.
The new research provides “a conclusive set of evidence … from a very nicely constructed set of experiments,” says Clifford Stanley, a geochemist at Acadia University in Wolfville, Canada. “The tree is a conveyor belt bringing gold to the surface,” he notes. Like other such elements in the earth, gold gets sucked up by the plant as it absorbs nutrients in the soil. Then, as a dissolved mineral, it gets transported throughout the tree, although the highest concentrations are typically found in leaves. “When you see the particles of gold inside the plants,” Stanley says, “all doubt goes away.”
Don’t think about mining trees, however. Average concentrations of gold in the leaves are much higher than normal, but individual particles of the metal are still very small, few, and far between. Even the largest particles—which Lintern and his team have jokingly dubbed “phytonuggets”—were no more than 8 micrometers across, about half the diameter of the finest human hair. The trees don’t have a biological need for the element, Lintern says; indeed, it may be toxic to them. “To the trees, gold may be just another heavy metal to be got rid of.”
Though the phytonuggets are too small to be collected and mined, they can serve as a sign that gold deposits may lie within the reach of a tree’s roots. Eucalyptus trees, which can grow lengthy taproots to reach deep ground water in arid areas, may stretch down 40 meters.
Developing and using new techniques to find gold is becoming increasingly important, Lintern says. Worldwide, new discoveries of the metal are down 45% over the past decade. “All the easy gold has been found already,” he notes. By analyzing leaves and twigs, prospectors would waste no money on digging and cause no environmental damage. All that’s required is a field trip to gather large samples of leaves and then some chemical and x-ray analyses of the material back in the lab. “It’s a relatively inexpensive first pass at prospecting,” he says. “The trees are doing the work for you.”Maintenance man who molested and killed Jorelys Rivera, 7, hangs himself in jail
The 20-year-old maintenance man sentenced to life in prison for beating and killing a 7-year-old girl, who was found in a trash bin has committed suicide in his jail cell.
Ryan Brunn was found unresponsive at the Jackson State Prison today and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.
'I can confirm that Ryan Brunn did commit suicide,' said Kristen Stancil, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.
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Murderer: Ryan Brunn admitted killing seven-year-old Jorleys Rivera before killing himself in his prison cell on Thursday
Coverup: Ryan Brunn, 20, told a judge he killed Jorelys Rivera so she wouldn't tell her parents that he had molested her
Brunn killed himself by hanging, a source told 11Alive News.
Ryan Brunn had pleaded guilty on Tuesday to several charges including murder and child molestation in the December 2 killing of Jorelys Rivera.
He responded 'Yes, sir,' when a judge asked if he was pleading guilty to several charges. The judge accepted his plea and sentenced him to life without parole.
'I'd like to apologize for everything that's done. Lo Siento,' Brunn said, apologizing in Spanish as he took the stand briefly a second time.
Brunn said he chose the girl because he happened to find her roller skate and used it to lure her to a vacant apartment, where he killed her, he told the judge.
He said he first sexually assaulted her.
'I didn't want her to go home and tell her mom or dad on me. So I cut her,' he told the Cherokee County judge.
He bound her arms with plastic ties in the bathtub and then taped her face before cutting her with a razor he uses to slice carpet, he said.
When she didn't die immediately, he hit her about five times with a 'hammer-like object' and stabbed her in the chest. He stuffed her body in a garbage bag and threw it into a trash compactor, he said.
Brunn spoke softly and candidly to the judge as members of Rivera's family sat in the front row sobbing.
A mother's pain: Jocelyn Rivera wept in court as Ryan Brunn plead guilty
Guilty: Ryan Brunn, seen here after his arrest, admitted to charges of murder, child molesting and kidnapping before he hanged himself
A statement from the girl's mother, Joselinne Rivera, was read in court.
'The rest of my life I am going to feel terrible and destroyed because of the harm you did to my daughter,' Rivera said in the statement. 'I desire this man the worst possible of the world, and that they do to him the worst so he suffers.'
Brunn's defense attorney David Cannon addressed reporters after the sentencing.
'He was remorseful. A child's life was lost and he was sentenced. And that's the bottom line ladies and gentlemen. It's over,' Cannon said.
Authorities found the child's body three days after her mother reported her missing from the Canton apartment complex. After getting rid of the body,
Brunn said he returned to his apartment and then went out with friends to Walmart before returning home to smoke pot and meth.
Grief: Joselin Rivera, centre, Jorelys' mother, said she will never recover from the murder of her daughter
Two days after the killing, Brunn began 'freaking out' and wrote a note on the back of a McDonald's receipt saying the girl's body was in the trash compactor and taped it to the bin, he told the judge. When the judge asked why he did that, he responded, 'I was high.'
Police say Brunn snatched the girl as she walked from the playground to her apartment to get sodas for her friends.
Brunn was being held without bond at the Cherokee County jail. His family has said he is innocent. The charges carried the possibility of a death sentence if convicted, but prosecutors had not decided yet whether to seek it.
Brunn has no known criminal past and he cleared background checks by the company that runs the apartment complex where he had been working about a month. Authorities say Brunn had keys to the apartment and the trash compactor bin where Rivera's body was left.
'We're very glad this is over for us, and especially the family,' said Canton Police Chief Jeff Lance after the sentencing.We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.
Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.
We are moving ahead by honoring Current’s values. Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily — especially now, during the presidential election campaign. Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation.
As we move toward this summer’s political conventions and the general election in the fall, Current is making significant new additions to our broadcasts. We have just debuted six hours of new programming each weekday with Bill Press (Full Court Press, at 6 am ET/3 am PT) and Stephanie Miller (Talking Liberally, at 9 am ET/6 pm PT).
We’re very excited to announce that beginning tonight, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will host Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. Eliot is a veteran public servant and an astute observer of the issues of the day. He has important opinions and insights and he relishes the kind of constructive discourse that our viewers will appreciate this election year. We are confident that our viewers will be able to count on Governor Spitzer to deliver critical information on a daily basis.
All of these additions to Current’s lineup are aimed at achieving one simple goal — thegoal that has always been central to Current’s mission: To tell stories no one else will tell, to speak truth to power, and to influence the conversation of democracy on behalf of those whose voice is too seldom heard. We, and everyone at Current, want to thank our viewers for their continued steadfast support.
Sincerely,
Al Gore & Joel Hyatt
Current’s FoundersDo you ever feel like you’re taking crazy pills with all these false, leftist narratives being shoved down your throat? Down is up and up is being chucked into a bucket full of stupid? With a serving of Arby’s yak vomit. Well you’re not alone, and there’s a judge who decided he wasn’t taking it anymore.
The “client” just happened to be running from a car after, like, gun shots were fired — total coincidence. At one in the morning —he was out jogging while he was fresh. In a neighborhood in which he didn’t live — cause maybe he and the wife and kids will move there. Hiding from police in a private dock, in the water — he wanted to see the pretty, pretty boats. With a gun holster — because…fashion?
You’ve gotta give the defender some credit for at least trying the meme “White Cops Shoot Unarmed Black Men all the time,” and my innocent, unarmed client was just trying to not get killed. And he wanted to take a dip in the water at 1 am. Doctor says it’s good for the skin.
The attorney never got a chance to say why his client had a gun holster and no gun. Here’s our take: a gun holster, with no gun, equals style. Pretty sure Kanye West is featuring it in his new fashion line. Not because he’s black, but because he’s Kanye. Gold-plated Gun Holster, Without Gun. It’s a thing, just Google it.
So applause to Judge Hurley, who got to say what many of us are thinking and can’t say, lest we’re called racists and thus blacklisted from all of society for all of time.
Now excuse me, I have to go buy a gun holster for my next gala.Matt Bellamy also reveals that he 'would love to do a film soundtrack'
Muse have spoken about their new album ‘The 2nd Law’ and have revealed that Hans Zimmer, the composer of The Dark Knight Rises has been a big influence on the record.
‘The 2nd Law’ is due to be released on October 1 in the UK and October 2 in the US and includes recent single ‘Survival’ and dubstep-influenced track ‘Unsustainable’, which you can hear at the bottom of the page.
Speaking to Classic Rock, singer Matt Bellamy responded to a question about whether he considered ‘The 2nd Law’ to be very cinematic by saying that he did and that film soundtracks had always been a big influence on the band.
He said of this: “I’ve always been very influenced by and interested in film music, growing up watching Stephen Spielberg films or John Williams’ stuff. And I’ve always been a big fan of Hans Zimmer.”
He continued: “He’s the greatest film composer of recent times. That song ‘The 2nd Law’, you can definitely hear some Hans Zimmer influence.”
Then asked if he’d be interested in doing a soundtrack of his own, Bellamy said: “Making a film soundtrack is probably harder than making an album. It takes a lot of work, a lot of time. And it’s something I’d like to do one day. But we need to take a longer break to do that.”
Bellamy also reiterated his opinion that the band’s new album is “very diverse”, saying of this: “It’s a very diverse album. And every song has been produced very specifically and differently to whatever is best for the song. I think it’s definitely our most diverse album.”
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The singer also said that the band would be undertaking “outdoor shows” next summer, but did not say whether they would be festival appearances or the band’s own shows.
He added: “The idea for the European tour this autumn is that we’re just going to do a quick tour, because we’re going to come back again and do some outdoor concerts in the summer. We’ll definitely still have lots of video stuff. But I think we’ll do something a bit more spectacular for the outdoor concerts next summer.”
‘The 2nd Law’ is the follow-up to 2009’s ‘The Resistance’ and has been recorded in London. It contains a total of 13 tracks.
The Devon trio will tour the UK in October, playing five shows. The gigs begin at Glasgow’s SECC on October 24, before the band move onto London’s O2 Arena for two shows on October 26 and 27. They then play Birmingham LG Arena on October 30 before finishing up at Manchester Arena on November 1.Law Professor Jonathan Turley makes note of a little reported but extremely alarming development at the United Nations:
While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians. Though the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism. It is viewed as a transparent bid to appeal to the “Muslim street” and our Arab allies, with the administration seeking greater coexistence through the curtailment of objectionable speech. Though it has no direct enforcement (and is weaker than earlier versions), it is still viewed as a victory for those who sought to juxtapose and balance the rights of speech and religion.
As Turley notes, the rise of Muslim populations in Europe, among whom respect for Western concepts such as freedom of speech are much less prevalent, has led to several examples of people being prosecuted for actions merely because they offend someone’s religious beliefs:
• In Holland, Dutch prosecutors arrested cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot for insulting Christians and Muslims with cartoons, including one that caricatured a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist as zombies who want to marry and attend gay rallies. • In Canada, the Alberta human rights commission punished the Rev. Stephen Boission and the Concerned Christian Coalition for anti-gay speech, not only awarding damages but also censuring future speech that the commission deems inappropriate. • In Italy, comedian Sabina Guzzanti was put under criminal investigation for joking at a rally that “in 20 years, the pope will be where he ought to be — in hell, tormented by great big poofter (gay) devils, and very active ones.” • In London, an aide to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was arrested for “inciting religious hatred” at his gym by shouting obscenities about Jews while watching news reports of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.Also, Dutch politician Geert Wilders was barred from entering Britain as a “threat to public policy, public security or public health” because he made a movie describing the Quran as a “fascist” book and Islam as a violent religion. • In Poland, Catholic magazine Gosc Niedzielny was fined $11,000 for inciting “contempt, hostility and malice“by comparing the abortion of a woman to the medical experiments at Auschwitz. The “blasphemy” cases include the prosecution of writers for calling Mohammed a “pedophile” because of his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha (which was consummated when she was 9). A far-right legislator in Austria, a publisher in India and a city councilman in Finland have been prosecuted for repeating this view of the historical record.
And adherence to the outmoded concept that “blasphemy” is something that government has any right to concern itself with isn’t limited to Europe and Canada; earlier this year the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania denied a corporate registration because it considered the corporate name “blasphemous.”
In a free society, of course, there is no room for laws against blasphemy, as the Supreme Court made clear in the 1952 case Burstyn v. Williams:
[F]rom the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures
Yes, it’s just a UN Resolution and, yes, it has no teeth and can’t be enforced, but it’s symbolic and it’s incredibly disturbing, and completely inexcusable, that an American President would side with the censors.
H/T: The Crossed PondNews Halong Bay on silver-screen
on
The recent Hollywood blockbuster Kong: Skull island has brought Vietnam’s beauty to millions of audience all over the world. The scenery is “gorgeous and otherworldly” according to Vogt-Roberts, the talented director of Kong. But this spectacular beauty of Halong Bay has been featured in other famous films before that many moviegoers might not know.
1, Pan (2015)
Directed by Joe Wright – successful director of Pride and Prejudice, Atonement và Anna Karenina- the movie depicts the fairytale land of Neverland and the residents there. The real location used to create the magical world is attractions in Vietnam. The footage for Pan was shot in world-renowned Halong Bay, Ninh Binh and Quang Binh.
A scene from the movie that features Halong Bay
Hang En in Quang Binh
2, Kong: Skull Island (2017)
New released movie Kong has been shot mainly in Halong Bay, Ninh Binh, Quang Binh. Halong Bay this time is depicted as Skull Island – Home to the giant Kong. The surreal landscape has inspired many tourists to visit this attraction.
3, James Bond: Tomorrow never dies (1997)
James Bond: Tomorrow never dies is the eighth spy movie in the famous James Bond series. Filmed in 1997, the production crew had chosen Halong Bay and Ho Chi Minh city as the shooting scenes. Long before Hollywood, Vietnam unique beauty has drew attention of foreign filmmakers.
Unfortunately, the film was never shot in Vietnam due to government permission problem. The Halong scene was shot in Phang Nga Bay, Thailand instead.
4, Indochine (1992)
Indochine is a French movie which told the story of French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter. The film was shot mainly in Imperial City, Hue, Ha Long (Ha Long Bay) and Ninh Binh (Phát Diệm Cathedral) in Vietnam. The movie was appreciated by critics and audiences which won Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In the future, let’s hope that there will be more hit movies shot in Halong Bay. More and more audiences can experience the stunning view of this World Heritage’s site.Story highlights The museum has 34,678 items in its collection
The project puts them at your fingertips
(CNN) The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art can teach us a thing or two about taking our texting game to the next level.
When you text this museum how you're feeling, you don't get a cliched cat gif. No, it responds with a work of art that captures your mood.
The idea behind the " Send Me SFMOMA " project is genius. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has 34,678 items in its collection. If they were all out on display, you'd need to walk 121 miles to see them all.
At any given time, the museum can only display about 5% of the collection. And that's where this Netflix of art feature comes in -- it literally places artwork on the palm of your hand.
It's simple: Text 572-51 with the words "send me" followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji. And the museum will personally curate a piece based on that.
Read MoreThe following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to futures studies:
Futures studies (also called futurology) – study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and parallel to the field of history. History studies the past, futures studies considers the future. Futures studies (colloquially called "futures" by many of the field's practitioners) seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends.
General concepts [ edit ]
Futures techniques [ edit ]
Organizations [ edit ]
Research centers [ edit ]
Academic programs [ edit ]
See also: Acceleration Studies Foundation's annotated list of 10 primary and 60+ secondary graduate futures studies programs.
Futurologists [ edit ]
Publications [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Periodicals and monographs [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Muscle is a soft tissue found in most animals. Muscle cells contain protein filaments of actin and myosin that slide past one another, producing a contraction that changes both the length and the shape of the cell. Muscles function to produce force and motion. They are primarily responsible for maintaining and changing posture, locomotion, as well as movement of internal organs, such as the contraction of the heart and the movement of food through the digestive system via peristalsis.
Muscle tissues are derived from the mesodermal layer of embryonic germ cells in a process known as myogenesis. There are three types of muscle, skeletal or striated, cardiac, and smooth. Muscle action can be classified as being either voluntary or involuntary. Cardiac and smooth muscles contract without conscious thought and are termed involuntary, whereas the skeletal muscles contract upon command.[1] Skeletal muscles in turn can be divided into fast and slow twitch fibers.
Muscles are predominantly powered by the oxidation of fats and carbohydrates, but anaerobic chemical reactions are also used, particularly by fast twitch fibers. These chemical reactions produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules that are used to power the movement of the myosin heads.[2]
The term muscle is derived from the Latin musculus meaning "little mouse" perhaps because of the shape of certain muscles or because contracting muscles look like mice moving under the skin.[3][4]
Structure
The anatomy of muscles includes gross anatomy, which comprises all the muscles of an organism, and microanatomy, which comprises the structures of a single muscle.
Types
The body contains three types of muscle tissue: ( |
animal, to survive outside of the womb earlier and earlier. The necessary time inside the womb has been reduced. In 2006, one of the world’s youngest premature infants was delivered and survived at just twenty-one weeks and six days, two weeks before the legal limit for terminations in the United Kingdom. This is, in and of itself, partial ectogenesis.
A neonatal intensive care unit, nowadays, is capable of supporting a premature infant as it develops outside the womb, as a normal fetus would within the uterus.
Artificial wombs have existed for decades, as evident in successful research projects with animal, and human fetuses, sustained and developed outside of the maternal body.
A series of experiments using ex vivo (out of the body) uterine environments, are able to support fetuses in early pregnancy for a period of time, presenting new techniques for creating and supporting life. These artificial wombs have been shown to supply nutrients and oxygen to fetuses, while also including an artificial placenta for fetal circulation of fluids and removal of wastes.
According to an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences entitled “The Artificial Womb,” the first attempts at ex vivo human uteri and embryos were conducted in 1982 in Bologna, Italy and in 1983 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Such experiments raised ethical concerns and the experimental programs ceased due to strong opposition.
Mammalian fetuses have been the primary focus of these uterus model experiments. In the mid-1990s, goat fetuses were maintained for weeks in incubators containing artificial amniotic fluid. A BioEngineer article reports Tokyo researchers threaded catheters through vessels in the umbilical cords of goat fetuses, providing them with oxygenated blood.
There were complications with this artificial environment, including circulatory failure and other technical difficulties; none of the goat fetuses survived past three weeks. Complete artificial gestation is evidently still a work in progress.
Image found here.
Complete ectogenesis will require further solutions, including finding a way to replicate the complex and varying flow of blood, oxygen, nutrients and hormones that a mother’s womb provides for the fetus.
Researchers have attempted to reproduce the endometrium, a cell layer of the uterus that covers and nourishes the fetus during pregnancy, as a way to counter these difficulties. If successful, this would make it possible to transfer embryo into a system, containing a placenta and umbilical cord, giving the ability to supply nutrients and remove waste.
An artificial womb is yet to produce a single surviving offspring, either animal or human; but eventually, if technological advancements persist, human and mammalian embryos will no longer need a uterus in the early stages for survival.
Bioethics and Politics of the Womb
Ectogenetic technology will change the way we understand “birth”. In an age of motherless birth, a significant number of women could take advantage of an artificial womb. An Annals of the New York Academy of Sciencesarticle lists two major benefits of ex vivo uteri: an artificial uterus could enable women with damaged or diseased uteri to have offspring, and it could function as an incubator for infants who are delivered prematurely.
Ectogenesis could also reduce fetal mortality due to prematurity, and potentially prevent fetal malformations. Often, when children are born with malformations, damage is done to organ systems before birth. N. Scott Adzick, a surgeon-in-chief at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, describes the need for a womb-like environment to perform fetal surgeries: “If you’d only gotten there earlier on, you could have prevented the damage. I felt it might make sense to treat certain life-threatening malformations before birth”.
BioEngineer chronicles the pregnancy of Felicia Rodriguez from West Palm Beach, Florida in the late 1990s, whose fetus, at twenty-two weeks, was diagnosed with a congenital malformation. Surgeons at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia performed a fetal surgery, first making a Caesarean-type incision before removing the mass. The pregnancy continued thereafter, and Rodriquez gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
Additionally, ectogenetic technology means it will be easier for infertile, gay and transgendered couples to have children; all one needs now is an embryo and the artificial womb, replacing the surrogate system and saving time and resources.
Ectogenesis could theoretically end abortion. As the Genetic Literacy Project points out, “If a developing embryo or fetus is not viable and the mother wants it out of her uterus, that’s her right. But what happens once we have the technology to remove it from her without killing it and let the pregnancy continue in an artificial womb?” The argument that ectogenesis will end abortion dates back to when the idea was invented.
Despite these potential benefits of artificial wombs, ethical and legal concerns have been brought up since the term “ectogenesis” was developed in the early twentieth century.
It is true that artificial wombs could provide opportunities for parents to conceive children, but ectogenesis lacks the advantages of a traditional birth. The sensation of a growing fetus inside a woman’s body is a kind of connection that cannot exist within an artificial womb. The natural processes of pregnancy and birth are considered essential for the bonding and attachment between mother and child, as stressed in several studies on maternal-fetal attachment.
In an exploratory study of women’s views towards artificial wombs, man-made uteri were reported to raise “feelings of shock, detachment, and possible harm to the mother-child relationship”.
The same study also showed that wombs were associated with femininity, comfort, support, affection, intimacy, and the beginning of motherhood, both physically and symbolically. Moreover, the womb helps prepare a woman for motherhood, as “even the timing of birth is determined by the fetus in a natural birth, and prepares her for her new role as a mother”.
The author of the study, Ruth Landau of the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, describes what artificial wombs and pregnancies deprive women of: “Pregnancy with an artificial womb, without the expected culmination of birth, will essentially be a totally medicalized and mechanized process under the full control of physicians and engineers and without the active participation of the genetic mother. … [I]f an artificial womb were used, this would allow the future mother to live her life without an interference or demands from the developing fetus, thus allowing her to continue to perceive her own needs as central and not switch to focus on the child”.
But perhaps the most important question or questions to consider, from a familial stand point, is if a fetus develops in an artificial womb, whose child is it anyway? To whom does it belong? And what if during the pregnancy in the artificial womb, one parent decides to “pull the plug”? Who will have parental rights? Will the state have any rights, if the embryo develops outside a woman’s womb? Will fetuses in artificial wombs have the same status and rights as fetuses in women’s wombs? Will contracts concerning embryos in artificial wombs be enforceable?
Returning to abortion, theorists suggest that having ectogenesis as an alternative to surgical or chemical termination does not solve the abortion debate, but rather continues it; ectogenesis can be seen to still impede and pose a threat to a woman’s right to undergo an abortion. According to Sarah Langford, from the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, being denied abortion and ectogenesis coupled with fetal adoption both end with the same result: an individual who is the genetic offspring of that woman being brought into the world.
Research has shown that women with unwanted pregnancies would still not opt for ectogenesis. Leslie Cannold interviewed women for her research published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. She asked women what they would do if they were pregnant and did not want to raise the child, but had access to ectogenetic technology. Cannold reported that “women on both sides of the abortion debate rejected ectogenesis as a solution based on similar concepts of maternal responsibility. … [E]ctogenesis presented greater moral concern to this group than abortion, because women who chose ectogenesis over abortion not only abandoned their responsibility of raising the child but also of gestating the fetus”.
Another consideration is the physiological and psychological effects of children born through ectogenesis. As Jessica H. Schultz points out in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, the effects of ectogenesis on a fetus developing into a child “cannot be assessed in experiments on animals. … If it is unethical to attempt ectogenesis in humans until we have a reasonable assurance that it is safe, and we can have no reasonable assurance that it is safe until it is carried out, we seem to be in a classic ‘Catch 22’ situation. Work on ectogenesis will remain forever unjustifiable.”No one, it can be argued, knows more about the history of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. The investigative journalist, who served in the Navy and attended law school in his native Boston, has the distinction of having written the first book about the NSA: “The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency.”
Since that 1982 best seller, Bamford has written three more books that delve into the NSA: “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency” (2001); “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies” (2004); and “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret N.S.A. From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” (2008).
A former distinguished visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Bamford now lives in Washington, D.C., and London.
He answered questions by email about the NSA in light of the recent case of Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the agency who leaked details of classified mass surveillance programs, including PRISM, which collects metadata from Internet sites.
Q: What do you make of Edward Snowden’s actions?
A: With regard to the information he released on domestic surveillance, I consider him a whistleblower. He revealed details of massive violations by the NSA of the privacy rights of all Americans. The NSA has no constitutional right to secretly obtain the telephone records of every American citizen on a daily basis, subject them to sophisticated data mining and store them forever. It’s time government officials are charged with criminal conduct, including lying to Congress, instead of going after those exposing the wrongdoing.
Q: What has changed the most about the NSA since your last book, “The Shadow Factory,” came out in 2008?
A: The agency has expanded enormously, in terms of size, power and invasiveness since “The Shadow Factory” was published. As I wrote in my Wired magazine cover story last year, the agency has been going on a massive building spree, expanding eavesdropping locations around the world, including one for 4,000 intercept operators at its facility near Augusta, Ga. In addition, it is in the process of building a gigantic one million square-foot surveillance center in Utah where it will store billions of records, phone calls, email and Google searches, many of them involving Americans.
The agency has also increased enormously in power. In my current July 2013 cover story in Wired, I write about Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of NSA, and how he has become the most powerful figure in the history of American intelligence. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign or the depth of his secrecy. As a four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force and the Second Army.
Q: The NSA predicted, as you wrote in “The Shadow Factory,” that it would be “plowing through phone calls, e-mails, and other data at more than a quadrillion operations a second,” breaking the so-called petaflop barrier. A mere quadrillion operations a second — is that child’s play these days?
A: As I wrote in my Wired cover story last year, the NSA is secretly building the world’s fastest and most powerful computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the U.S. developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Having broken the petaflop barrier, they are now working on a computer with exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and the next goal will be zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop. Beyond yottaflop, names have not yet been invented.
Q: In “The Shadow Factory,” you wrote that the NSA’s watch list — “of people, both American and foreign, thought to pose a danger to the country” — once had only 20 names on it, then rose to “an astonishing half a million.” Do you know what the figure is now?
A: The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, known as TIDE, now contains about 875,000 names.
Q: PRISM has reportedly given the NSA access to exabytes of confidential data. To give readers some perspective, roughly how much information is contained in an exabyte? How many books could fit in one?
A: An exabyte is about 960,767,920,505,705 pages of text or about 4,803,839,602,528 books containing 200 pages.
Q: Privacy concerns aside, one of the problems with collecting all this data, you have written, is that “the NSA is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood.” What does the NSA need to do to make practical use of this data?
A: The problem is the bigger you build the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle. Thus, despite all this collection, the NSA missed the Boston bombing, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. And most, if not all, of the “successes” they point to could have been discovered using much less invasive surveillance. Thus, they should collect less hay and give analysts better training in ways to find needles.
Q: In “The Shadow Factory,” you quote the late Sen. Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said the NSA’s data collection “could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” What do you make of Church’s comments today?
A: He was enormously prescient and we should have heeded his warning.
JOHN McMURTRIE is the book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He is on Twitter @McMurtrieSF.Heath Campbell, also known as the “Nazi Naming Dad,” today was denied his request for visitation rights with his youngest son, Heinrich Hons Campbell, by a New Jersey court.
Campbell and his then wife first gained notoriety in 2008 when they visited a local Shop Rite store in Greenwich Township, NJ to order a birthday cake decorated with the name of their oldest son, Adolf Hitler Campbell. The store refused to make the cake, but the Campbells later found a Walmart that was willing to decorate a cake for them. According to Philadelphia’s NBC affiliate, Channel 10, the uproar surrounding the story about the cake caused the New Jersey Department Of Youth and Family Services to start an investigation of the family. Following the investigation a judge determined that there was sufficient evidence of violence and abuse in the home and removed the Campbell’s children from their care. Campbell claimed that the children were removed because of their names, but officials have denied that the names had anything to do with their decision. The child in question today, Hons, was taken from the Campbells in November 2011 when he was only 16 hours old.
Another new chapter in this story involves the announcement made last month by Campbell and his fiancé, Bethanie Rose Zito, that she is pregnant. Zito, 22, told the New York Daily News that if the baby is a girl they will name it Eva Braun. If it is a boy, she said “I don’t know what I’m gonna name him, but I’m thinking Rommel.” Eva Braun, of course, was the original Adolf Hitler’s mistress, who committed suicide with him in Berlin near the end of World War II. Rommel is Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, who was forced to commit suicide for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. An interesting conversation potentially awaits when the child one day asks “mommy, where does my name come from?” Zito also has another child by a different father that has been removed from her custody.
Campbell vows that sometime this month he is sending Zito to a neo-Nazi compound to hide her from authorities.
In July, I’m shipping [my fiancée] to a neo-Nazi compound down South.There’s no way in the world they’re going to find out where this child is.
Campbell believes that his finacee’s pregnancy is a sign from God.Google announced this week that it’s investing $280 million in SolarCity, a company that installs and maintains residential-scale solar panels. Customers pay a fee for this service, either up-front or at a monthly rate—and end up saving less money on electricity than they would if they were to buy and install the panels themselves—but they avoid the risk and long-term commitment of ownership. In this system, SolarCity and, by extension, Google take on that risk and the government tax credits that go along with installing solar panels. If you’re like me, Google already backs everything else in life; why not let the company help you save a little on your electricity bill as well?
Google has been putting money towards clean energy for more than a year now, but up until this past April, it had invested primarily in wind projects. There are two places to invest in solar power: on the residential scale or on the utility scale. Google’s first two solar investments went to utility-scale projects. Its first venture, just $5 million, supported a plain-vanilla solar power plant in Germany. Its second investment, of $168 billion, went to a 450-foot-tall solar tower, which collects energy from light reflected by a field of mirrors.
This investment, Google’s biggest to date, supports distributed solar power on a consumer level. For SolarCity, $280 million represents its single biggest chunk of project finance funding. The Google money makes up a fifth of the total $1.28 billion SolarCity says it has raised from project partners.
SolarCity customers might save less on their electricity bills than DIYers who have tens of thousands of dollars to sink into a solar system. But much like Google’s search engine, the more people who contribute to a network of residential solar panels, the stronger the system becomes. More residential installations means less stress on the grid and less pressure to build new power plants or draw on dirty energy sources like coal.
Right now, SolarCity’s business model depends in part on government tax credits that make solar an attractive investment for companies like Google. But across the board, solar power is becoming more accessible on a consumer level. Last month, the hardware store company Lowe’s announced a program that would make it easy for customers to walk into one of its stores and get a quote for solar installation. And consumer products are moving away from designs so ugly that no discerning person would leave the house carrying one. In 2005, for instance, a solar-powered beach or patio umbrella looked like a frisbee from outer space; in 2009, it looked like a normal umbrella with solar panels pasted on; in 2010, it looked like a normal umbrella.
Photo courtesy of flickr user Mary AustinOver a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis, a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that Snowden would substantiate the following summer.
We covered it in a 2012 post titled “We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received little attention in 2012 - his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney has to say has become gospel.
William Binney, NSA whistleblower
Which is why we are confident that at least a subset of the US population will express great interest in what Binney said earlier today, when the famous whistleblower said in a radio interview on Sunday that the NSA has “all” of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails and the FBI could gain access to them if they so desired, William Binney, a former highly placed NSA official.
Speaking on Aaron Klein's Sunday radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM, Binney raised the possibility that the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s server was done not by Russia but by a disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker concerned about Clinton’s compromise of national security secrets via her personal email use.
Binney was an architect of the NSA’s surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI’s ability to access various secretive databases “to track down known and suspected terrorists.”
“Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA. Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails.”
“So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now,” he said of Clinton’s emails as well as DNC emails.
Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of “all” of Clinton’s emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney confirmed.
“Yes,” he responded. “That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there.”
Binney then went on to speculate about something even more shocking: that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry over Clinton’s compromise of national security data with her email use.
And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she’s got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don’t necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.
According to Klein, the GAMMA classification is defined as follows: "GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was)."
It would be truly ironic if instead of the Democrat hack originating at the Kremlin, as the media and Hillary have already concluded is the case without any actual proof, the true source of Hillary's hacked and leaked emails is none other than an unknown crusader at the the NSA itself, another "Snowden", determined to see the downfall of Clinton after her actions exposed national security to unprecedented risk for years. Alas we will never know: as we reported yesterday, it is the NSA that has been tasked with determining if Putin was responsible. We doubt it will find anything, however we are certain that it won't find itself to be the culprit.Blade Contact
When gaining the sword, it is important to not think of it as a bind. This is a subtle action, used to control the opponent’s weapon through superior positioning rather than pressure. We hear from other authors such as Fabris that we shouldn’t allow the blades to touch at all.
L’Ange doesn’t seem to be quite so extreme. He merely says to avoid gaining the sword too strongly, as it would expose the body to much and your opponent, looking for such as advantage, will see the opening.
Timing
L’Ange seems to be suggesting that the hand and right foot move at the same time. That is to say, you approach with a “stiff arm”. If so, this would contrast with Agrippa who has you move your arm before your foot.
In any event, L’Agne strongly warns us that the constraint must be complete by the time the left foot lands. Or in other words, you can’t step forward and then try to gain control of the opponent’s weapon.
Note here that he didn’t say “before you move your left foot”. So don’t try to form the constraint with just the right foot, as you would then have to waste a tempo trying to keep it as you pull up your left foot.
Footwork
L’Ange does say much on where to step, so I’ll share some advice I was given a long time ago. When gaining narrow measure, take a small step away from the sword, no more than the width of the foot. This puts you at a somewhat better angle, granting more control in the constraint.
Then when attacking, take a small step towards the opponent’s sword in order to better expel it from your presence. Again, the step should be no wider than the width of the foot.
Whether or not L’Ange would agree with these minor corrections is unknown to me at this point. However, I find them to be useful.
AdvertisementsAnd, as Mr. Trump pointed out, four of the five teenagers did confess to being at the scene of the rape. But false confessions are surprisingly common in criminal cases. In the hundreds of post-conviction DNA exonerations that the Innocence Project has studied, at least one in four of the wrongly convicted had given a confession.
In the case of the Central Park attack, the confessions were the only real evidence. DNA testing, a nascent technology in 1989, was used to compare a single sample found on the victim with the profiles of not only the Central Park Five, but also of many of the other kids they had been with in the park. There were no matches. The victim, when she awoke from a coma, had no memory of the attack.
That left only the statements from four of the teenagers: Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise and Antron McCray. The fifth, Yusef Salaam, might have confessed, but his mother interrupted the interrogation before he signed anything. A detective was nonetheless allowed to testify that Mr. Salaam had admitted to participating, though he’d given no formal statement.
From the relative comfort of the jury box or Trump Tower, it may be hard to imagine why anyone would admit to a crime he didn’t commit. The power imbalance in an interrogation room is extreme, especially when the suspects are young teenagers, afraid of the police and unfamiliar with the justice system or their rights.
The teenagers faced hours of intense interrogations with no lawyers present and often with no parent or guardian, even though they were just 14, 15 and 16 years old. They were denied food, drink and sleep over many hours. And they were terrified.
The young men were all led to believe that they would be allowed to go home only if they said what the police wanted to hear. The four who gave statements admitted to having been present but blamed others for the rape, which they naïvely thought would not incriminate them.
The “confessions” were riddled with problems. As the district attorney’s office later found, the statements “differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime — who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault and when in the sequence of events the attack took place.”(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)
FTN's Bob Schieffer asked Ryan to comment on Obama's open mic audio in which the President called him out for being "not on the level"
“Eliminating the health care bill would cost us $1 trillion dollars,” the president said. “It would add $1 trillion to the deficit. So when Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant and trying to you know be responsible, this is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill — but wasn't paid for. So it’s not on the level. And we've got to keep on you know, keep on shining a light on that.”
I would like to hear what Ryan has to say on why when Bush was the president, being worried about spending and deficits didn't matter.
Bob: So what about that Congressman? Ryan: Look, I can go point by point on all of those things, but I don't see how productive it would be to get into a partisan bickering match with the president. I'm just not going to do that because we got things to do.
Yes, "America's accountant" says he has things to do like destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He can't answer for his votes under Bush honestly because then it would shine a light on him that confirms he's nothing more than an ideological partisan hack and professor of junk science.
Why hasn't the media asked the same of all Republicans who voted to destroy the government's budget surplus under George Bush by voting for his tax cuts for the rich and not funding two wars? If you look at real dollars, those funds could have fixed Medicare and Social Security possibly for generations.
I'm sick of hearing that Ryan's plan was courageous. I like Fareed Zakaria's show and find him credible on many levels, but he said the same thing about Ryan. It wasn't brave, it is a bill of lunacy aimed at destroying everything FDR and the Great Society stood for. It's like the Beltway hasn't noticed what Tea Party and conservative lawmakers have been doing the last few months. Everything that ensures this country will protect the working class, the sick, the poor and our seniors has been targeted. Ryan's Junk Science plan would not only make the rich richer, but painfully cripple the other 98% of America for generations to come. That's not bold, that's mad. Ryan absolutely should have to explain his votes under Bush--and what he thinks Americans 45-54 should do under his plan if something catastrophic happens.
Oh, and Ryan also voted for TARP and the auto industry bail outs if any Tea Party patriots care to remember? If anything, it shows he's a corporate shill in the highest order.Ukip’s Brexit spokesman Gerard Batten described the proposal tabled by the prime minister as “pitiful” and pointed out it means the UK will not fully regain control of its borders until five years after the decision to leave.
Earlier today the Government published its detailed offer to EU negotiators on the thorny subject of citizens’ rights after Brexit which includes a vow to toughen up immigration rules in the future.
But eurosceptics were outraged by small print in the deal which advocates a “grace period” of up to two years after the date when Britain leaves the club during which EU nationals can still apply for permanent residency.
Ministers say that this measure is necessary to avoid a cliff-edge for EU migration and prevent a last minute surge of people coming to the UK in Spring 2019.
But that excuse did not wash with London MEP Mr Batten who said ordinary voters would not be able to understand why free movement is not set to end on the day Britain formally quits the club.
He told express.co.uk: “This is an outrageous betrayal of the will of the British people on one of the most important points of the referendum vote – to stop EU mass immigration.
“Finally gaining control over our borders in 2021, almost five years after the referendum result, is pitiful.”
“Our public services simply cannot cope with this added pressure, over 150,000 EU migrants a year come to the UK on current numbers.
“Immediate legislative action is required to enforce the will of the British people and to delay until 2021 is simply more Tory Brexit backsliding.”
The PM’s offer was attacked on all sides tonight as the Liberal Democrats, who have campaigned vigorously to overturn the referendum result, conversely criticised it for not being generous enough.
Brexit spokesman Tom Brake MP said: “Far from being ‘fair and serious’, this proposal offers very little and shows the government is continuing in its callousness.
“Theresa May should be utterly ashamed this is the best they can come up with, a year on. It offers little in the way of reassurance to EU citizens who have made Britain their home and continues to use them as bargaining chips.
“These people cannot just be labelled as EU nationals as if they are just a commodity to be traded. They are our friends, colleagues, family. They care for our children, elderly and sick. The government might want to play the politics of the dog-whistle but the Liberal Democrats won’t.
“These people play by the rules, pay taxes and make Britain what it is. Theresa May is treating these people like dirt and we should unilaterality guarantee these people’s right to stay.”
However, whilst the proposals received an extremely frosty reception domestically there is every chance they will be looked upon more favourably in Brussels.
Mrs May’s plans to make all EU nationals apply for ID cards, change their family reunification rights to be in line with British people’s and refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the ECJ may cause some concern.
But many of the other suggestions the Government makes, especially on non-discrimination between UK and EU nationals and a generous offer on permanent residency, fit the bill in terms of what eurocrats were demanding.
The PM gave a presentation to the 27 EU leaders in Brussels last week which garnered a mixed reaction, with Council President Donald Tusk saying it fell “below our expectations” but Irish Taioseach Leo Varadkar describing it as “welcome”.
EU officials have said they will study the proposals carefully and liase with the 27 member states and the EU parliament ahead of negotiations on the citizens’ rights issue, slated to start on July 17.
Original Article
Share ThisOrangutans from Sumatra and Borneo are among our closest relatives Orangutans can help each other get food by trading tokens, scientists have discovered - but only if the help goes in both directions. Researchers from the University of St Andrews found orangutans could learn the value of tokens and trade them, helping each other win bananas. An article in Biology Letters, claims it is the first evidence of "calculated reciprocity" in non-human primates. Gorillas and chimpanzees were much less willing to co-operate, they report. Two orangutans - Bim and Dok - who live in Leipzig Zoo, Germany, were especially good at helping each other. Initially, they were given several sets of tokens, and learned the value of the different types. It's not just humans that calculate about giving; orangutans do that too
Valerie Dufour An animal could exchange one type for bananas for itself, another type could be used to gain bananas for a partner, and a third had no value. Initially, Dok, the female, was especially good at swapping tokens to get bananas for Bim, the male. Sometimes Bim would point at the tokens to encourage her. But he was less interested in trading tokens that would win bananas for her. As she became less willing to help him out, Bim responded by trading more and more, until their efforts were more or less equal. "So we have a calculation behind the giving," explained Valerie Dufour who led the research at the Scottish university. "If you don't give me enough, then I don't give you either; but if you give me enough, OK, then I buy your co-operation, and I secure it by giving too." Many animals exchange goods and services with each other; the grooming of primates is an obvious example. But the researchers say there has been no experimental evidence before of "calculated reciprocity", where animals adapt their own behaviour in response to how another is helping them. "It's not just humans that calculate about giving, and it's not just humans who expect to be given something in return when they are co-operative," Dr Dufour told BBC News. "Orangutans do that too." However, other apes - chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos - were less able or willing to play the game.
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Last week, Philippine Congresswoman Kimi Cojuangco caused a buzz within the crypto community by proposing the country’s first digital currency, an altcoin entitled E-Peso or Electronic Peso.
The E-Peso is the electronic equivalent of the paper peso. All rights, obligations, attributes and characteristics accruing to the paper peso shall also accrue to the E-Peso. The E-Peso is legal tender, and a valid and legal payment for debts, taxes, goods and services transacted through the internet. Being a legal tender, E-Peso cannot be denied as a legal mode of payment
The proposal has stated that no establishment or business in the Philippines may accept digital currencies / crypto currencies unless it is denominated in the said E-Peso.
The Bangko Sentral or The Philippine Central bank will deploy government approved machines to be government controlled nodes around all the banks in the Philippines.
Apparently, these might also be another setback on the proposed altcoin due to the Philippines’ constant outages of electricity, slow internet speeds and low demand for digital goods in the country. In addition to this, about 7 billion E-Pesos will be premined by the |
_ptr<T> make_shared(size_t N); // T is U[]
template<class T> shared_ptr<T> make_shared(); // T is U[N]
// Per-element initialization to a specified value, analogous to the std::vector<U>(N, u) constructor
template<class T> shared_ptr<T> make_shared(size_t N, const U& u); // T is U[] template<class T> shared_ptr<T> make_shared(const U& u); // T is U[N]
When using shared_ptr, make_shared should be the preferred way to create a shared_ptr. So, when making changes to shared_ptr, also make_shared needs to be updated.
This is the end of the 3 Part about the Library Proposals, in the 4th part of this series is about more proposals from Library plus Graphics, Networking, Numerics and Undefined Behavior.
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This and other posts on Meeting C++ are enabled by my supporters on patreon!This week, an opulent new tourist attraction, the “Museum of the Bible”, will open its doors to the public in Washington DC. It has been built at an eye watering cost of $500 million (£378 million).
The museum, which celebrates its grand opening today, is privately funded by, an evangelical Christian and owner of the arts and crafts retail chain Hobby Lobby. The museum will feature a “huge array of artefacts both from Green’s private collection and from traveling exhibits from around the world”, writes Travel and Leisure.
The opening of the museum’s Book of Genesis-inscribed doors has prompted a vast range of responses.
Some have expressed their approval:
Museum of the Bible added to my bucket list — eva. (@evateriong) November 17, 2017
I want to go to The Museum Of The Bible in Washington DC — Kayla (@kaylaam12) November 17, 2017
someone fly me out to dc so i can go to the museum of the bible — samuel (@racetrayter) November 6, 2017
Others have questioned the museum’s cost of construction.
They spent 500 million on a Bible Museum? Wouldn%u2019t a better representation of the Bible be I don%u2019t know like helping kids eat and have clean water? — Spenser Myers Foley (@spenserfoley) November 16, 2017
Anyone who would spend $500 million on a Museum of the Bible clearly hasn%u2019t read it. — RYFIE (@ryankfields) November 17, 2017
Haiku for the day 500 million
Museum of the Bible
Children are starving — Douglas (@Im_an_Atheist) November 16, 2017
The museum has been the subject of several other controversies in recent months.
Experts on biblical artefacts have stepped forward to question the authenticity of some of the museum’s exhibits. The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that “on the fourth floor of the museum, there is an impressively grand section dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls, including from books of the Hebrew Bible that were hidden in caves for centuries until they were stumbled on in 1947 by a Bedouin boy.
“But a number of biblical scholars believe that most if not all of the Dead Sea fragments sold since 2001 — which would include those purchased by Green — are modern forgeries.
“In a recent article published in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries, Kipp Davis, a research fellow in Hebrew Bible at Trinity Western University, concluded that at least six of the 13 fragments owned by Green are almost certainly fake.”
Furthermore, accusations of artefact smuggling have hung over Green dating back to 2011. In July this year, Green’s Hobby Lobby chain agreed to return more than 5,000 items and pay a $3m settlement after the Department of Justice accused the firm of smuggling antiquities taken from Iraq, reports the Washington Post.
“The US Justice Department investigated Hobby Lobby for importing ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform fragments and bullae of Iraqi origin that were falsely labelled as Turkish tile samples and valued at $300”, the Art Newspaper adds. “Green’s lawyers said that he was a new collector and unschooled in US import rules.”SK Gaming League of Legends:
Ruin
SezzeR
SuNo
Vardags
Unlimited
Gevous
Group A
Low Priority
Fnatic Academy
SK Gaming
Renegades: Banditos
Tricked eSports
Melty eSport Club
Group B
Team Forge
K1ck Black
mousesports
G2 Vodafone
Szef+6
EURONICS Gaming Low PriorityFnatic AcademySK GamingRenegades: BanditosTricked eSportsMelty eSport ClubTeam ForgeK1ck BlackmousesportsG2 VodafoneSzef+6EURONICS Gaming
Starting this Friday, 20th of May, our League of Legends team will participate in the European Challenger Series Summer Qualifier. A total of 12 teams are looking to get one of the two spots for the upcoming Summer Split and eventually compete for a chance to get into the higher echelon of LoL competition, the EU LCS.With that in mind, we'd like to introduce one change in our starting roster, as well as our new team coach. Please welcome Kim 'Ruin' Hyeongmin, a young Korean player who will be joining us as our new top laner, and Fayan 'Gevous' Pertijs, who already has a fair share of experience as a coach and analyst in the challenger scene, most recently at Natus Vincere.Kim '' Hyeongmin - Top LaneJonatan '' Villebro - Jungle - Twitch Sun-ho '' Ahn - Mid Lane - Twitch Pontus '' Dahlblom - AD Carry - Twitch Petar '' Georgiev - Support - Twitch Fayan ‘’ Pertijs - Team Coach - Twitter The 12 teams participating in the Challenger Series Summer Qualifier have been divided into two groups as the following:As you can see, our team has been drawn into Group A and their first opponent this Friday, 20th May, will be Tricked eSports. Every game counts as only the top two teams from each group will advance to the playoffs which will determine the two teams advancing to the Challenger Series. Please give a warm welcome to our new team members and support them in the upcoming games!GALVESTON, Texas - Authorities have found the body of a 12-year-old girl who disappeared Thursday while swimming with classmates during a school field trip to Galveston, according to KIPP Houston.
Samira Carlon was at the beach on a field trip with 19 classmates and two teachers from the Kipp Voyage Academy for girls in northeast Houston. She was in the water off the Galveston Seawall near 57th Street when she was last seen.
KIPP Houston sent out an open letter on Saturday that read, in part: "I am deeply saddened to be writing you with this news. We have learned that our missing 6th grader from KIPP Voyage Academy has passed away. She went missing while swimming in Galveston during a field trip this week. Her body was found today.
"She was deeply beloved at KIPP Voyage, with a constant smile that lit up a room. She was positive, curious, and energetic in her approach to learning and a caring teammate. She was an exemplary student and showed passion for every one of her classes. An enthusiastic dancer, she was always eager to learn new styles of dance and loved making up her own choreography. She was bold and brave. To KIPP Voyage she was truly 'a light.'"
Samira was standing with four classmates and a teacher, who is also a lifeguard, about 30 yards from shore on a sandbar. When two of the students got scared, the teacher helped them swim closer in. When the teacher looked back, Samira was gone.
The Coast Guard and Galveston Beach Patrol searched for four hours Thursday afternoon and again all day Friday.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the family at this difficult time," said Lt. Cmdr. Jonathan Andrechik, the command duty officer at U.S. Coast Guard Sector Houston-Galveston. "We are deeply saddened by this outcome, and we appreciate the dedicated efforts of everyone involved in the search."
Copyright 2015 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and a veteran of sorts of the antiwar movement, I feel that the left as a whole has done a poor job of speaking to veterans. This is unfortunate considering they are an extremely important resource and could be great allies in our fight for democracy and freedom for the people of America and the world. We must find a way to communicate with them without parroting rhetoric that is frankly inapplicable to today’s military and today’s war.
When we protest war, do we protest the war itself, the warrior, or the people who truly started the war in the first place? Vets feel they are being protested as well as the war. How can we separate the war from the warrior? It’s like trying to dissociate a shoe from a shoemaker or an exterminator from their poison. Soldiering requires a high level of training and skill. It also requires a sense of honor, self-sacrifice, courage, duty and loyalty – noble values that we on the left hold in high esteem as we work for peace and justice. However, in our zeal for opposing war, we often have failed to recognize these positive traits in U.S. soldiers. We often generalize and dehumanize them.
However, we can all agree that most soldiers are certainly not psychotic killers who enjoy death and suffering. If this were the case, then why are the VA hospitals filling up with people horribly traumatized with PTSD, their humanity and consciousness scarred? For the rest of their lives, veterans will experience guilt, horror, terror, confusion and anger. And yet, these scars validate their humanity. Soldiers are good people who have gone through hell. By all accounts they should be considered victims, although their pride would never let them accept our pity.
So why do they fight unpopular wars? The reason is simple. Soldiers themselves correctly point out that they did not choose the war, therefore we cannot hold them responsible for the facts of the war. They have no control over where they go, who they fight, and when they return. They can literally do nothing about their lot, and, despite the screeching on the far left, it is delusional for us to believe that soldiers will commit mass disobedience against this or any war. In any case, such disobedience would lead to the military clamping down on civil rights and possibly cutting us off from the soldiers completely. We must face the fact that massive disobedience is simply not practical or possible in an all-volunteer military. Soldiers operate under too many rules and they have been trained too well for this to ever occur. In our rhetoric, we must therefore be sure to separate soldiers from the war.
But what do we tell a soldier who has just come back from Iraq – who has seen combat for three years, has had many friends killed for what feels like no reason, and comes home to a lukewarm welcome and a broken-down VA system that leaves them out in the cold? How do we reach them? How can we gain the trust of those who believe that we hate them because we dislike the war they fight? Who believe that we “hate America” because we dislike some of its leaders and major aspects of its economic structure?
How do we address soldiers experiencing alienation from the society they once belonged to? Their dissatisfaction can be fodder for right-wing extremist groups. Such groups are working to recruit these alienated and troubled soldiers and Marines and twist them into foot-soldiers of hate and death. Or they are tricking them into Quixotic crusades for unrealistic candidates like Ron Paul and his “libertarian” circus. This trend may have terrible consequences for the future of this country. We may be moving toward a similar situation as the one in post-World-War-I Germany when legions of disaffected German soldiers were recruited by fascist thugs to fight progressive reforms and help turn Germany into a fascist state. Today, the myriad “tea party” groups, whose anger at any kind of progressive reform is to some degree fueled by closeted racism, are feeding the feelings of victimhood already present in many soldiers.
To reach veterans, disaffected and otherwise, we must clearly communicate the nature of war, the Iraq War in particular, and their role in it without attacking their honor or dignity, or else we lose their ear. We must separate them from the war without lying to them or talking down to them.
We must explain the truth:
– Soldiers fight and die in wars to secure natural resources and captive markets for capitalists to exploit.
– Most wars fought over the last 200 years have had nothing to do with freedom or democracy.
– As working-class Americans they share a common brotherhood with 90 percent of the world. They share a deeper brotherhood with the average Iraqi than almost nine-tenths of the U.S. Congress by this simple class measure – a Congress that sends young men and women to kill, fight and die so that they can secure profits for large multinational corporations and the “defense” industry.
We must do this without the conversation devolving into superficial liberalism or pacifism. It is not enough for them to think “killing is wrong” and leave it at that. This would be ignoring the bigger picture and doing them a great disservice. They must be told about the nature and origin of war and imperialism truthfully and scientifically so they can decide for themselves about war and why they feel so much doubt and alienation.
We must communicate that we do not hate America when we disagree with policies of its leaders and their marriage to big business. We must communicate the class roots of warfare and the veterans’ role in it. We must tell them that it is morally right to use their freedom of speech to talk about their experiences. We must convince them that we are fighting FOR them if not WITH them. Most of all, veterans need to hear that values of honor, self sacrifice, courage, duty, and loyalty – their values – are needed to fight for democracy and freedom here at home. We need them to help us build a better future for America, and to bring peace at last for the rest of the world.Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
The conceptual photographer and video artist celebrates this iconic look at “how the most seemingly benign products of our popular culture are actually filled with meaning and power,” a notion that’s perfectly in keeping with her own practice. Barthes’s work, she says, shows “how kitsch has a class-based motivation. He breaks down how the bourgeoisie present their ideologies as ‘natural’ in order to mask hierarchies of power, and this happens through the everyday images and objects of pop culture: travel guides, cooking photography, movie stars.”
Of all the everyday things dissected in Mythologies, Cwynar’s favorite passage concerns plastics: “It is a ‘shaped’ substance: whatever its final state, plastic keeps a flocculent appearance, something opaque, creamy and curdled, something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant smoothness of Nature.…Its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality, and uses them as mere names, being able to display only concepts of colour.”Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
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The robber had a handgun and wore the bizarre disguise, which included a clown mask, pink hair, a polka-dot shirt and fake breasts.
Johnson, 39, was arrested earlier this week after allegedly holding up the Crosstown Civic Credit Union in the 1500 block of Regent Avenue West.
It sounds like something straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but the strange story of Rondell McGarrett Johnson is very real.
A tattooed, 230-pound Florida fugitive ends up in one of the coldest major cities on the planet just days before Christmas and allegedly robs a bank while dressed as a busty female clown.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 21/12/2012 (2259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/12/2012 (2259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A tattooed, 230-pound Florida fugitive ends up in one of the coldest major cities on the planet just days before Christmas and allegedly robs a bank while dressed as a busty female clown.
It sounds like something straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but the strange story of Rondell McGarrett Johnson is very real.
Rondell Johnson
Johnson, 39, was arrested earlier this week after allegedly holding up the Crosstown Civic Credit Union in the 1500 block of Regent Avenue West.
The robber had a handgun and wore the bizarre disguise, which included a clown mask, pink hair, a polka-dot shirt and fake breasts.
Johnson is in custody at the Winnipeg Remand Centre, charged with robbery with a firearm, wearing a disguise with intent to commit a crime and public mischief.
The case has made national headlines because of the unusual circumstances. New details have emerged that make it even more surreal.
Police and justice sources tell the Free Press the accused is no stranger to the law or altering his identity. Johnson is currently wanted on a warrant for violation of his parole by authorities in Colorado and has a lengthy rap sheet.
He is an American citizen, born and raised in Pensacola, Fla., who has used a number of aliases, including Buster Johnson and Derrick Ray Bodie.
Johnson has said little since his arrest following a foot chase Tuesday afternoon in which he allegedly chucked parts of his costume but was tracked down by officers and the K-9 unit near the credit union. It's alleged he was trying to hide the stolen loot in a snowbank when he was caught.
He declined a request for an interview Thursday in the remand centre. "He hates it here, says it's too cold," said a justice source who has dealt with Johnson this week.
Some of the questions investigators are trying to answer is how Johnson got into Canada, when he arrived and why he came to Winnipeg. At this point, there is no known Canadian connection.
"He claims he crossed into the country on foot by sneaking across the border through Minnesota," a justice source said Thursday.
That information has triggered an ongoing investigation by Canada Border Services. Winnipeg police are also working with U.S. agencies as they piece together Johnson's past.
Court records show he was first sentenced in 1994 for cocaine trafficking in Duval County, Fla. He was given five years in prison but was granted early release in 1997.
He was back in custody in 2004 after another arrest for selling drugs. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years behind bars, serving just over two.
He was arrested a third time in 2008, although the charge isn't clear on his court records. He spent five months in custody before being released.
Sources couldn't say Thursday what charges his Colorado parole violation stems from. Colorado officials have been in touch with remand centre staff, asking for updates on Johnson's status.
His past indicates an issue with drugs, which experts say is often a motivator for robberies. But why someone on the run from U.S. authorities would head north isn't clear, although there have been a handful of cases in recent Manitoba history where fugitives did so in the belief they'd get softer treatment in the Canadian justice system.
In Johnson's case, he will remain in custody in Winnipeg at least over Christmas.
A Legal Aid lawyer has been assigned to represent him and appeared in court Thursday, adjourning his case until Dec. 27. No bail hearing is scheduled.
Federal Crown prosecutor Ian Mahon said his office has yet to be contacted by federal or U.S. government officials about possible extradition of Johnson.
www.mikeoncrime.comMimics. You know what I mean, those people that can do amazing impersonations. The one I’m most recently impressed by is Ross Marquand, an actor on The Walking Dead. His takes on Kevin Spacey and Michael Caine are uncanny. Uncanny — remember that word. In a discussion with a coworker, I put forth my favorite theory on why some people can be accomplished mimics, and some can’t. Oh, for sure, you grew up knowing that guy who could act like the gym teacher and make everyone laugh. But I’m not really talking about that guy. That guy has a light quiver. His only arrow might be the gym teacher and maybe a really mediocre Christopher Walken. One that makes you cringe but you go along with it because, well, its bad form to point out someone trying that hard is pathetically failing.
These are the average schmoes, guys and gals like you and me that might have only one impersonation. And none of us are uncanny. There’s that word — uncanny. Ok, so back to my theory, and here it is. Or actually I’m going to creep up on my theory by first making an observation. Have you ever seen yourself filmed or recorded and thought “OMG, is THAT my voice? I don’t sound like that at all!”
But of course, yes you do. Because everyone else in the shot sounds like everyone else sounds. But that means you DO sound that. How far is it off for you? For me, my recorded voice sounds more tinny, more sibilant and less masculine than what I hear in my own ears when I talk. Yes, it’s a bit of a blow to my ego. But we’re not talking about me now, are we?
So my theory: Our voices sound differently to ourselves because it has to travel through a different medium. Other people hear us directly through the air. We hear ourselves through the distracting interference of our bones and flesh as it reaches our inner ear. We can’t hear ourselves correctly. Well, most of us. And that brings us back to mimics.
I believe people that are actually uncanny in their ability to mimic a wide ranges of celebrities can do this because they’ve either learned to ignore the distracting interference of their own skull and work around it, OR their interference simply doesn’t exist. They hear themselves exactly as the rest of us do. Either way, this allows them to actively modulate their voice to become the voice of their target of impersonation. So, what does this have to do writing? You’ve probably figure out I’m an author, I could tell you about myself yadda yadda yadda who cares? I want to talk about when writing actually works, when it comes together like a perfect storm of fate, coincidence or sheer effort to produce a compelling believable piece of writing. I’m suggesting it best happens when we learn to sabotage the distracting interference of our own lives and begin to actually hear and speak what the characters want to say. We become better mimics of them, we follow their speech patterns, their thoughts, their desires, their goals, everything about them. But if we let our own thoughts, our own distractions, our own goals get in the way, then we become that guy who did the gym teacher’s voice, badly.
It’s a Zen, thing. I love it when it happens. I can plan and plot and intend almost anything, but as I’m writing, the voice of the character tells me “no, John, I’m not saying that. Why would I say that? Don’t you know this scene scares the crap out of me? Don’t you know this guy reminds me of my father, who beat me? I would never politely tell this guy to shove off, I’d do it with a sledgehammer.” The trick, you see, is to let your characters write the story. Honestly, they’re better at it. It’s their life story, after all. If you MUST look me up as an author, for some reason, I’ve got a few books out. Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Dystopia, short stories. If you’re a fan of Sarah Noffke’s, and you’d be an idiot not to be, the book you’d likely be most interested in would be ROOF. You can find it or me on Amazon.
Thanks for listening… through the bones in your skull.
John Gregory Hancock
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Bio: John Gregory Hancock is a storyteller.
A graphic professional for many years (which is one way to tell a story), his graphic journalism garnered international awards, and was nominated for a Pulitzer. He incorporates his visual sense in his ability to spin compelling yarns.
Currently, he has seven books of his own, and has written for The Future Chronicles anthology series, whose titles have hit the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list. The Immortality Chronicles – a Top 5 SF Anthology and Hot New Release – featured his story ‘The Antares Cigar Shoppe’, which was also nominated for Best American Science Fiction. The collection won best anthology from Preditors and Editors
His work has appeared in other anthologies, including; Prep For Doom, Bite-Sized Offerings: Tales & Legends of the Zombie Apocalypse, Flying Toasters – The DeadPixel Tales, and Off the Kuf.
Check out John here: http://www.johngregoryhancock.com/For the yarn club. based off of a story about a boy who can paint anything into life.Check out my website [link] and thanks Kate for doing this awesome story for me!Soe Thans BrushK. Bachus, retold from Burmese traditionalThere was once a boy in Burma named Soe Than.He was poor, and an orphan, and worked all his days as a laborer. The rest of the time, hepainted.Soe Than had no brushes, so he used sticks, and cloth, and even with just these things paintedsuch amazing pictures that people would marvel. Many of his paintings were of things hed never seen,like tall distant mountains, grey and blue and ringed in mist or wide green rivers all jade green, or tigers.Always tigers. Most often, tigers.After his day laboring he would sit under a teak tree and people would come and watch, andthis simple boys fame as an artist spread throughout the village, and even through the province.Then one day Soe Than was visited by a Nat, who came to him as he painted and swirled aroundhim all foggy spirit and said I have a gift for you. Paint the world. And when Soe Than woke as if from adream, he was holding a golden paintbrush.Soe Than dipped the brush, and began to paint.First he painted soup and rice, because he was always hungry and as he painted a warm ngapismell rose and when he was done there was a meal in front of him so he stopped painting, and ate.Then he painted for himself a longyi, and shoes, and put those on in place of his tattered ones. Thenhe painted a lotus, and took it in curved hands and set it at the base of the tree where the Nat hadappeared.The next day Soe Than went through the village, painting rice and fruit and fish curry and sweetpashu mont and pairs of shoes. These he gave out to the poor like himself, and by the end of the day,everyone was talking about Soe Than and his magic brush.Soe Than continued to paint. He painted a water buffalo for a farmer and he painted bangles fora little girl, and he went through the province painting and giving, but it wasnt always shoes and oxen.He painted puppets for a puppeteer, that danced and leapt without strings. He painted a green and pinkstick bug for a little boy to play with. He wanted to paint tigers, he missed painting tigers. But obviouslyhe couldnt paint tigers.Now, the king heard rumors of Soe Than and his magical brush, and sent his adviser to Soe Thanto command him to paint whatever the king desired.Soe Than refused.The king was outraged, and threw Soe Than into a dungeon, without food or water. Soe Thanpainted himself meals, and fruit, and little blue and green bugs to play with. Hearing that Soe Than hadmade himself perfectly comfortable in the dungeon, the king flew into an even greater rage, and sent hisguards to kill Soe Than.So the boy painted himself a trapdoor and escaped.The kings guards pursued him, but he painted himself a horse to ride away on, and fled toa remote village to the Kachin province far to the north, and tried to live quietly and without notice.He painted only small and simple things, just enough. Not too much. But one day he grew bored andforgot and painted a bright green monkey, and the next day the kings soldiers came and arrested him.They took him to the palace, where the king demanded Soe Than paint him a vault of treasure.Scared now, and tired of running, Soe Than complied, hoping this would satisfy the king and he could goand live in peace again. But the king demanded another vault, and another. He painted so many vaultson top of each other that they all collapsed, but the king didnt care.Paint me a huge palace, he told Soe Than, larger and more resplendent than any other. SoSoe Than painted him a fantastic palace, with towering spires and marble floors and gold leaf adorningthe walls. Make a garden, the king demanded. The most beautiful garden anyone has ever seen.Soe Than painted a beautiful garden. It was full of white and yellow orchids, and fragrant sabae,and huge pink lotus flowers. Make the garden bigger, the king demanded. And all the lotus should bewhite. Do it at once! Soe Than made the garden bigger. Narrow paths twisted through it, tall trees roseup making dark, deep glens.White lotus! the king insisted. Bigger!Im finished, said Soe Than. You have a beautiful garden, and a beautiful palace, and there isnothing wrong with a pink lotus. And he calmly and quietly put away his brush.Bigger! White! shouted the king and summoned his guards to force Soe Than to do hisbidding. But Soe than had left his paints behind and walked into the garden.It was the biggest garden in all of Burma, maybe all of the world.The king followed, and all the guards. Neither Soe Than, nor the king, nor the guards were seenagain.The palace crumbled, over time, but the garden flourished. Only the very brave will venture intoit to see its wonders, though.They say its full of tigers.Story highlights Former world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali has pneumonia
The illness was discovered quickly, Ali's spokesman said
He is expected to be out of the hospital soon
Ali became heavyweight world champion for the first time in 1964
Famed boxer Muhammad Ali was admitted to an undisclosed hospital Saturday with pneumonia, his spokesman Bob Gunnell said.
Ali's treatment prognosis is good, he said.
"Ali, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, is being treated by his team of doctors and is in stable condition," Gunnell said in a statement.
The illness was caught early, and Ali, 72, is not expected to be in the hospital long.
"At this time, the Muhammad Ali family respectfully requests privacy," the statement said.
Muhammad Ali at the Allstate Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on January 2, 2013.
Ali was born Cassius Clay and won an Olympic gold medal as a light-heavyweight at age 18.
In 1964, he became world heavyweight champion in an upset victory against then champion Sonny Liston, according to Ali's official website.
Shortly thereafter changed his name to Muhammad Ali to reflect his conversion to Islam.
The boxer was also known for his protest against the Vietnam War and refusal to be drafted into service out of religious conviction.
He retired from boxing in 1981 and announced his diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease three years later.Bots are a great way for holiday shoppers to check off items from their wish lists while avoiding crowded stores and endless hold times on the phone. Bots are also a fantastic tool for the organizations that use them. But they might not be ready to help you find that perfect gift (yet).
Internet bots execute routine online tasks, usually those either so tedious that they would bore human workers half to death, or on such a massive scale that people couldn’t finish the job within their lifetime. But like people, bots learn -- and some even have personalities.
“Many bots are programmed to act like humans when you talk to them,” as CNET noted, “so it feels like asking a person for help instead of just typing in a search engine.”
Made in Your Image
U.S. cosmetics maker CoverGirl is targeting teens with a chatbot created in the image -- and diction -- of a fellow teen: American television personality Kalani Hilliker. In true machine-learning form, KalaniBot takes cues from how Hilliker communicates on social media in order to interact with customers in a similar fashion.
The business benefit for CoverGirl?
“The bot’s detailed analytics deliver feedback on engagement levels,” AdAge stated last week, “providing reporting metrics across average conversation length; sentiment analysis; semantic analysis; branded messages; bot mentions; response rate; and purchase links.”
In short, bots offer a trove of data and insight, which is information that organizations can’t get when shoppers interact with human associates. And that’s a big reason online shoppers are starting to see bots now -- and why we can expect to see more bots while shopping next Christmas season.
“Bots represent an opportunity for the industry to close the conversion loop by tracking clicks to purchases,” Justin Rezvani, founder and CEO of KalaniBot co-creator theAmplify, told AdAge. “This means more transparency and accountability for how well your strategies and content perform.”
Your Virtual Shopping Buddy
Bots could improve the customer experience, especially for younger shoppers who would not to ring a vendor’s 800 number. One software solution can accomplish its missions more consistently than multiple call center operators,* according to The Drum.
“Bots live within chat, which is a highly social environment where friends talk and share,” The Drum stated last week. “[So] it’s not too much of a stretch to think about consumers eventually asking bots what to buy their friends.”
Asking a bot to help you shop for others usually involves answering conversational questions, rather than a battery of multiple-choice queries, as a Technical.ly reporter recently discovered when trying to find a Christmas gift for his brother. The bot asked Tyler Woods about his brother’s age, occupation and other standard questions before delving into more specifics, such as passions and hobbies.
“I replied that he likes sports and politics and works in healthcare; that he dresses well and runs and seems ambitious,” Woods wrote last week. “I didn’t put in that he can be a troll on Twitter and IRL, but I could have.”
Ready for Prime Time?
A bunch of retailers already offer chatbots to help you shop for flowers and apparel this holiday season, as The Drum noted. But your experience might not always be flawless, as technology reporter Chris Griffith discovered while searching for green socks with the help of a bot.
“It launched a Web page... offering to sell a $15 U-Lock bike lock,” Griffith stated in The Australian last month. “Some coding still needs to be done!”
So while we wait for retailers to sort out the bugs, shoppers can use bots as part of their strategy to find this year’s best Christmas deals, according to WSJ Personal Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler. He recommends bots that offer price history and price alerts for specific products.
“Saving money is all about timing,” Fowler said in The Wall Street Journal last month. “And a few good bots will help you know when to strike.”
Happy Hunting
Part of knowing when to strike is knowing which bots to trust. They aren’t perfect, but their potential to offer easy shopping for customers -- and real-time insights for retailers -- is too great to pass up.
Many bots already deliver a happy bargain hunting experience to shoppers this year. And this technology promises many more bots -- and an even better customer experience -- next year.
This story originally appeared on SAP’s Business Trends. Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher
*This technology might free those call center operators to |
level change, now all lie beneath the waves.
“If you go back 100,000 years, sea level change was about one meter in 100 years,” said Nicholas Flemming, a marine archaeologist at the University of Southampton and lead author of the report. “You would have noticed it. You would remember your grandfather telling you where the coast was when he was a boy.”
Around 5,000 years ago, human settlements began to get larger and more complex—and the footprint of those villages can be traced away from shorelines. “You can see as the sea level comes up how villages were abandoned and people built a mile farther from the shore,” said Flemming. “In the southern Baltic, you see that clearly, and also on the coast of Israel.”
Our own coastal cities are not as portable though. Some cities have begun to implement managed retreat practices that place infrastructure away from rising seas, but most low-lying coastlines remain at risk.
“We’re infinitely more sensitive to changes of sea level than the early Mesolithic or Paleolithic people,” said Flemming. “They lost a bit of hunting ground or fishing banks, but if we see a meter rise of the sea, we lose houses of Parliament and half of Tokyo. A meter to us means an awful lot.”
Marcy Rockman, the climate change adaptation coordinator for cultural resources with the National Park Service in the United States, points out that submerged sites on the U.S. coast, though far fewer than those in Europe, can also tell us how the earliest Americans reacted to changes in sea level.
Several promising sites on the southernmost tip of Florida await analysis, and she suspects the Gulf of Mexico may also be rich in submerged archaeological settlements.
“So often when I hear about ‘resilience’ in climate change, the thought is ‘Well, we’ll get through it—we’ll bounce back,’ ” said Rockman. “But when you add in the evidence of physical anthropology, it’s clear that it was not without a cost. We must recognize the physical trauma, and what stress are we willing to bear needs to be part of the question.”
Flemming says it’s no great mystery how humans who lived with rising seas reacted—they retreated.
“We have to calculate the repercussions of the present situation in terms of how much real estate, capital, and population is located within a few meters of sea level,” he said. “We must ask what are we prepared to do to modify the rate of change in climate and rate of change in sea level?”As promised, Oculus has opened pre-orders for its first consumer Rift virtual reality headset. Now that you can actually lock your order in, we finally know one of the most important details: just how much it will cost.
In order to bring home the Rift, you’ll need to budget $600. When we spoke with Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe at E3, he reiterated a previous statement about what interested purchasers should expect to pay for a new PC that supports VR and the headset itself.
“I want to see, and hope to see, full package Rift plus PC for even less, for down to $1,300 or $1,200.,” Iribe told us. “The $1,500 statement was around what people can expect to spend for a full package at retail. You’ll buy parts a lot cheaper. If you do it yourself and you’re putting together your own PC, you’ll be able to do it for a lot less than $1,500. This is something we’re really pushing on our retail partners and our OEM PC partners, we’re going to be out there heavily promoting it at $1,500 or less for the full package. Rift is only a small fraction of that. Most of that cost is the PC.”
Based on the Rift price, you’re looking at a PC in the neighborhood of $900 to hit Iribe’s mark. If you’re looking to purchase parts to build your own from scratch, that comes down to $600 - $700.
The minimum spec for the Rift has only slightly changed since it was announced last year. The difference is the increase in USB ports from two to four to account for additional devices connected (an Xbox One controller or wireless adapter, for instance).
Pre-orders for the Rift include EVE Valkyrie, and everyone that purchases one will also get Playful’s 3D platformer, Lucky’s Tale. You won’t be charged for the Rift until it ships in March, and pre-orders won’t “sell out.” If you don’t get in on the first wave, your ship date will simply be pushed later.
You can pre-order yours on Oculus’ website (if you can get it to load). You can also read more about it and the other VR contenders in our January issue.
Update: The first wave of Oculus Rifts have sold through, with shipping for additional orders now arriving in April. Oculus says that 20 Rift-exclusive games will launch in 2016, including Insomniac's Edge of Nowhwere, Harmonix's Rock Band VR, and Crytek's The Climb. Minecraft will also be out this year for RIft.
The bundle will also now include a remote for navigation. Oculus says that this is intended to ease non-gamers into VR without having to force them to use a controller.
One of the things to note is that Oculus has confirmed that, despite its absence from the image above and the related blog post, the Rift does come with an Xbox One wireless adapter so you can use the included controller without a cord. That is an additional $25 value.
Rift-compatible PC bundles that include the computer and the Rift will be available for order in February. If you pre-order a rift and later choose to buy a bundle, you'll keep your place in line. For those wondering if your existing PC is compatible, here are the required specs:
graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
memory: 8GB+ RAM
output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
There's also a tool you can download and run that will test your system and let you know how you fare.
[Source: Oculus]
Our Take
$600 puts the Oculus Rift in PS3 territory, and that didn't work out terribly well for Sony. This is $100 more than I anticipated, and it also means that new PC owners budgeting against the $1,500 off-the-shelf estimate have less to work with. You can likely find a PC that fits for the remaining $900, but the chance of it lasting you terribly long before an upgrade has diminished.The defeat of the Islamic State in the Middle East and the end of its so-called caliphate may prove a turning point in Middle East politics — but not the one that many anticipated. The chief beneficiaries of these developments are Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad. More worrisome still, this turn of events could foreshadow a new order not only in the Middle East but elsewhere in the world as well.
The horrors perpetrated by IS have allowed many people to forget that the vacuum that the radical group filled was created in part by the civil war in Syria. IS proved to be the most formidable opponent of the Damascus regime, and Assad and his allies, Putin in particular, were quick to seize on the threat posed by IS to rally other forces behind the proverbial lesser of two evils. Indecisiveness on the part of the United States over yet another external intervention as its forces struggled in Afghanistan and Iraq gave Russia an opening to assert itself fully in the Syrian maelstrom.
Almost as soon as the civil war began, Russia began pushing for a diplomatic solution to the conflict, which was premised on the survival of the Assad regime. Peace talks began in Geneva in 2014, but they only sputtered along. More important than discussions in Switzerland was the situation on the ground in Syria: Since the talks began, the Assad government has reclaimed virtually all the territory it had lost and is now again the pre-eminent power in the country.
Working with both the Syrian army and Iranian militias, Russian might and diplomatic cover allowed Assad to regain the initiative on the battlefront. When Donald Trump became U.S. president last January, Washington sought to work more closely with Moscow to defeat IS, to limit U.S. involvement in the conflict and to lay the foundation for a more robust partnership with Russia.
That change in fortune has transformed the dynamics of the negotiations and Putin has seized the moment. When he met Trump at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting earlier this month in Vietnam, the two men issued a joint statement calling for a political rather than military solution to the war in Syria. Soon after, Assad flew to Moscow to meet Putin and work out a political settlement that would keep the Damascus government in place.
Shortly after that meeting, Putin, Iranian Prime Minister Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in Sochi, Russia, to work out their preferred solution to the conflict. They are united in support of Damascus as well as limiting U.S. influence in the region. One important indicator of the solidarity among the three governments is their ability to arrange a cease-fire for Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria. Such a deal would prevent a clash between those three armed forces.
With IS defeated, the governments of Russia, Syria, Iran and Turkey are eager for U.S. forces to withdraw from the region. And even though Trump campaigned against overseas adventures, U.S. officials now speak of an ongoing American presence, officially to mop up IS remnants, but also to shape political outcomes in Damascus and to prevent Tehran from extending its influence in the region. For its part, Tehran insists that foreign forces should remain in Syria only with the permission of the Syrian government. As the U.S. presence is assisting the Syrian Democratic Forces, an opposition group, Damascus is unlikely to approve.
Talks will resume in Geneva this week and attention will be focused as much on Putin as Assad. The Russian leader’s activism has produced a flurry of diplomacy that appears to be making progress — in sharp contrast to the Geneva process. The deals he has struck can be adopted by participants in Geneva, even if they challenge some of the fundamental premises of the negotiations, in particular the future role of Assad.
The question now is whether this will prove to be a model for crisis resolution elsewhere in the world. If so, it would effectively marginalize the U.S. in working out regional disputes, leaving that role to other governments with a keener appreciation of the equities and the stakes in each crisis. After all, Trump has argued the U.S. should pull back from foreign entanglements since they risk squandering national assets. He has also dismissed the value of multilateral negotiations, preferring bilateral settings to maximize his leverage. For decades, one goal of U.S. foreign policy has been to reduce Russian influence in the Middle East. This Syrian solution not only abandons that long-standing objective, but it sets a precedent that could do greater damage still to the interests of the U.S. and its partners around the world.The Contentious Historical Origins of Spray Paint The aerosolized spray paint can comes from the Chicago ‘burbs, but the process of spraying paint on to things dates back to the Columbian Exposition of 1893 (and explains its “White City” name). Or maybe it doesn’t.
I’ve seen this interesting little brief from the New York Times in a couple places: the modest origins of spray paint cans:
Ed Seymour, the proprietor of a Sycamore, Ill., paint company, was in search of an easy way to demonstrate his aluminum coating for painting radiators. His wife suggested a makeshift spray gun, like those used for deodorizers. And so, in 1949, Seymour mixed paint and aerosol in a can with a spray head. As it turned out, compressing paint in a can made for a nice finish.
So that’s why so many Chicago radiators have that odd aluminum coating. Anyway, Ed Seymour’s company is still around and still in Sycamore.
But Seymour basically made spray paint portable; two men, both working in Chicago just before the turn of the century, are given credit for inventing spray paint:
* Joseph Binks, as described by Mark Clark in Body Shop Business:
In 1887, Binks was a maintenance supervisor for Marshall Field’s Department store in Chicago. Marshall Field’s had miles of basement walls that needed to be whitewashed regularly, and when Binks sent a crew down there with brushes and buckets, it was weeks before they finished the walls on a single level of the multi-level basement. In an effort to speed the task, Binks combined a hand-operated pump, a vessel to hold the liquid under pressure and a wand with a nozzle on the end - much like the pump-up garden sprayer you currently use. The whitewash was strained into the tank, pumped under pressure by the hand pump and propelled out the end of the wand.
Collision Repair and Refinishing: A Foundation Course for Technicians has a handy diagram of Binks’s invention. As with Ed Seymour, Binks turned his invention into a company, and his company is still in Glendale Heights.
* Francis David Millet, decorations director for the Columbian Exposition. Well, so says Wikipedia. And HowStuffWorks; here’s a diagram from the World’s Fair showing spray painters at work. But Clark (and others) claim that the white of the White City can be traced to Binks’s invention:
But with just days to go before opening, 90 percent of the buildings housing the exhibits were still unpainted. Enter Joe Binks’ Paint & Whitewash Spraying Machine. All buildings were sparkling white by the show’s opening, and the exposition was referred to admiringly as “The White City” in the press.
* But Railway and Locomotive Engineering called BS on all of this back in 1897:
We have recently seen an article spray painting with compressed air attributed the origin of this process Mr T.G. Turner of New York City, and said that it was first used in buildings at the World’s Fair in Chicago. This is far from being true. The method of painting by spraying with air originated on the Southern Railway and the process was first described in Locomotive Engineering seven or eight years ago. It had been use then for six or seven years. It wonderful how many inventors of a successful process turn up long after process has been put into use.
* While we’re talking atomized paint history: the airbrush has its origins in Rockford and Chicago.
Update: I would be remiss, while we are giving thanks for airbrushes, not to mention their greatest automotive use in the history of mankind. I was late for a meeting because of this truck. Yes, that’s a special “King Ranch” edition.
Photograph: ZERØ (CC by 2.0)
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Check out this video/song by: Roy Howard. Awesome depiction of Allstate's treatment after their house burned down.
Please file your complaints with the Department of Insurance in your state, as well as our complaints page.
Enough complaints to enough people can make a difference, and Allstate is betting that you will not file your complaints.
Wow, how can this even be legal?
I just recently found out that Public Adjusters are not allowed in Arkansas. John Q. Public is not allowed to have a knowledgeable Public Adjuster on his side to level the playing field and to protect his interests. Usually a policyholder is having to deal with a claim at a time following a disaster. Psychologically, most people are not up to the task under these circumstances and it is very common to see people in a state of shock, confusion and helplessness. And now, they aren't allowed to seek the help of a Professional Public Adjuster who is emotionally level and competent, to look out for their interests. This is very disturbing to me, and should be for all of us.
Arkansas Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford recently issued a reminder in the wake of recent violent weather, "that public adjusters are not permitted in the state. Only adjusters whose salary is paid by the insurance company he or she represents are allowed."
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We can make the worm turn!!!At the start of January, I caught PZ Myers in a blatant lie about the stated views of the late Christopher Hitchens. In short, he accused Christopher Hitchens of ‘proposing genocide’ and being in favour of ‘wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world’’. What was particularly useful about Myers’ claims was the fact that he named the time, place and precise moment Hitchens was alleged to have expressed these views. Unfortunately for Myers, this precise moment in time was also documented on video for all to see. The footage conclusively reveals that Hitchens neither said, implied or hinted at any such thing. Not to mention such views are antithesis to the solidarity Hitchens so vocally expressed for Muslim dissidents throughout his career.
Given PZ Myers was so spectacularly exposed for his dishonesty, I wondered how he would respond. First came another lie wrapped in a denial:
Rather predictably, Myers has now chosen to respond to my writing with even more lies in a new blog post. Given there is zero wriggle room to justify his accusations of ‘proposing genocide’, he has no choice but to construct a straw man to take aim at instead. Myers would have you believe that the criticism levelled at him is comprised of people denying that Hitchens was in favour of war or military action. Myers writes:
‘So we now have an atheism that cheerfully denies reality to declare that Christopher Hitchens was practically a pacifist, because it’s so important to defeat Islam’.
Odd given that I wrote this in the very article Myers is responding to:
‘Call Hitchens’s comments hawkish, call them wrongheaded, call them whatever you like. But just don’t try to claim he was ‘proposing genocide’ or advocating ‘wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world’.
‘Hawkish’ – Advocating an aggressive or warlike policy, especially in foreign affairs: the administration’s hawkish stance.
So, let me spell it out once again. I’m not denying that Hitchens was in favour of military intervention, right or wrong with all its potential consequences – I am denying that he ever proposed the ‘genocide’ of Muslims. I am denying that he ever advocated ‘wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world’. I am denying these things because Hitchens never said or advocated them. They are lies conjured by a proven liar.
Myers avoids this fact in favour of attacking straw men because he knows he can’t possibly justify his claims. It’s particularly laughable to claim atheists are whitewashing Hitchens’ support of military intervention when the Iraq War is one of the main points of contention atheists (and Hitchens’ friends) have with the man.
In another embarrassing display, Myers recommends reading the works of Richard Seymour for ‘lots of direct quotes’ of Christopher Hitchens presumably saying some awful things. Coincidentally, earlier this month I reported that Richard Seymour attributed the following quote to Christopher Hitchens in his dreadful book ‘Unhitched’:
“As for that benighted country [Iran], I wouldn’t shed a tear if it was wiped off the face of this earth.”
The source for this quote? Someone told Richard Seymour that they had heard some other people say that they had heard Christopher Hitchens say it once. It seems Myers’ understanding of the word ‘direct’ is about as competent as his understanding the word ‘genocide’.
Continuing the trend of smearing people who expose his lies, PZ Myers brands me a ‘dishonest apologist’:
If anyone can locate a more encompassing example of projection, please let me know.
Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here.
Like this: Like Loading...Former defence attache Muhammad Rizalman Ismail admitted to a Wellington High Court that he went to a strip club but claimed he was only there for the music.
Rizalman, who was attached with the Malaysian High Commission before being charged, is facing a hearing in New Zealand for sexual assault.
The hearing is not to determine Rizalman's innocence as he had already pleaded guilty to indecent assault.
However, he is disputing certain facts of the case and the hearing is meant to establish which version the court will accept.
According to NZ Herald, prosecutor Grant Burston asked if Rizalman had gone to to the strip club called "Mermaids" in Wellington on two occasions when he felt under pressure.
Rizalman : Yes.
Burston : The women were taking their clothes off?
Rizalman : Only their outer clothes.
Burston : The women were topless?
Rizalman : Yes.
Burston : Were you interested in looking at the attractive women in the strip club?
Rizalman : No.
Burston : Why did you go to the strip club?
Rizalman : To listen to music and release tension.
The court also heard there were previous incidents involving Rizalman and women.
According to the report, Rizalman admitted to buying cannabis at a Wellington shop called Cosmic on Cuba on May 2 last year, where he then tried to approach two young female shop assistants.
Burston asked Rizalman if had questioned the two women if they had a boyfriend and asked one of the woman out for a drink, to which he replied, "Maybe".
However, Rizalman said he "can't remember" when asked if he grabbed one of the young women's shoulder when he was told to leave them alone.
He gave the same answer when asked if a male employee had escorted him out of the shop.
The report said Rizalman also admitted to smoking synthetic cannabis in Malaysia but denied using it during his stay in New Zealand.
Burston also highlighted a separate incident on May 8 last year where he had tailed another woman.
However, Rizalman insisted that he only wanted to talk to the woman about his problems.
Burston said after the woman went into a shop to get away from Rizalman, he stared at her before proceeding to his car.
Rizalman then tailed her again with his car with his window down, prompting the woman to seek refuge in another shop.
He claimed he was merely looking at the goods in the shop and was "not sure" about him tailing the woman in his car.
Defecating? Is Rizalman building a case for insanity?
Rizalman defecated outside woman's house, NZ court told
Rizalman: In M'sia, a woman's smile is an invitation to follow
Disgraced diplomat Rizalman's mental state probedNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If you sleep less than six hours a night, you’re increasing your risk of developing or dying from heart disease by 48 percent. At least, that’s what U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Abbott would have 1.2 billion people in India believe.
An advertisement from pharmaceutical giant Abbott, which appeared in a newspaper ad in India earlier this year, is shown in this image taken July 7, 2011. QUALITY FROM SOURCE REUTERS/Stringer
But doctors say the grim message, which appeared in a newspaper ad in India earlier this year, is baseless.
In fact, they worry Abbott’s marketing campaign may be the bigger threat, scaring healthy people into buying potentially harmful sleeping pills they don’t need — such as the company’s own drug Zolfresh.
“They are implying that taking sleeping pills may help you live longer, whereas the data shows that taking sleeping pills is associated with increased mortality,” said Dr. Daniel F. Kripke, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego.
Industry insiders say the ad points to a bigger problem: According to Benjamin England, an attorney formerly with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), drugmakers have lower standards for how they operate in emerging markets like India and China, where government oversight is poor.
“You already feel like you are in the Wild West,” said England, founder of the international consulting firm FDAImports.com. “There is not likely to be anybody who is going to take them to task.”
“If there is nobody paying that much attention to what people are saying about the product, then they’ll push the envelope and say things they would not have gotten away with here,” he told Reuters Health.
And it doesn’t matter that Abbott refrains from mentioning drugs directly, which would have been illegal in India, said another lawyer formerly with the FDA.
“I would argue that if the company making the claim has a sleep product for sale in India, then this is an implicit ad for the product,” the lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters Health.
“In the U.S., companies cannot put out a scare notice without substantiation simply because they do not mention their product in the communication.”
CREATING A NEW MARKET
With soaring incomes, expanding insurance coverage and more and more chronic disease, India has become a big draw for global drugmakers. According to one McKinsey report from last year, the country’s drug market will be worth $55 billion by 2020.
Promoting sleeping pills, a staple of Western medicine, is one way to tap into that potential. Last year U.S. doctors prescribed the drugs nearly 60 million times, with sales exceeding $1.9 billion, according to the research firm IMS Health.
In India, a pack of zolpidem — the generic form of Abbott’s Zolfresh — sells for just a couple of dollars. Despite the low price, getting just a small fraction of the large population to buy sleeping pills could mean a sizable profit for drugmakers.
“Insomnia is an area where you will find a huge untapped market,” said Ram Bala, a marketing expert at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, who has consulted for companies like Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.
He said drugmakers appear to be stepping up their efforts to win over emerging markets, although it’s an uphill battle as many Indians still prefer herbal remedies or are largely unaware of modern medicine.
“There is a lot of public resistance to treating insomnia, because they don’t think it is such an important condition,” Bala told Reuters Health. “If you bombard them with enough information about insomnia, maybe they may at some point decide, ‘Hey, you know what, there are so many people telling me that insomnia is important, maybe I should go to the doctor and check it out.’”
Indeed, Abbott’s ad encourages readers to see their doctor if they can tick off just one of 10 statements, including “I feel sleepy during the day” and “I have a feeling that my sleep is unrefreshing.”
“This is so dramatic and ridiculous,” said Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who runs PharmedOut, a think tank that studies drugmakers’ influence on prescribing.
“It is really advertising, but it is disguised as education,” she told Reuters Health. “Industry calls it disease awareness, those of us who are public health advocates call it disease-mongering — making people believe that they are sick when they are normal.”
Abbott declined to discuss the purpose of its campaign.
But McKinsey’s India report bolsters Fugh-Berman’s point: “The acceptability of modern medicine and newer therapies will increase due to aggressive market creation by players,” it notes. “Investments in increasing patient awareness and education will impact diagnosis and treatment levels... In addition, patients will show greater propensity to self-medicate.”
‘DANGEROUS’ MARKETING
Of course, Western medicines like antibiotics and vaccines have helped countless people across the globe. But in the case of Abbott’s sleeping pills, doctors say the company has gone too far.
In the ad, a smiling Bollywood actress is seen standing next to the words, “Hard Work Never Kills. Lack of Sleep Can.”
It continues, “Research shows that sleeping less than 6 hours at night leads to 48% increase in developing or dying from heart disease.”
Dr. Francesco Cappuccio, whose research Abbott cites, did not answer requests for comments. But his work, like other research, only demonstrates an association — not that a lack of shuteye is at the root of heart problems.
“They can’t make any claims about the cause,” said Dr. Ana C. Krieger, who directs the Center for Sleep Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “We don’t know if people who sleep four to five hours are environmentally stressed because they work multiple jobs, and then get anxiety and insomnia, or because they are sicker to begin with.”
This may seem like a technical nuance, but it makes all the difference.
“A patient that comes to the office, for instance, saying, ‘I have insomnia and I need my Ambien so I don’t die of heart disease’ — that just doesn’t fly, we can’t justify that,” Krieger told Reuters Health. “It’s really an extrapolation, which can be kind of dangerous because there are side effects for any medication that we give to people.”
Those side effects include sleepwalking — risking falls and other accidents — as well as impaired memory and driving skills.
According to the FDA, the drugs may also cause bizarre behaviors like “sleep-cooking” and “sleep-driving.” The latter rose to national attention in 2006, when then-Representative Patrick Kennedy crashed his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in the middle of the night.
Kennedy had been taking Sanofi’s Ambien, the same chemical that Abbott sells as Zolfresh in India, as well as an anti-nausea pill that also acts as a sedative.
Krieger said she does prescribe sleeping pills to a few of her patients, but only for short periods of time and when changing their behavior doesn’t help.
“We want people to naturally increase their sleep,” she explained. “We don’t know if an unnatural sleep, like what the medication would do, would really be beneficial for them.”
In fact, people taking sleeping pills turn out to have a higher risk of death than those not on the drugs, even after taking into account other diseases they might have.
While that doesn’t prove the medications kill people, the science hints at it, said UCSD’s Kripke, a long-term critic of sleeping pills.
“The use of sleeping pills, including zolpidem, is associated with higher mortality, and there are 18 studies that show that,” he told Reuters Health.
And the extra rest patients get from the medications, recorded through brainwaves and eye movements and other objective tools, is modest at best. Pooling the available research, one 2007 study estimated zolpidem and similar drugs add just 11 minutes of total sleep time per night.
REGULATION ON THE BACKBURNER
Abbott’s ad includes a link to a website showing a picture of Zolfresh, despite the fact that direct-to-consumer advertising is illegal in India.
The company would not discuss its marketing activities over the phone and declined to comment on its claims.
“Abbott and other health care companies support disease awareness education programs for health conditions where there is an unmet need and where awareness about these conditions is low,” spokesman Scott Davies said in an emailed statement.
He noted that the campaigns “commonly incorporate education on lifestyle factors such as diet, stress and exercise,” although there was no such information in the ad that Reuters Health found.
The firm also said it follows the local regulations wherever it runs campaigns.
However, not even the FDA regulates what drugmakers can and cannot say in the name of disease awareness. And in emerging markets like China and India, experts say marketing claims are unlikely to be put under the microscope.
An advertisement from pharmaceutical giant Abbott, which appeared in a newspaper ad in India earlier this year, is shown in this image taken July 7, 2011. QUALITY FROM SOURCE REUTERS/Stringer
“Only in the United States and in more developed regulatory markets do we have the privilege to worry about what you said,” FDAImports.com’s England told Reuters Health. “In China, they are like, I don’t care what you said, just don’t sell something that has melamine in it!”
England would not comment on the legality of Abbott’s marketing, but noted that the ad is clearly meant to promote the company’s sleeping pills.
“This is just the beginning of the marketing,” he said. “It’s the door opener.”News in Science
Nano 'yarn' next step in biomedical implants
Biofuel cells Imagine a pacemaker or bionic ear that doesn't require batteries but is powered by your very own cells.
That could be the future of biomedical implants once biofuel cells come to fruition, says an international team of scientists, who have taken the technology one step closer to reality.
The researchers have created a biofuel cell made from carbon nanotubes that generate energy from blood glucose.
The advance improves the power output and the lifetime of biofuel cells, they report in the journal Nature Communications.
Unlike batteries, which store chemical energy, conventional fuel cells convert a fuel such as hydrogen or methanol into electricity.
Biofuel cells, which have been in development since the 1960s, employ the same principle except they use biological enzymes to convert glucose into electricity inside the body.
However, there have been a number of serious technical hurdles that have impaired their performance, says study co-author Professor Gordon Wallace from the University of Wollongong.
One of the challenges is "immobilising" the enzyme that converts the fuel into electricity and making it stick to the electrodes of the fuel cell, rather than diffusing through the cell and into the fuel.
Another challenge is keeping the immobilised enzyme active for long periods of time.
"This is because the electrodes, like anything implanted in the body, tend to get fouled and performance drops off quite quickly with time," says Wallace.
This has resulted in low power densities of only a few milliwatts per centimetre squared and a lifetime of only a few days, which is insufficient for practical use.
To tackle these problems Wallace and his colleagues turned to carbon nanotubes, which are microscopic cylinders made from long strings of interconnected carbon atoms.
They used a form of multi-walled carbon nanotube "yarn" to construct a microscopic structure for the biofuel cell.
"This provides an environment that gives stability to the enzymes and an environment that occludes the types of things that can poison the enzyme, therefore degrading its performance over time," says Wallace.
The end result was a biofuel cell with an extended lifetime and a higher power density 2.2 milliwatts per square centimetre.
"In terms of the power density it's a factor of two or three above what we were getting. That's probably not staggering, but it is significant," says Wallace.
"What is more significant is the length of time we can operate these biofuel cells for."
Repair nerve damage
The researchers are aiming to develop the carbon nanotube yarn biofuel cells to power an implant that will help regenerate nerve damage.
"Our initial target is for peripheral nerve repair, whether that's a finger or other limbs."
The idea is to implant the conduit in the area where the nerves need to be regenerated, and the biofuel cells will produce a tiny electric current to stimulate nerve growth without requiring batteries or an external power source.
Wallace and his collaborators are also working on improving the power output and lifetime of biofuel cells even further.
"That then opens them up to powering all sorts of implants, not just this temporary power supply to repair a damaged area, but a power supply that will be able to service in an ongoing prosthetic, like the vagus nerve stimulators for epilepsy or for chronic pain management."
The ultimate goal is to boost output and longevity to the point that biofuel cells can power a broad range of biomedical implants.
"If you can think of any type of device that is implantable that requires energy, this would be a great way to power it so you don't have to go in and change the batteries all the time," says Wallace.Image caption HIV drug costs have been driven down over the years
Rises in the use of cheaper, non-branded HIV drugs could potentially see more patients with treatment failure, claim US researchers.
They say, based on modelling and trial data, that generic medicines may be slightly less effective.
And as they require users to take three daily pills instead of one, this ups the risk some patients may miss doses.
But others say firm conclusions cannot be made from the Annals of Internal Medicine study.
The HIV information site Aidsmap says because the study is based on modelling it raises too many uncertainties.
A spokesman was concerned that reports such as this could unduly alarm people with HIV on these medicines.
He said the move to generics should be supported.
Generic drugs These are less expensive copies of branded drugs
They usually work in the same way and contain the same active ingredients as the branded version, although some have slight differences
Generic medicines are usually cheaper because there are fewer research and development costs
They still require vigorous safety and regulatory checks
Experts agree that generic antiretroviral drugs have already made a big contribution to managing HIV globally, particularly in the developing world.
The authors of the study say that they used a worst-case scenario for their modeling and much will depend on how well patients comply with taking their tablets - for those who do, the generic option would be a bit more complex but could be as effective as the standard regimen.
Introducing generic medications would be one way for the health service to reduce expenditure, but this must not be at the expense of patient health Jason Warriner of the Terrence Higgins Trust
By their calculations, reduced treatment efficacy could result in 4.4 months of life lost per patient lifetime.
At the same time the lifetime financial savings would be $42,500 (£26,500) per patient, say the Massachusetts General Hospital investigators.
The currently recommended treatment for newly diagnosed patients is a single pill (Atripla) taken dailythat combines three brand-name antiretrovirals - tenofovir (Viread), emtricitabine (Emtriva) and efavirenz (Sustiva).
A generic form of a drug that has a similar mechanism of action to emtricitabine became available in January 2012, and a generic version of efavirenz is expected in the relatively near future.
Patients could soon take these two less expensive generic drugs alongside the brand drug tenofovir.
Lead researcher Dr Rochelle Walensky said: "This is a trade-off that many of us will find emotionally difficult, and perhaps even ethically impossible, to recommend."
She said this trade-off might be more acceptable if the financial savings were redirected to other aspects of HIV medicine.
The researchers calculate that for every 15 patients switched to the generic-based regimen, one who is also infected with hepatitis C |
firm engaged in toward its seven stakeholders. Independent variable: Moral identity symbolization The most common method utilized to assess moral identity is self‐report measures of the importance of moral traits in terms of centrality to self‐definition (internalization) as well as the extent to which one's behaviors emblemize these traits (symbolization; Aquino & Reed, 2002). Aquino and Reed (2002) developed a list of nine traits that describe a moral person: caring, compassionate, fair, friendly, generous, helpful, hardworking, honest, and kind. This list of traits is not meant to be exhaustive but rather representative of a moral person. In their study, participants were asked to imagine how a person who represented these traits would think, feel, and act and then respond to five items measuring internalization (e.g., “Being someone who has these characteristics is an important part of who I am”) and five items measuring symbolization through the behaviors, activities, and organizational memberships that reflected these traits (e.g., “I am actively involved in activities that communicate to others that I have these characteristics”). They correlated these self‐report scales with other methods of moral identity assessment including judges’ ratings of morality based on individuals’ descriptions of their personality and found for example that self‐ratings on moral identity symbolization were positively correlated with third party morality ratings (Study 4). Thus, Aquino and Reed not only identify moral identity traits but also indicate that third party observers can reliably assess moral identity symbolization. With regard to our study, because top leaders typically do not submit to lengthy psychological tests (Hambrick, 2007; Sumanth & Cable, 2011), we adapted the measurement method Aquino and Reed (2002) utilized in their fourth study by obtaining judges’ ratings of leaders’ moral identity symbolization based on publicly available information on their personal characteristics (i.e., behavior and personality). Specifically, we employed a Q‐sort methodology. The Q‐sort methodology asks evaluators to observe or read information on a person, group, or organization and then rank a set of statements or items in terms of how characteristic they are of the person (i.e., California Adult Q‐sort; Block, 1961), group (Group Dynamics Q‐sort; Peterson, Owens, Tetlock, Fan, & Martorana, 1998), or organizational culture (Organizational Culture Q‐sort, O'Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991). One of the strengths of the Q‐sort methodology is that it combines “the descriptive richness of the qualitative approach with the rigor of a quantitative approach by creating a common data language” (Peterson, Owens, & Martorana, 1999, p. 107) that allows for comparisons among individuals, groups, or organizations across time and situations. Moreover, it is possible to utilize publicly available information to conduct the Q‐sort, thus allowing measurement of individuals or groups that are normally difficult to examine (Peterson et al., 1999). Because we were interested in examining individual leaders, we utilized the California Adult Q‐sort (CAQ; Block, 1961), which is composed of 100 items that describe an individual. Sample items from the CAQ include “Behaves in an assertive fashion; not afraid to express opinions; speaks up to get what s/he wants” and “Has a rapid personal tempo; behaves and acts quickly; is fast‐paced.” Research assistants, who were blind to the study's hypotheses, independently reviewed publicly available interviews and biographies of each CEO in our sample and then rated him/her in terms of each of the 100 items by sorting them into those that were most characteristic and least characteristic of the CEO. Our measure of moral identity symbolization was composed of seven CAQ items that were representative of moral traits (Aquino & Reed, 2002). The seven items of our moral identity symbolization scale were “Is dependable and responsible (CAQ item 2),” “Is giving, generous toward others (regardless of the motivation) (CAQ item 5),” “Behaves in a sympathetic and considerate manner (CAQ item 17),” “Is productive, gets things done (CAQ item 26),” “Has warmth; has capacity for close relationships, compassionate (CAQ item 35),” “Makes moral judgments; judges self and others in terms of right and wrong (regardless of the nature of the moral code, whether traditional or liberal) (CAQ item 41),” and “Behaves ethically; has a personal value system and is faithful to it (CAQ item 70).” These items overlap with Aquino and Reed's (2002) traits of caring, compassionate, kind, friendly, generous, helpful, hardworking, honest, and fair. For instance, Aquino and Reed's traits caring, compassionate, kind, friendly, and helpful relate to the CAQ items that focus on warmth, capacity for close relationships, sympathetic, considerate, and giving. Aquino and Reed's trait hardworking relates to the CAQ items that focus on being dependable and responsible, and being productive. Finally, Aquino and Reed's traits fair and honest can be seen in the CAQ items that mention morality and ethical behavior. The mean moral identity symbolization score was 6.68 (SD =.75) and was highly reliable (α =.81). The specific procedure for the CAQ is as follows. We first collected qualitative information on each CEO in our sample from books as well as the business press. To compile these information packets we searched for interviews, speeches, biographies, and autobiographies in the business press (e.g., Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes) and books that discussed the CEO's background, behaviors and personality. Each packet included biographies on the CEO from Marquis Biographies and the International Directory of Business Biographies, as well as multiple articles or interviews from the varied sources mentioned above. Articles or book chapters had to be at least 1,000 words in length to be included in the packet. Packets (i.e., total pages of articles) were required to be at a minimum 20 pages and at a maximum 50 pages (procedure adapted from Peterson et al., 2003). Research assistants were trained in a series of sessions. They were asked to read through a CEO's packet and write in the margins or mark areas that seemed of particular significance to the CAQ items. After reading through the packet, research assistants were asked to describe the CEO along the 100 CAQ items. Research assistants were told to rely on the information from the packet when making their assessments and disregard any prior knowledge or preconceived notions of the CEO. The specific procedure is as follows: Research assistants began the process by sorting the cards into three stacks, starting with Item 1. Each of the 100 CAQ items is presented on a 2×3 card, which was obtained from Mind Garden, Inc. In the first stack, coders placed those cards for which the qualities or traits were least characteristic of the CEO. In the second stack, research assistants placed all cards for which the qualities or traits were moderately characteristic of the CEO. And finally, the third stack included all cards for which the qualities or traits were most characteristic of the CEO. For this initial card sort, the research assistants were told that no attention needed to be paid to the number of cards falling into each grouping. Once the three stacks had been established, the coders were then told to further differentiate the items, or cards, into more categories, placing the least characteristic statements at one end and the most characteristic statements at the other until the items were rank ordered into one of nine categories that ranged from 1 = most uncharacteristic to 9 = most characteristic. Because the CAQ follows a forced distribution, research assistants were told to place fewer cards in the extremes (i.e., only five CAQ items can be rated a 1 and only five CAQ items can be rated 9) and more cards in the center categories (i.e., 18 CAQ items can be rated a 5). This process is advantageous compared to standard scale‐based measurements because it increases interrater reliability as well as the predictive power of the measure. At least two research assistants independently reviewed a CEO's qualitative packet and then individually rated the CEO on the 100 CAQ items. Our interrater reliability on our sample of 49 organizations ranged from α =.71 to α =.97 with an average of α =.84 (SD =.06). Thus, the research assistants’ scores were averaged to create one CAQ sort per CEO. Dependent variable: CSiR As with our measure of CSR, our measure of CSiR was obtained from KLD's CSR ratings, specifically the KLD concerns. The KLD concerns ratings are generated by ascertaining a firm's concerning behavior in relation to the same seven key stakeholders (community relations, diversity, employee relations, environment, product, corporate governance, and human rights), with each stakeholder benchmark composed of several sub‐indicators. For each of the stakeholder benchmark sub‐indicators, organizations are assigned a dichotomous rating of 1 or 0 for the presence of a CSR concern. For example, for the employee relations benchmark, a CSR concern is when the organization has poor union relations. For the community relations benchmark, an example of a CSR concern is the organization has engaged in controversial behavior that has negatively impacted a community's economics (e.g., reducing property value within a community). Following previous research (e.g., Strike et al., 2006), we averaged the KLD concerns scores along the seven key stakeholder benchmarks to measure CSiR. In addition, we controlled for firm industry by subtracting the industry mean from the CSiR score for each firm (Agle et al., 1999; Waldman, Siegel, & Javidan, 2006; Wong et al., 2011). In this study, our dependent variable was comprised of KLD concern data from 2003 to 2004 in order to cover the 2 years after the measure of our independent variable (i.e., CSR). However, additional analysis of time lags ranging between 1 and 4 years for our dependent variable indicate the same pattern of results. Following Agle and his colleagues (1999), we smoothed the data by averaging across the 2 years (i.e., 2003 and 2004). The average social irresponsibility score adjusted for industry was.50 (SD =.44). The higher the CSiR score, the more a firm engaged in negative actions toward the seven stakeholders. Control variables Previous research on social responsibility has found that it is related to firm financial performance (e.g., return on assets; see Margolis & Walsh, 2003 for a review). Thus, we control for industry‐adjusted firm financial performance using firm return on assets (Agle et al., 1999) averaged over the sample time period. In addition, following David and colleagues (2007) and Waldman, Siegel, and Javidan (2006), we control for industry‐adjusted CSiR over the sample time period. Researchers have also noted the possible effects of firm size, and therefore we control for firm size (log of the average sales over the sample time period; e.g., Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1990; Graves & Waddock, 1994; Waddock & Graves, 1997). Following Waldman, Siegel, and Javidan (2006), we also control for CEO tenure (logged). Finally, because our CAQ packets varied in the number of pages, we control for packet length (in pages, logged). Industry data were collected from Dun & Bradstreet's Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios, firm data were obtained from COMPUSTAT, and data for CEO tenure were obtained from Dun and Bradstreet's Book of Corporate Managements.
Results Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and correlations among the study variables. Before analyzing our data, we examined the variance inflation factor (VIF) for all variables in our model to check for multicollinearity. The highest observed VIF score in our study variables was 1.61, which suggests that multicollinearity was not a problem as this value is well below the conventional cutoff of 10.00 (Neter, Wasserman, & Kutner, 1989). Table 1. Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Variables Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. CAQ packet length (in packet length) 3.61.31 2. CEO tenure (in tenure) 2.84.90 −.19 3. Firm size (in sales) 23.97.96.14.08 4. Prior return on sales, industry adjusted (1996–2002) 1.66 5.93 −.09.38* −.10 5. Prior CSiR, industry adjusted (1996–2002).27.38.12.02.59** –.15 6. Prior CSR, industry adjusted (2001–2002).48.43.30* −.13.29* −.15.31* 7. CEO moral identity symbolization 6.68.75 −.11.02 −.11 −.07 −.06.11 8. CSiR, industry adjusted (2003–2004).50.44.09.08.61** −.15.89**.42** −.01 To test our hypotheses, we regressed CSiR on the control variables, prior CSR, CEO moral identity symbolization, and their interaction term. Table 2 shows the results of these regressions. In Model 1, the base model, we regressed CSiR on only our control variables: length of the CAQ packet, CEO tenure, firm size, prior firm financial performance, and prior CSiR. The overall model results indicate that the control variables explain approximately 80% of the variance in CSiR. Table 2. Hierarchical Regression Results for Corporate Social Irresponsibility on Prior Corporate Social Responsibility and CEO Moral Identity Symbolization Dependent variable: CSiR (2003–2004) Variables Model 1: Base model Model 2: Main effect model Model 3: Full model with interaction Step 1: Control variables CAQ packet length (in packet length) −.02 −.08 −.09 CEO tenure (in tenure).03.04.04 Firm size (in sales).06.05.07 Prior return on sales (1996–2002) −.00 −.00 −.00 Prior CSiR (1996–2002).92**.88**.83** Step 2: Main effects Prior CSR (2001–2002).18* −1.34† CEO moral identity symbolization.01 −.08 Step 3: Interaction Prior CSR × CEO moral identity symbolization.22* Overall model R2.80.83.85 Adjusted R2.78.80.82 Change in R2.03.02 F statistic for change 3.18* 4.56* Overall F statistic 34.85** 28.33** 27.50** In Model 2, we regressed CSiR on the control variables, prior CSR and CEO moral identity symbolization. As seen in Step 2 of Model 2, prior CSR has a significant positive relationship with CSiR (ß =.18, p <.05), providing support for Hypothesis 1. Moral identity symbolization has no relationship with CSiR (ß =.01, ns). The overall model results indicate that the control variables, prior CSR, and moral identity symbolization explain approximately 83% of the variance in CSiR (p <.05). In Model 3 we test the prediction that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR such that the relationship between CSR and CSiR is more positive when CEOs are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization (Hypothesis 2). In support of this hypothesis, the interaction between prior CSR and moral identity symbolization is significant (ß =.22, p <.05). Simple slope analyses (Aiken & West, 1991) provide support for our hypothesis by showing that CSiR is positively related to prior CSR among CEOs high on moral identity symbolization (b =.43, SE =.14, t = 3.13, p <.01), whereas CSiR is unrelated to prior CSR among CEOs low on moral identity symbolization (b = –.31, SE =.24, t = –1.29, ns). These simple effects are depicted in Figure 1. This step explains 2% of the incremental variance in CSiR and yields an R2 of.85 (p <.05). Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Moderating Role of CEO Moral Identity Symbolization on Prior Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Social Irresponsibility Relationship. Additional Analyses Although our analyses indicate support for our prediction that CSR is positively associated with future CSiR (Hypothesis 1), because previous research has found that CSiR leads to CSR (Kotchen & Moon, 2011), we also tested our data for reverse causality (i.e., CSiR associating with subsequent CSR). We find that past CSiR (2001–2002) is positively related to CSR (2003–2004; r =.33, p <.01). However, when we conduct regression analyses to examine how past CSiR relates to subsequent CSR and control for firm size, past firm financial performance, and past CSR, we do not find support for the reverse causal order (ß =.15, ns) nor do we find support for the interaction between past CSiR and CEO moral identity symbolization predicting subsequent CSR (ß =.03, ns). These results support the theoretical framework upon which we draw (i.e., moral licensing) and provide greater confidence in our finding that CSR predicts CSiR and that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates this relationship.
Discussion At its height, Enron was Houston's go‐to corporate philanthropist. The company gave heavily to arts groups, scholarship funds, and local medical centers (Philanthropy News Digest, 2001). But for all this good, it also engaged in surreptitious accounting fraud that eventually cost shareholders $11 billion when its stock price dropped from nearly $100 per share to $1 at the end of 2001. Such corporate misconduct toward stakeholders continues to be a common occurrence. In response, business practitioners and academics alike have considered how to increase CSR and, specifically, how leaders can facilitate CSR. This research has been instrumental to our understanding of how to encourage CSR yet it does not directly speak to the impetus for much of this research: Whether and when do firms behave badly? In this paper, we have begun to address these questions by considering how leaders’ psychological processes and personal characteristics relate to CSiR. Using archival data on Fortune 500 firms, we demonstrated that firms that engaged in prior socially responsible behavior are more likely to then engage in socially irresponsible behavior. In addition, we found that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR, such that the relationship is stronger for CEOs who are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization. Theoretical Contributions This study has several theoretical contributions for research on CSR, strategic leadership, moral licensing, and moral identity. First, our work contributes to research on CSR in a number of ways. Past research has assumed that engaging in CSR has positive consequences and, thus, has focused on how CSR leads to positive outcomes such as firm financial performance. However, given that much psychological research has shown that good behavior leads to bad behavior (e.g., psychological licensing), it is important to understand whether CSR also results in detrimental outcomes. Our research draws on this psychological research to find that CSR can indeed result in negative consequences: heightened CSiR. We also contribute to CSR research in that previous research has been limited in its examination of the antecedents and consequences of CSiR (Campbell, 2007; Greenwood, 2007). To the extent that it has been examined, previous CSR researchers have focused on how prior CSiR affects subsequent CSR (e.g., Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Muller & Kräussl, 2011). We consider the opposite relationship—that of how CSR affects subsequent CSiR. In addition, the research that has been conducted on CSiR has been at the firm‐level only. Our research complements this research by taking a microlevel approach and exploring the role of strategic leaders in shaping the CSR–CSiR relationship. To better understand this relationship, we draw on strategic leadership and moral licensing research to examine how a leader's implementation of past CSR might license them to subsequently be less ethical and careful when managing stakeholders’ needs. As such, we contribute to our understanding of CSR and CSiR in companies such as Enron or BP. Related to this contribution, researchers have called for studies that utilize social psychological theories to understand CSR, but little research has been conducted applying this lens (e.g., Rupp et al., 2011). Our research responds to this call by examining how moral identity relates to CSiR. We found that moral identity symbolization was not related to CSiR. At first blush this finding appears to run counter to moral identity research that finds moral identity to be positively related to prosocial behavior and negatively associated with antisocial behavior (see Shao, Aquino, & Freeman, 2008 for a review). However, recent research suggests the importance of contextual factors, such as past behavior, in understanding moral identity's effects on moral outcomes (Mulder & Aquino, in press). In line with this research, we find that prior CSR is an important contextual factor that influences whether leaders’ moral identity symbolization affects CSiR. This examination helps us better understand leaders’ attention to CSR and how it affects subsequent strategic choices about CSiR. Second, we contribute to strategic leadership research in which scholars have repeatedly called for studies that consider how the psychological processes of top leaders influence firm‐level outcomes (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Hambrick, 2007). Researchers have noted the difficulty of conducting this research because top leaders generally do not submit themselves to psychological assessments (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Hambrick, 2007; Hermann, 1999; Sumanth & Cable, 2011). Although past research has utilized demographic variables as proxies of leaders’ personal characteristics, we contribute to strategic leadership literature by examining an important, but underexamined, personal characteristic of CEOs (i.e., moral identity symbolization) using a novel, unobtrusive methodology, the CAQ. Because the CAQ methodology transforms qualitative information into quantitative data, it allowed us to make comparisons across more CEOs and raters than the case study methodology allows. Third, our study contributes to research on moral licensing. To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine moral licensing at the organizational level using data with high ecological validity, and in this way our research contributes to the burgeoning literature on psychological licensing. Prior moral licensing research has been conducted at the individual level and within experimental settings to show that participants are more likely to engage in morally questionable behavior after having previously engaged in socially desirable behavior. By using data from Fortune 500 companies, we extend theoretical understanding of this psychological process to leaders and show its organizational‐level implications. In addition, we respond to recent calls by researchers to consider how individual differences affect moral licensing (Jordan, Mullen, & Murnighan, 2011; Miller & Effron, 2010). Our findings demonstrate a boundary condition to moral licensing research by showing that leaders who are less focused on their moral actions (i.e., low moral identity symbolization) are more likely to remain consistent. Alternatively, our study suggests that leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization may be more morally aware, as opposed to consistent, and thus know when they can and cannot engage in less ethical behavior without compromising their moral integrity. Therefore, this study contributes to our understanding of when inconsistency trumps people's basic desire for consistency (Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957). Fourth, we contribute to moral identity research. The majority of research on moral identity has focused on moral identity internalization (see Shao et al., 2008, for a review; Winterich et al., 2012). Few studies have examined the effects of moral identity symbolization, despite research showing that symbolization has significant effects on behavior (e.g., Mayer et al., 2012). As such, one of our theoretical contributions to this research is our examination of symbolization effects. In addition, we contribute to the moral identity research by identifying an alternative method of measurement. Typically, studies have utilized Aquino and Reed's (2002) self‐report measure of moral identity symbolization. However, one potential drawback of this method is that it relies on individuals to report their behavior and their perceptions of themselves. In this way we provide a methodological contribution to this literature by using the Q‐sort methodology in which multiple judges, who were blind to the study hypotheses, rated the leaders on a wide range of behavior resulting in less biased ratings of moral actions. Practical Implications In addition to the theoretical contributions of this paper, our results have practical implications as well. First, our findings suggest that governance structures should be put in place that explicitly hold leaders accountable for both stakeholder management and stakeholder mismanagement. Given leaders’ propensity to engage in wrongdoing after they have previously engaged in CSR, boards should be particularly careful after the successful implementation of a CSR strategy to ensure that leaders do not become complacent. Moreover, boards should set clear rules about intolerance toward unethical or illegal behavior. Boards need to clearly communicate to top leaders that unethical behavior toward stakeholders will not be tolerated and specify the consequences of such mismanagement. Interestingly, Zhong and colleagues (2010) note that highlighting the importance of “doing good” and rewarding ethical behavior may inadvertently cause employees to engage in unethical behavior. As such, boards and leaders should take great caution in considering how to manage the CSR–CSiR relationship. Contrary to what one might expect, our research suggests that leaders who attempt to put forth a moral image are in fact more likely to engage in moral licensing behavior than are those who do not engage in symbolic moral action. Although boards may believe that CEOs who are high on moral identity symbolization can be trusted to behave ethically on a consistent basis, our research instead shows that they may be less likely to remain consistent. In fact, these leaders may be more in tune with managing others’ moral impressions of them and in maintaining a balanced moral scorecard, which may not always result in beneficial outcomes for the firm. This focus may be advantageous when companies have previously engaged in wrongdoing. However, it may be harmful when companies have previously engaged in CSR. Thus, boards should remain particularly vigilant of leaders who put forth a moral image. Limitations and Future Research The theoretical contributions and practical implications of our study should be considered with regard to the study's limitations. First, in this research we attend to moral licensing as one means to understand the short‐term CSR–CSiR relationship. We found robust support for this relationship by first demonstrating that prior CSR predicts future CSiR and second by conducting additional analyses that ruled out reverse causality. Although these analyses provide confidence for observed moral licensing in our present research, other research has found evidence for moral cleansing, whereby morally questionable actions give rise to ethical or prosocial behavior (Carlsmith & Gross, 1969; Sachdeva et al., 2009; Zhong & Liljenquest, 2006). Jordan and colleagues (2011) suggest that moral behavior is dynamic and acts much like a pendulum that swings between moral cleansing and moral licensing. One limitation then of our study is that we only examine a short time period, which may only capture a snapshot of a larger moral licensing‐cleansing cycle. Future research should investigate this pendulum by examining CSR and CSiR over a longer time frame. Second, one might note that the effect sizes in this study are small. Though categorized as small, the effect sizes are comparable with other studies examining CEOs’ impact on CSR (e.g., Deckop et al., 2006; McGuire, Dow, & Argheyd, 2003). In addition, despite the stability of CSiR over time (e.g., the correlation between CSiR 2001–2002 and CSiR 2003–2004 is highly significant), our results indicate that leadership still plays an important role in shaping organizations’ CSR strategies. Finally, small effect sizes can still be impactful when they show a dependent variable (in this case, CSiR) is influenced by an unlikely independent variable (in this case, CSR; Prentice & Miller, 1992). Specifically, Prentice and Miller (1992) note that “showing that an effect holds even under the most unlikely circumstances possible can be as impressive as (or, in some cases, perhaps even more impressive than) showing that it accounts for a great deal of variance” (p. 163). In our case, finding that socially responsible behavior relates to subsequent irresponsible behavior is important. Finally, although the CAQ methodology offers great benefits to examining top leaders at a distance, it is not without its limitations. First, because of the qualitative nature of the CAQ, it is possible that the data were biased because of journalists’ or coders’ biases. Although our use of varied sources to create our packets of information on each CEO as well as our use of multiple coders minimizes the impact of any individual bias, we cannot fully isolate personal prejudgment or bias in our data. Second, our study is restricted in its sample. Given the level of detail required to complete a CAQ, our sample was limited to CEOs of large, American firms that received extensive coverage in the business press. However, given that leaders have more discretion in smaller firms than they do in larger firms (Miller, Ket de Vries, & Toulouse, 1982), it is likely that this sample serves as a conservative test of our study hypotheses (i.e., results might be even stronger within smaller organizations in which leaders have more control of communication and the decision‐making process). Our study suggests a number of future research directions. In our study we focused on an aggregated measure of CSR, arguing that leaders who develop CSR strategies that balance the needs of a variety of stakeholders subsequently are more likely to engage in CSiR that hurts a variety of stakeholders. This general approach is important because it is the first test of moral licensing in relation to CSR strategies. However, it does not disentangle whether leaders are engaging in domain or nondomain specific moral licensing. Following from earlier moral licensing work in experimental settings, which found that moral licensing at the individual‐level can be both domain and nondomain specific (e.g., Mazar & Zhong, 2011; Monin & Miller, 2001), future research should examine whether moral licensing in firms is domain specific (e.g., does positive action toward the environment then lead to negative action toward the environment?) or nondomain specific (e.g., does positive action toward the environment subsequently lead to negative action toward employees?). Another avenue for future research on CSR–CSiR is to explore the moderating effects of other psychological and contextual factors on CSiR. In this paper, we focused on one important psychological characteristic influencing the CSR–CSiR relationship, moral identity symbolization, but other psychological and contextual factors likely exist. For example, factors such as leader cognitive moral development and moral philosophies are related to ethical leadership (see Kish‐Gephart, Harrison, & Treviño, 2010 for a review) and may influence how leaders use past moral behavior as a guide to determine subsequent moral behavior. It is also possible that leaders who are more actively engaged in developing and implementing strategies may simultaneously engage in both CSR and CSiR. Thus, leader personality attributes related to assertiveness and conscientiousness may also be important to consider. With regard to contextual factors, future research should explore how contextual factors such as organizational culture influence the CSR–CSiR relationship. Given that previous research shows paradoxical negative effects of a meritocratic culture on sexism in the workplace (Castilla & Benard, 2010), we may find that organizational cultures intended to increase the ethical standards of the organization actually lead to subsequent CSiR. Future research studies exploring these psychological and contextual factors are important as they will allow us to better understand how leaders can manage both CSR and CSiR. Our findings also have implications for future research on moral licensing. This study, to our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate moral licensing effects at the organizational level in an organizational context, and our interaction results further indicate leader moral regulation is an important determinant of CSiR. However, like much prior moral licensing research, we did not directly test the underlying moral licensing processes as our initial goal was to demonstrate moral licensing at the organizational level. Having done so, our findings warrant future exploration and identification of the mechanisms driving moral licensing effects (e.g., moral credits). For instance, future research could empirically test whether leaders’ moral credits are indeed bolstered after implementing a CSR strategy. To assess the relationship between the firm's CSR ratings and leaders’ moral credits, a future study could code the manner in which CEOs discuss prior CSR through interviews after the release of the KLD ratings. Moreover, future moral licensing research should explore other factors that may influence the moral licensing effect, such as leaders’ identification with their organization. Given that some leaders are promoted from within their firm whereas others are outsiders, their identification level may vary, which in turn may influence the degree to which they internalize moral credits accrued from their firm's past CSR. Relatedly, longer‐tenured CEOs, who helped implement prior CSR strategies, may be more likely to engage in moral licensing than shorter‐tenured CEOs, who did not implement prior CSR strategies. As such, future research should explore how leader identification and tenure, as well as whether a leader was an internal or external hire, influences the CSR–CSiR relationship. Our research also warrants further investigation in the area of moral identity, and in particular, moral identity symbolization. Specifically, future research should pinpoint why leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization are less likely to be consistent in their moral actions than are those who are low on moral identity symbolization. In contrast to our findings, Zhong and colleagues (2010) suggested that individuals with high moral maturity, or people who consider morality as central to their identity, should be more consistent in their moral action over time than those with low moral maturity because it is more critical to them that they maintain a positive moral image. Our research contradicts their prediction by finding that those with high moral identity symbolization are actually less consistent in their moral action. Although our data cannot directly speak to why high moral identity leaders were more likely to engage in moral licensing, it may be that individuals who are high on moral identity symbolization do not strongly identify with being a moral person (i.e., moral identity internalization). Therefore, their engagement in moral licensing may reflect their strategic use of moral actions. Future research should explore the underlying mechanisms linking moral identity symbolization to moral licensing. Future research regarding moral identity measures is also necessary. Moral identity researchers typically use self‐report measures to assess this construct. We relied on third party data to obtain our measure of moral identity symbolization. Using the Q‐sort methodology allowed us to discreetly measure moral identity symbolization; however, questions remain as to the degree of overlap between self‐report measures and the Q‐sort method we utilized. Future research should examine the degree to which self‐report measures of moral identity internalization and symbolization correlate with the Q‐sort measure of symbolization and what implications a mismatch might have on the CSR–CSiR relationship. In addition, future research should examine how this Q‐sort measure of moral identity symbolization correlates with other related constructs such as ethical leadership and a moral personality (Brown & Treviño, 2006; McFerran et al., 2010).
Conclusion Although previous research has examined positive effects of CSR such as how it relates to firm financial performance, we argued that it may also be an antecedent to CSiR. We further argued that it is important to consider how leaders affect CSiR because they guide the strategic decision‐making process for CSR initiatives. We find that CSR is positively related to CSiR and that the relationship is stronger for leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization rather than leaders who are low on moral identity symbolization. These findings provide a critical step in understanding the underlying processes that influence CSiR.
1 Various constructs relate to moral identity symbolization including the aforementioned moral identity internalization (Aquino & Reed, 2002 2006 2010 1999 1959 2012 2012 o, 2006 o, 2006, for a review)” (Mayer et al., 2012
Various constructs relate to moral identity symbolization including the aforementioned moral identity internalization (Aquino & Reed, o, o, 2006, for a review)” (Mayer et al., 2 The CEOs in our sample were in office for the majority of our time period, which was 1996–2002 (i.e., in office for 3.5 years or more). Eleven CEOs out of the 49 CEOs included in our study were in office for fewer than 3.5 years (i.e., nine CEOs were in office for 3 years of the 1996–2002 time period and two CEOs were in office for 2 years of the 1996–2002 time period). These 11 CEOs’ tenures occurred in the latter part of our time period (i.e., 2000–2002) and thus during the independent variable's time period (2001–2002) as well as closer to the dependent variable's time period (2003–2004). When we exclude these 11 CEOs from our analyses, we find the same pattern of results.COLIN McLaren got the bad news the week he started at the police academy: his much-loved Uncle Neil had been killed in a shooting accident.
Neil McLaren was a sensible and seasoned shooter but he'd made a mortal error, getting into a car after a shooting trip without checking his shotgun. The car hit a bump, the gun went off and he was dead.
His nephew always had that loss hanging over him. He would spend years living dangerously in heavy squads and undercover jobs, dealing with the Walsh St murders and infiltrating Australia's Calabrian mafia. He carried guns, but carefully. He knew mistakes could be fatal.
During his time in the force, a policeman called Neil Clinch was shot dead by a policewoman aiming at an "offender" - who was, in fact, a householder fearing the police in his backyard were intruders.
Then there was Constable Clare Bourke, shot dead at Sunshine police station by a policeman fooling around with an " |
this special feature. 2 July 21, 2009 May 25, 2009 April 28, 2010 13 4 The Master Pie Maker – Hop into creator Bryan Fuller's mind to discover the inner secrets of Pushing Daisies!
! From Oven to Table – Follow the production challenges of taking one of Bryan Fuller's script ideas, involving a lighthouse and an egg, and crafting it into reality.
Secret Sweet Ingredients – Learn how composer Jim Dooley's music shapes a scene in ways most viewers aren't even aware of.
Add a Little Magic – Watch the visual effects team bring a 2-ton rhino to life and learn about the challenges of executing a scene to rival Jumanji!
Syndication [ edit ]
Pushing Daisies premiered in syndication on Chiller on March 5, 2013.[57] In 2015, Pushing Daisies was added to The CW's streaming service CW Seed. The CW is partly owned by Warner Bros. who owns the distribution rights.[58]Preparation Time: 30 minutes
I don't know about you, but I have missed the delicious, mouth watering taste of sloppy joes. Fortunately for us, there's a delicious vegan recipe for sloppy joes that tastes better than the original, if I do say so myself. The creamy texture of the filling will have you coming back for seconds, till it's gone!
This vegan recipe, just like every other vegan recipe of the day, is not one of my own, but one contributed by passionate vegans from the community. If you would like your recipe featured on my blog, please email it to jackalhead@live.com along with a picture of it.
Ingredients:
1. 2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
2. 1 cup finely chopped fresh or canned tomatoes
3. 1 tbsp. ketchup
4. 2 tsp. dark brown sugar replacement
5. Salt to taste
6. 1/4 tsp. chili powder
7. 1 tbsp. mustard
8. 2 tbsp. sweet chili sauce
9. 1 onion, very finely chopped
10. 2 tsp. tomato paste
11. 16 oz. vegan beef crumbles or 1 cup cooked lentils
12. 2 baby chili peppers, finely chopped
13. 4 scallions (spring onions), chopped into 1/4 inch slices
14. olive oil for frying
Directions:
1. In a medium-sized skillet, heat up your olive oil over medium heat and fry half of your scallions until they become slightly brown.
2. Add in the chili peppers and fry for an additional 2 minutes.
3. Reduce the skillet to a simmer and toss in your remaining scallions, apple cider vinegar, tomatoes, ketchup, brown sugar replacement, salt chili powder, mustard, sweet chili sauce, onion and tomato paste. Stir together to mix well and then allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Remove the skillet from the heat source and serve by scooping the filling into toasted buns.
If you enjoyed this recipe, like and follow us on Facebook for a new vegan recipe six days a week!Clinton: We Must Defeat The "Virus" Of "Radical Jihadist Groups," They Can Not Be Contained
Hillary Clinton says that the U.S. must be "clear eyed" in its effort to defeat radical jihadism.
HILLARY CLINTON: The Orlando terrorist may be dead, but the virus that poisoned his mind remains very much alive. And we must attack it with clear eyes, steady hands, unwavering determination and pride in our country and our values.
(APPLAUSE)
I have no doubt -- I have no doubt we can meet this challenge if we meet it together. Whatever we learn about this killer, his motives in the days ahead, we know already the barbarity that we face from radical jihadists is profound.
In the Middle East, ISIS is attempting a genocide of religious and ethnic minorities. They are slaughtering Muslims who refuse to accept their medieval ways. They are beheading civilians, including executing LGBT people. They are murdering Americans and Europeans, enslaving, torturing and raping women and girls.
In speeches like this one, after Paris, Brussels and San Bernardino, I have laid out a plan to defeat ISIS and the other radical jihadist groups in the region and beyond.
The attack in Orlando makes it even more clear, we cannot contain this threat. We must defeat it. And the good news is that the coalition effort in Syria and Iraq has made recent gains in the last months.
So we should keep the pressure on ramping up the air campaign, accelerating support for our friends fighting to take and hold ground and pushing our partners in the region to do even more.
Full speech:MMAjunkie.com has reported three-time IBJJF World Champion Augusto “Tanquinho” Mendes, who is 5-0 with 5 finishes in his young MMA career, has been signed by the UFC as a last minute replacement and will fight Charlie Rosa (10-2, 1-2 in UFC) in a featherweight fight this Sunday, January 17th at UFC Fight Night 81. Mendes steps in to replace Jimmy Hettes (11-3, 3-3 in UFC), who suffered a serious knee injury just a week before the fight. Even though he is a last minute replacement, Mendes has been training for a February 5th title fight with Ricardo Ramos for the vacant Legacy FC Bantamweight title.
Mendes, who is 32-years old, has had a very productive 2015, where he was 2-0 in the cage and captured the 2015 IBJJF NoGi World Championship as well as the bronze at the 2015 ADCC Championships. In an interview with MMAfighting.com in July, he spoke about the difficulties of finding MMA opponents due to his world class grappling skills.
“They hear I’m a jiu-jitsu champion and think ‘there’s a lot of jiu-jitsu champions out there’, they think it’s easy, but when they find out I’m a world champion as a black belt it makes a difference. There are fighters in the UFC who call themselves jiu-jitsu world champions, but they never won the IBJJF world championship as a black belt. That’s completely different. When they find out I’m an IBJJF black belt world champion and realize the fight won’t be easy, they pull out. Since I signed for my MMA debut, I believe more than 15 guys pulled out. For my first two or three fights, I guess I had 10 different opponents. They say yes, then Google my name and that’s it. It looks like fighters with a good record don’t want to fight me. But that’s it. I want to win the belt no matter what.”Smart Home Device Called 911 To Break Up Domestic Assault. Or Did it?
Editors Note July 10, 7:37 pm: There are many news stories now suggesting this was an Amazon Echo using Alexa that made the call. It was easy to debunk the original Google Home as you will see from the analysis below. The new story that it was an Amazon Echo is possible but very unlikely. July 12 update: Amazon tells Fox News it does not support 911 calls. A description of the sequence of events by the New York Post confirms my suspicion that a smartphone was used to connect with 911 and not a smart speaker. How else would 911 call the victim’s phone? How that call was originally placed is another question as you will see in the initial analysis below.
ABC News reported that a Google Home Called 911 during a domestic assault and has subsequently suggested it was a “smart home” device but declined to name the product. The article summarized the encounter this way:
Eduardo Barros was house-sitting with his girlfriend and her daughter Sunday night at a residence in Tijeras, some 15 miles east of Albuquerque. The couple got into an argument and the altercation became physical, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff Department’s spokesperson, Deputy Felicia Romero. Barros allegedly wielded a firearm and threatened to kill his girlfriend, asking her: “Did you call the sheriffs?” A smart speaker, which was hooked up to a surround sound system inside the home, recognized that as a voice command and called 911, Romero said.
A SWAT team responded, surrounded the house and took Mr. Barros into custody. His girlfriend was injured but didn’t require hospitalization. Her daughter was unharmed. A spokesman for the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s office commented to ABC News, “This amazing technology definitely helped save a mother and her child from a very violent situation.” But, did it really?
How Did This Happen?
This is undoubtably a good outcome, but it may leave frequent Voicebot readers wondering how this happened. There are two reasons why this is hard to believe if you are following the industry closely:
The “wake-up phrase” was not uttered. Google Home can’t make calls.
No Wake-Up Phrase Uttered
First, a comment like “Did you call the sheriffs,” doesn’t include the wake-up phrase, “OK Google.” Google Home devices are supposedly only listening for “OK Google” and then after that wake-up phrase will listen to requests and execute tasks in the cloud. The devices are designed to only activate after the “wake-up” for both privacy and technology performance reasons.
It is unlikely that the assailant uttered the wake-up phrase on purpose, so it may have been a sound-alike phrase activated the device or some statement in the preceding sentence. This is a plausible scenario, but falls into the rare category because “OK Google,” doesn’t have a lot of frequently spoken sound-alike phrases unlike Alexa. Google has this data and could tell us the exact invocation and utterance.
Google Home Can’t Make Calls
However, even if Google Home was activated, the device doesn’t have calling features unless Google has rolled these out in New Mexico without telling anyone. I tested my Google Home today with three questions.
My 1st Question : “Did you call the Sheriffs?”
: “Did you call the Sheriffs?” Google Home Response : Nothing. Without the wake-up phrase the device didn’t respond.
: Nothing. Without the wake-up phrase the device didn’t respond. My 2nd Question : “OK Google, did you call the Sheriffs?”
: “OK Google, did you call the Sheriffs?” Google Home Response : “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do that yet.”
: “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do that yet.” My 3rd Question : “OK Google, can you call 911?”
: “OK Google, can you call 911?” Google Home Response : “Sorry, I can’t make calls yet.”
These are the responses I expected. Let’s set aside the wake-up phrase consideration. Google Home cannot make calls. The company announced that the devices would be able to make calls later this year during the Google I/O developer conference in April, but the feature has not launched yet. It is hard to believe that Google Home had anything to do with this.
Was This Really a Smartphone Call by Google Assistant?
The more likely scenario is that a smartphone made the call. This could have happened in two ways. First, if the smartphone had Google Assistant installed, it could have made the call. Voicebot readers know that Google Assistant on the smartphone is the same brains behind Google Home’s personal assistant. If a wake up phrase and similar sounding utterance such as “OK Google,” was said, Google Assistant would be listening.
I tested this today on my own Google Assistant app for iPhone. I asked, “OK Google, did you call the Sheriffs?” It brought back a text bubble suggesting what I had said was, “can you call the Sheriff’s Office,” and then showed a Google Assistant bubble with “Calling…” It offered to make a call, but a dialog box asked me to confirm with a click to “cancel,” or “call.” It required a touch to complete the action. I tested this from an iPhone so it may be different on an Android. That would make sense. Siri is the default voice assistant on iPhone and doesn’t require a confirmation step to place a call. I assume the same is true for Google Assistant which is the default voice assistant for Android phones. The fact is that smartphones can make calls using Google Assistant or other voice assistants that by default are always listening.
A second potential scenario is that the woman or the daughter activated a call knowingly during the altercation as it escalated. It may be convenient to say this was a Google Home call, but I suspect a subsequent investigation would conclude that the origin was a smartphone either as a direct call or aided by Google Assistant.
Could This Have Been an Amazon Echo?
Editors Note and Update: After ABC News updated its story to say “smart device” we tested the same scenario on Amazon Alexa. The Alexa wake-up word is known for being activated more easily because of many soundalike words. It also has a calling feature.
Both of these factors make this more likely. However, for it to be an Alexa-powered device, the Sheriff’s department would have had to be in the saved contacts of the device owner. This is certainly possible, but again we have another hurdle to cross to make this story believable. And, after the call is initiated, the Echo tells you it is making the call and to whom. This audible confirmation that a call is being placed to the Sheriff would likely have been noticed by the inhabitants in the house.
Google Should Share the Circumstances of the Call
This is the type of urban legend that can generate its own momentum if it is never challenged. It is also the type of story that will raise new concerns about privacy. Granted, the outcome here was good, but it will make people wonder about times when the outcome might not be. The technology limitations suggest Google Home didn’t make the call despite what was reported.
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1Young forward Chuba Akpom has joined League One leaders Brentford on loan for one month.The 18-year-old has been in fine form for the Arsenal academy sides this season. He hit a hat-trick in the 6-1 victory over Peterborough United in the FA Youth Cup fourth round on Monday evening, scored three goals in four games in the Uefa Youth League in 2013 and has been a regular for the under-21s.
An England youth international, Akpom has appeared twice for Arsène Wenger’s first team this season. He made his Premier League debut as an injury-time substitute in Arsenal’s 3-1 victory away to Sunderland on September 14 and contributed to the League Cup win over West Bromwich Albion later in the month, scoring from the spot in the penalty shoot-out.
The Newham-born youngster also impressed on the first team’s pre-season tour of Asia last summer.The teenager scored in the 7-0 triumph over the Indonesia Dream Team, before bagging a quickfire brace in the 7-1 victory over Vietnam. He scored his fourth goal of the tour in the 2-1 win against Urawa Reds.
In joining the Bees, Akpom follows in the footsteps of Wojciech Szczesny, who spent six successful months on loan with the club in 2009/10.
Everyone at Arsenal wishes Chuba well for his time with Brentford.Joe Biden told attendees at a Thursday dinner in Denver, CO that terrorism is not an “existential threat” to the United States’ national security.
WATCH:
“Will there be another attack in the United States like Boston, [like] we saw in California?” Biden asked during his speech at the University of Denver’s annual Korbel dinner. “If you had to bet, probably sometime there would be.”
“We’re a nation of 320 million people,” he continued. “American people know in their gut. There is no existential threat to the security of the United States of America.”
He also joked to the crowd that the “way to become the most popular politician in America” is to “announce you are not running for president.”
Biden’s appearance marked the first time a sitting vice president had visited the University of Denver.
Follow Datoc on Twitter and FacebookImage: Leena Luotio / Yle
The recession has apparently had a lot to do with the spike in the number of inebriated women who turn abusive.
"The typical case is a single mother who has an alcohol problem and who's become exhausted by work," explains Police Sergeant Pekka Hätönen, who's in charge of the child abuse unit at the Helsinki Itäkeskus police department.
"She might have recently lost her job. All these pressures become focused on a misbehaving child, and the mother becomes easily enraged and lashes out physically, violently."
Normally, police are alerted to suspected child abuse through day cares, schools, and social workers.
Prosecution Tough for Kids
In Finland, children under the age of 15 are rarely ever brought into the court room. Instead, videotapes of police interviews them are shown. But even conducting an interview with a child is a delicate and difficult task.
Gaining trust is key.
"Before we even go to the video interview room, we try to connect with the child. We might read Donald Duck or other comic books, play, or even sing together if that feels right. Sometimes we've even played with the police badge," says Hätönen.
Hätönen says that he has heard children describe cruel acts by their mothers.
"One child we interviewed didn't heat up some water enough. The mother became enraged, boiled the water, and put the child's hand in it to show how hot the water should have been," he said.
According to Finnish law and interpretations by the courts, flicking, slapping, and hair-pulling are all forms of mild child abuse.The surest sign that it was a good idea to give Portland an MLS franchise: their fans already have a collective drinking problem. The supporters group is turning teetotaler to keep from embarrassing itself again.
The Timbers had a game against DC United Sunday, and the cameras didn't exactly capture the Timbers Army at its most raucous. From the group's website,
One thing that I will remember is the tone of sections 101-108 & 201-208. While we were certainly louder than most other American supporters sections this weekend, I don't believe our A-game was on display. The volume was down a notch or two. The breaks between chants seemed a bit longer. When compared to our previous five appearances this season, yesterday's presence was above average, but not excellent. I have a couple theories on why this happened. 1) An early Sunday afternoon game under cloudy skies (in late May) does not a festive atmosphere make. 2) DC United players of various interests (Davies, McCarty, Cronin) didn't make an appearance. But I believe this last one might be the overarching reason: 3) Too many hangovers. Folks, I read the Twitters and Facebooks. I know what most of us were up to. In this world where everyone shares everything at every possible juncture, it's difficult to avoid the mundane updates. I'm just as guilty of this. So it's not hard for me to recognize the signs. We were slower. We were quieter. We had to exert more energy for a lesser performance.
So here's the plan: for the next early game, a nationally televised 1:00 Sunday tilt in July, the Timbers Army is beseeching every supporter to stay sober the day before. And while it's asking a lot from an Oregonian to avoid drinking for any 24 hours, let alone a summer Saturday, it should lead to louder, more focused cheering and chanting, and will make a better impression for the cameras.
It's not all Carrie Nation, though. The "Sober Saturday" lasts until 6 a.m. on Sunday, at which point you can drink as much as you want providing you're within walking distance of the stadium. So: hangovers bad, raging drunks good.
The Sober Saturday challenge [Timbers Army]Morgan Freeman didn’t hold back talking about newly-elected President Trump in a new interview with February/March issue of AARP Magazine.
The staunch Hillary Clinton supporter told the mag that Trump’s win "feels like we are jumping off a cliff. We just have to find out how we land.”
But at 79-years-old, Freeman isn’t jaded or pessimistic. He says he’s “not scared… and [he’s] holding out hope that Donald Trump has to be a good president. He can’t not be. What I see is a guy who will not lose."
MORGAN FREEMAN UNINJURED AFTER PRIVATE PLANE CRASH IN MISSISSIPPI
Freeman’s career took off playing opposite Dana Ivey in “Driving Miss Daisy” off-Broadway in 1987. He says when he learned that Warner Bros. was making a movie version of the play, he thought they’d never hire an actor from New York. But in a turn of good fortune and the thumbs up from acting giant, Sidney Poitier, Freeman got his break.
"When the movie's director, Bruce Beresford, came backstage, I said, 'So, do I get the job?' he said, 'You're kinda’ young.' He wanted Sidney Poitier. But when they went to Sidney, Sidney said, 'Go with the kid."
Freeman, a father of four, spoke about his son Alfonso who has taken after his actor dad. Alfonso has appeared in such films as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Seven,” “Nurse Betty,” and “The Bucket List.”
When it came time for him to start his career, naturally Alfonso went to his father for advice and help.
“I think when someone in my family is famous the downside is everybody expects things of you,” Freeman said. “But you have to make things happen on your own. When my son was younger, he said he wanted to be an actor and that I should introduce him to people. I said, ‘You should change your name. Don’t use Freeman.’ He didn’t listen to me.”
MORGAN FREEMAN GOES AROUND THE WORLD SEARCHING FOR GOD
After thirty years in the industry, today Freeman lives out of the spotlight and in the small town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region.
“It’s beautiful. It’s quiet. It’s green. I started going to Mississippi in the 1970s, after my folks moved back there. I couldn’t do New York anymore – living in a cave, concrete everywhere. I get to have a normal life in Mississippi. Nobody bothers me. I stay home. I golf with friends. I go have dinner. I survived inner-city South Side of Chicago, which was a hellhole, and worked hard over the years. I figure I owe it to myself to have some peace at this point in life.”Everyone’s favourite marsupial is back. “Crash Bandicoot” is set to come crashing back to gamers’ lives everywhere in 2017. A remastered and enhanced Crash is bound to ramp up nostalgic video game fever with the unveiling of the “Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy,” a PlayStation 4 (PS4) compilation of the first three games in the series, which are “Crash Bandicoot,” “Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back” and “Crash Bandicoot: Warped.”
Here are things about “Crash Bandicoot” that new breeds and old-timers need to know.
The first “Crash Bandicoot” game was released 20 years ago
It has been that long. The first platform game of the series that was originally developed by Naughty Dog was launched on the Sony PlayStation on Sept. 9, 1996. It went on to sell close to 7 million units, making it one of the best-selling PlayStation video games of all time.
READ: 'Super Mario Maker Nintendo 3DS' Australia launch: Price and details revealed
The series has spanned multiple consoles and platforms over the years
Not only has the “Crash Bandicoot” series been launched on multiple platforms, it has also gone through numerous game developers and has extended over different genres. There are a total of 18 titles in the series, with more than 50 million units shipped globally.
Most of the games in the series are set in Australia
“Crash Bandicoot” games are typically set on the Wumpa Islands, a fictional island chain supposedly located in South Australia. The franchise’s main character, Crash, is a human-like bandicoot created by Doctor Neo Cortex, the chief antagonist. Cortex wants Crash eliminated and often disturbs the bandicoot’s serene life on the Wumpa Islands.
Watch: “Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy” Comeback Trailer
Is the latest PS4-bound “Crash Bandicoot” a remaster or a remake
According to the upcoming trilogy’s developer, Vicarious Visions, the answer is “not simple” and could actually be both.
“It’s practically impossible to make a traditional remaster of the original Naughty Dog games. They’re roughly 20 years old, and technology has advanced significantly in that time,” the developer wrote in a blog post. “But we don’t consider this a remake. We know how much you all love the original games, so we didn’t want to fully remake them. The ‘N. Sane Trilogy’ is a ‘remaster plus.’”
What fans should expect on “Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy”
Vicarious Visions disclosed some of the features of the upcoming “Crash Bandicoot” PS4 remaster, which include rebuilt levels, characters and cinematic based on the originals. A unified check-pointing and save game system is going to be introduced, which include manual and auto-saving options. A unified menu system that highlights game progress and items in possession is also expected. All three games will feature Time Trials as well.Back in the early 1980s, the feminist movement was divided by what became known as the “feminist sex wars.” On one side were women who claimed pornography was a tool of patriarchal oppression that promoted male dominance and should be censored; on the other side, feminists identifying as “sex-positive” who didn’t want to censor sexual activity between consenting adults.
The latter group believed that sexual freedom — the ability for women to have sex often and with multiple partners without being called a “slut” — was key to feminism and women’s equality. Since men are allowed to have that kind of sex without guilt, the argument went, women should be able to have it as well.
But it seems we’re now experiencing “Sex Wars Episode 2: The Establishment Strikes Back.”
Ever since the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released its “ Dear Colleague” letter in 2011, colleges and universities across the country — and the entire state of California — have been adopting policies that define consent so broadly as to be meaningless and nearly impossible to prove.
Now, under the “affirmative consent” or “yes means yes” standard, consent must be active and ongoing. Competitive Enterprise Institute counsel Hans Bader, a critic of these policies, has argued that they constitute “dry legal contracts” requiring every step of a sexual encounter to receive a “yes” or “no” response.
These new policies do not consider silence or lack of restraint to be a sign of consent, and consent is revoked if an accuser was intoxicated. But intoxication is never defined. Is it the same level of intoxication police use in a DUI arrest? If so, where can students get Breathalyzers to test their dates? And if there is no legal level of intoxication, how can a college or university accept a woman’s word that she was too intoxicated to give consent?
These new policies contradict the idea that women should be free to explore their sexuality. It’s hard to reconcile the idea that, on one hand, women shouldn’t be judged for engaging in drunken sex, using a standard under which they cannot legally give consent even if they consumed just a little alcohol. How can the same action simultaneously be a manifestation of feminine sexual liberation and an example of the heinous crime of rape? Feminists can’t have it both ways.
Now it’s not just that women can have as much guilt-free sex with as many partners as they want, but if they do feel guilty about any sexual encounter, it must have been rape.
I don’t see anything wrong with women enjoying sex as much as men, but just as men regret some sexual encounters, women do too — but that doesn’t mean they were raped.
The new definition of rape and sexual assault — that women are too weak to handle alcohol and therefore aren’t responsible for their decisions — flies in the face of those supposedly fighting for equality. Women should be free to get blitzed at parties and hook up with whoever they want — but just as men aren’t excused from being drunk, neither should women get a pass.
I know many will call this victim-blaming, but I’m not talking about women who say “no” or pass out and are raped. I’m talking about people who get drunk, consent to sex, and then wish they hadn’t in the morning.
The original sex-positive feminists opposed any kind of limit on consensual sexual activity. That belief is now being turned on its head by people claiming that consent is not consent if alcohol is involved, and that schools and government must redefine sex.
This new view of alcohol-fueled sex makes no sense in a truly equal world, as men have as much a right as women to claim they were too drunk to consent to sex. This discrepancy is highlighted in cases of same-sex sexual assault, when the patriarchy can’t be blamed.
For heterosexual men, the only rational response to this new contradiction is never to sleep with a woman who has had even one drink (and to be wary of bad breakups or “friends with benefits”). That seems to be what the current crop of feminists wants, but if men stop sleeping with women who are under the influence, doesn’t that limit a heterosexual woman’s freedom to engage in sexual activity?About
72 remaining hours update:
Third Assist thanks those backers already on board. If you're not on board yet, backing will give you access to updates as we continue and also first access to early-bird specials on our gear launch later this winter. Never too late to join the team!
Third Assist
We'll keep it short and sweet. While developing our Kickstarter-funded Father Nature Outdoors last year, we stumbled upon some awesome gear manufacturers. Spending our childhoods in Alaska and being-life long hockey players we decided to take advantage of the opportunity. We collaborated with a number of designers and manufacturers, merged our resources, and we were able to create new innovative hockey gear specifically targeted towards outdoor hockey. No one has ever catered solely to the pond hockey community before, and with your support we hope to be the first to share the following fun and functional products:
Note: All Rewards have free shipping to the United States and Canada!
The Gloves: First, we feature our patent-pending design, traditional black four-roll gloves with nash palms and Reflhex lining. We top off the design with a historic lace tie up and a neoprene gaiter to keep the gloves comfortable. Check out the pictures below:
The Interior: Reflhex lining, neoprene gaiter, lace tie-up.
For Kickstarter we wanted a design that looked traditional on the exterior, but game-changing on the interior. We incorporated some of the best materials around (polyester shell, Reflhex lining, nash palm, etc.) to make a durable, weather-resistant glove design. After months of prototyping we can proudly say we have succeeded.
Traditional exterior, pioneering interior.
So what is Reflhex? Reflhex is a material which is credited for reflecting heat sources yet dispelling moisture sources. The idea for using this material stemmed from emergency blanket usages, so we incorporated the same principle into the gloves in order to create a glove which stayed warm with the user's body heat. Traditional gloves lose heat rapidly given the open cuff design and light fabrics so we integrated a comfortable and flexible neoprene gaiter to create a seal. Further the gaiter keeps out cold air, snow, and ice. The combination of all the design features culminate in the glove best prepared to take on freezing winter temps!
Reflhex: Named appropriately so.
Note: Reflhex itself does not generate heat but it supplements the user's own body heat in order to create a warm, comfortable glove. This material is not to be confused with other similar looking materials on the market. Reflhex is unique, and we named it appropriately so.
This design comes in sizes 11" through 15". Fits for the family.
The Jersey:
You have never seen jerseys like these before. We were able to source the first ever fleece lined synthetic jersey material in order to make sweaters for the pond. We're not fans of bulky jackets, and there's nothing too exciting about mesh jerseys when its 15 degrees Fahrenheit. So we created a novel pond hockey jersey utilizing a thick polyester shell, but lined with a soft white fleece. Now we're itching for the temps to start dropping..
What makes it special? There's never been a jersey catered to the outdoor hockey community, and you can personalize your own. We hope to expand on this design in the future, but this customization option is special to Kickstarter (name and number of choice). With sizes Small through XXL we're offering sizes for the full team.
Thick synthetic fibers lined with soft fleece is a prime defense against freezing temperatures
Can we do your team's jerseys? Yes if we are successful on Kickstarter, message us above if interested.
The Scotch Cap:
In our mind a hat was a hat. There wasn't anything too exciting in sourcing a hat for a Kickstarter. Then we developed this wool design and our opinion changed. This is a wool scotch cap with a flexible ear flap which keeps your head warm when you want it, or provides a little extra protection when you're just warming up. Stylish, yet functional. These are now are favorite lids for the pond. Hats in sizes S/M and L/XL.
Wool scotch cap with flexible winter ear flap.
The Decals:
We weren't planning on these to be a reward, but these were a hit for Father Nature Outdoors. We have some of the best fans for FNO and they enjoy sporting a cool logo on their trucks, bikes, coolers, bottles, etc. We hope our Third Assist logo will follow the trend.
By the way, what do backers and customers now think of FNO? See here.
Join the 'First Line'
When we ran a Kickstarter for Father Nature Outdoors last year we wanted to make sure our Kickstarter backers were continually thanked. For Father Nature Outdoors we created the 'Founding Family' which has been an exclusive group of 200+ backers which receive first dibs on new products, and product discounts up to 50%. This idea has been awesome for getting us product feedback, and it adds incentive to get on board with Kickstarter. So not only will backing Third Assist now get you discounted products, but as long as you select an appropriate reward the benefits will continue for years to come!
Creative Commons Media
A number of Kickstarter projects don't credit their media sources. We can't take credit for all the pond hockey activity on this page. We have used media from a handful of creative commons sources under an attribution creative commons license. See the license here and the owner names on our video. The owners of the media do not endorse Third Assist in any manner. Nonetheless, they are clearly advocates of pond hockey and we think it is appropriate to give them credit for sharing the game we all love!(Correction: Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016, to reflect Gadelha training at Luttrell/Yee’s MMA in Albuquerque, not Jackson-Wink MMA.)
A strawweight bout between Cortney Casey (6-3 MMA, 2-2 UFC) and Claudia Gadelha (13-2 MMA, 2-2 UFC) is the latest addition to November’s UFC Fight Night 100 lineup.
UFC officials today announced the bout.
UFC Fight Night 100 takes place Nov. 18 at takes place Nov. 19 at Ibirapuera Gymnasium in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The event airs on FS1 following early prelims on UFC Fight Pass, though the bout order hasn’t been finalized.
Gadelha, No. 2 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA strawweight rankings, will return to competition for the first time since her unanimous decision loss to champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk at The Ultimate Fighter 23 Finale in July. It marked her second career defeat, both of which have come to the 115-pound titleholder,
The Brazilian recently revealed she parted ways with her longtime home at Nova Uniao in her home country. For her next camp Gadelha, 27, will train at Luttrell/Yee’s MMA in Albuquerque, N.M., in hoping of avoiding back-to-back losses for the first time.
Casey, 29, meanwhile, will attempt to upset the former title challenger in the biggest fight of her career. After a rocky start to her UFC tenure with consecutive losses against Joanne Calderwood and Seo Hee Ham, “Cast Iron” has rebounded in a big way in 2016.
First Casey stopped Cristina Stanciu with elbows in the first round at UFC Fight Night 91 then followed that up with another victory just five weeks later, submitting Randa Markos in the opening frame of their bout at UFC 202 in August.
If Casey can make it three straight with a win over Gadelha in Brazil, it would put her near the top of the list of title contenders.
The latest UFC Fight Night 100 card now includes:
Alexander Gustafsson vs. Antonio Rogerio Nogueira
Krzysztof Jotko vs. Thales Leites
Johnny Eduardo vs. Manny Gamburyan
Gadzhimurad Antigulov vs. Marcos Rogerio de Lima
Matheus Nicolau vs. Ulka Sasaki
Michael Graves vs. Sergio Moraes
Pedro Munhoz vs. Justin Scoggins
Cortney Casey vs. Claudia Gadelha
For more on UFC Fight Night 100, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.Richard Danielson is a staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times and has covered politics and development in and around Tampa since 1984.
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn likes to say that when he moved here in 1980, only 600 people lived downtown—300 of them at the old Morgan Street jail.
No wonder. Downtown Tampa in 1980 had been in decline for decades. A century before, early leaders had charted its future as a deep-water port for moving cargo: phosphate mined in Central Florida, citrus grown along the Gulf Coast and cigars rolled in brick factories |
forge Productions.[32]:380 Gygax was thus able to return to publish Lejendary Adventures in 1999.[6] The game was published as a three-volume set: The Lejendary Rules for All Players (1999), Lejend Master's Lore (2000) and Beasts of Lejend (2000).[32]:380
The new owner of TSR, WotC's Peter Adkison, clearly did not harbor any of Lorraine Williams' ill-will toward Gygax: Adkison purchased all of Gygax's residual rights to D&D and AD&D for a six-figure sum.[7]:203 Although Gygax did not write any new supplements or books for TSR or WotC, he did agree to write the preface to the 1998 adventure Return to the Tomb of Horrors, a paean to Gygax's original AD&D adventure Tomb of Horrors.[44] He also returned to the pages of Dragon Magazine, writing the "Up on a Soapbox" column from Issue #268 (January, 2000) to Issue #320 (June, 2004).[32]:282
2000–2008: Later works and death [ edit ]
Gygax continued to work on Lejendary Adventures which he believed was his best work. However, sales were below expectation.[7]:204
On June 11, 2001, Stephen Chenault and Davis Chenault of Troll Lord Games announced that Gygax would be writing books for their company.[32]:378 Gygax's early work for Troll Lord included a series of hardcover books that eventually came to be called "Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds"; the first was The Canting Crew (2002), a look at the roguish underworld. He also wrote World Builder (2003) and Living Fantasy (2003), generic game design books usable in many different settings. After the first four books in the series, Gygax stepped down from writing and took on an advisory role, though the series logo still carried his name.[32]:379 Troll Lord also published a few adventures as a result of their partnership with Gygax, including The Hermit (2002) an adventure intended for d20 and also for Lejendary Adventures.[32]:379
By 2002, Gygax had given Christopher Clark of Hekaforge an encyclopaedic 72,000-word text describing the Lejendary Earth. Clark split the manuscript up into five books and expanded it, with each of the final books coming to about 128,000 words, giving Hekaforge a third Lejendary Adventures line to supplement the core rules and adventures. Hekaforge managed to publish the first two of those Lejendary Earth sourcebooks, Gazetteer (2002) and Noble Kings and Great Lands (2003),[32]:380 but by 2003 the small company was having financial difficulties. Clark to ask Troll Lord Games to become an "angel" investor by publishing the three remaining Lejendary Adventures books.[32]:381
On October 9, 2001, Necromancer Games announced that they would be publishing a d20 version of Necropolis, an adventure originally planned by Gygax for New Infinities Productions and later printed in 1992 as a Mythus adventure by GDW; Gary Gygax's Necropolis was published a year later.[32]:366–367
Gygax also performed voiceover narration for cartoons and video games. In 2000, he voiced his own cartoon self for an episode of Futurama, "Anthology of Interest I"[5][55] that also included the voices of Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and Nichelle Nichols.[7]:202 Gygax also performed as a guest Dungeon Master in the Delera's Tomb quest series of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach.[56]
During his time with TSR, Gygax had often mentioned the mysterious Castle Greyhawk which formed the centre of his own home campaign. But despite all of his written output over the previous 30 years, Gygax had never published details of the castle. In 2003, Gygax announced that he was again partnering with Rob Kuntz to publish the original and previously unpublished details of Castle Greyhawk and the City of Greyhawk in 6 volumes, although the project would use the rules for Castles and Crusades rather than D&D. As Gygax wrote in an on-line forum: "I have laid out a new schematic of castle and dungeon levels based on both my original design of 13 levels plus side adjuncts, and the 'New Greyhawk Castle' that resulted when Rob and I combined our efforts and added a lot of new levels too. From that Rob will draft the level plans for the newest version of the work. Meantime, I am collecting all the most salient feature, encounters, tricks, traps, etc. for inclusion on the various levels. So the end result will be what is essentially the best of our old work in a coherent presentation usable by all DMs, the material having all the known and yet to be discussed features of the original work that are outstanding... I hope."[57] Since Wizards of the Coast, which had bought TSR in 1997, still owned the rights to the name "Greyhawk", Gygax changed the name of Castle Greyhawk to "Castle Zagyg", a reverse homophone of his own name, and also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials "E.G.G."[7]:208
The scale of the project was enormous: By the time Gygax and Kuntz had stopped working on their original home campaign, the castle dungeons had encompassed 50 levels of cunningly complex passages with thousands of rooms and traps. This, plus plans for the city of Yggsburgh and encounter areas outside the castle and city, would clearly be too much to fit into the proposed 6 volumes. Gygax decided he would compress the castle dungeons into 13 levels, the size of his original Castle Greyhawk in 1973[58] by amalgamating the best of what could be gleaned from binders and boxes of old notes.[59] However, neither Gygax nor Kuntz had kept careful or comprehensive plans. Because they had often made up details of play sessions on the spot,[60] they usually just scribbled a quick map as they played, with cursory notes about monsters, treasures, and traps.[61] These sketchy maps had contained just enough detail that the two could ensure their independent work would dovetail. All of these old notes now had to be deciphered, 25-year-old memories dredged up as to what had happened in each room, and a decision made whether to keep or discard each new piece.[62] Recreating the city too would be a challenge. Although Gygax still had his old maps of the original city, all of his previously published work on the city was owned by WotC, so he would have to create most of the city from scratch while still maintaining the "look and feel" of his original.[63]
Due to creative differences, Kuntz backed out of the project, but created an adventure module that would be published at the same time as Gygax's first book.[64] Gygax continued to painstakingly put Castle Zagyg together on his own, but even this slow and laborious process came to a complete halt when Gygax suffered a serious stroke in April 2004 and then another one a few weeks later.[7]:211 Although he returned to his keyboard after a seven-month convalescence, his output was reduced from 14-hour work days to only one or two hours per day.[65] Finally in 2005, Castle Zagyg Part I: Yggsburgh, the first book in the six-book series, appeared.[32]:381 Later that year, Troll Lord Games also published Castle Zagyg: Dark Chateau (2005), the adventure module written for the Yggsburgh setting by Rob Kuntz.[32]:381 Jeff Talanian helped with the creation of the dungeon, eventually resulting in publication of the limited edition CZ9: The East Marks Gazetteer (2007).[32]:381
That same year, Gygax was diagnosed with a potentially deadly abdominal aortic aneurysm. Doctors concurred that surgery was needed, but their estimates of success varied from 50% to 90%. With no firm medical consensus, Gygax came to believe that he would likely die on the operating table; he refused to consider surgery, although he realized that a rupture of the aneurysm – likely inevitable – would be fatal.[7]:216 In one concession to his condition, he switched from cigarettes, which he had smoked since high school, to cigars.[7]:212
It wasn't until 2008 that Gygax was able to finish the second volume of six volumes, Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works, which described details of the castle above ground. The next two volumes were supposed to detail the dungeons beneath Castle Zagyg. However, before they could be written, Gygax died in March 2008. Three months after his death, Gygax Games – a new company formed by Gary's widow, Gail – withdrew all of the Gygax licenses from Troll Lord,[32]:382 and also from Hekaforge.[32]:381
Personal life [ edit ]
From an early age, Gygax hunted and was a target-shooter with both bow and gun.[66] He was also an avid gun collector, and at various times owned a variety of rifles, shotguns, and handguns.[67]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
The first DM,
He taught us to roll the dice.
He opened the door to new worlds.
His work shaped our industry.
He brought us Gen Con,
For this we thank him.
In fond memory of Gary Gygax
and in celebration of his spirit and accomplishments. A plaque dedicated to Gary Gygax at Gen Con 2008 reading:
As the "father of role-playing games", Gygax received many awards, honors, and tributes related to gaming:
See also [ edit ]INKSTER, Mich. - Grief has consumed John Guarascio.
His daughter Jenna was just 21 when she was killed in Inkster in November of last year. Jenna was sitting in her car with her boyfriend in the front seat and his cousin in the back. A gunman appeared and started shooting into the car.
Read back: 21-year-old woman shot, killed outside home in Inkster
"You take on responsibility for your children. My responsibility is to make sure that she gets justice," said Guarascio. "That's why I don't want this story to just disappear. She's not just another statistic, she's my daughter."
In the year since her death, Guarascio has spent a lot of time waiting for that phone call from police with news someone is in custody.
"We were given all these lofty hopes, and in the end it's just another dead person in Inkster," he said.
The father is hoping someone has the courage to put a killer -- or killers -- behind bars. He says the men in Jenna's car haven't been forthcoming and he believes someone heard the barrage of gunfire that night and may have seen something.
"If people don't talk, people are just going to continue to kill people and get away with it," he said.
Jenna's birthday is Wednesday -- the first birthday since her murder. The family plans to hold a small memorial.
Almost a year later, has this case gone cold, or are there leads police are looking into?
Inkster police say this is an ongoing investigation and they are pursuing some leads. Michigan State Police investigators have a general idea what led up to the shooting, but their biggest problem is that people aren't talking.
Copyright 2014 by ClickOnDetroit.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.So, the Chicago Blackhawks fell to the Dallas Stars. That's not ideal under normal circumstances, but when there's a really, really tight three-way division race on the line, it's even worse. The difference between winning the Central or not is playing a wild card team in the first round of the playoffs - or facing off against another Central team you're neck-in-neck with.
But as Mark Lazerus pointed out, despite the loss, there's still reason to be feeling good:
Worth noting:#Blackhawks play just four teams currently in the playoff picture in their last 13.
Blues play 8.
Stars play 11. — Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) March 12, 2016
The Hawks face the Kings, Stars, Bruins, and Blues in the rest of the regular season. Though it's worth noting they also play the Flyers and Wild: two teams in the thick of the playoff race.
So that leaves six games against the Jets, Flames, Canucks, Coyotes, and Blue Jackets: all teams whose playoff aspirations are pretty much over, or should be by the time the Hawks play them.
The Blues? They still face the Stars, Sharks, Capitals, Avalanche, Bruins, and Hawks over eight games - including the NHL-leading Caps twice. It is worth noting, though, that the Avalanche are basically in the same position as the Wild: they're right on the bubble, so they could go either way in being a playoff team or not.
They also face the Flames, Oilers, Canucks, and Coyotes five times before the season ends: just one less game against bottom feeders than the Hawks.
The Stars, on the other hand, really have it tough. They still face the Blues, Kings, Lightning, Islanders, Hawks, Sharks, Predators, Ducks, and Avalanche. With just two games against the Coyotes remaining on their schedule, almost their entire lead up to the playoffs is against, well, playoff teams.
The Blackhawks are just two points back of the division lead. There's just under a month left in the season. It's anybody's division - but you have to like Chicago's chances.The battle for medicine's soul: A century of alternative remedies Conventional and alternative medicine have waged a century-long war for supremacy. Here's what they can both learn
On an October evening in 1893, homeopaths from the Hahnemann Medical College marched proudly down the streets of Philadelphia in the city’s annual medical parade. Cheered on by the crowd lining the streets, the students carried canes and waved banners in the royal blue and burnt orange of their school, proudly displaying their motto: “In things certain, unity; in things doubtful, liberty; in all things, charity.” Unity and charity were far from the minds of the medical students at the University of Philadelphia, Jefferson, and Medico-Chirurgical colleges, however. After learning that the Hahnemann students were to lead the parade, the regular students flatly refused to participate, claiming that to do so would insult “their health and dignity.” And so the homeopaths from Hahnemann along with students from the Philadelphia Dental College marched down Broad Street alone to the taunts of their regular peers: “Sugar pill, sugar pill, / Never cured and never will. / Rickety roup, rickety roup, / Hahnemann, Hahnemann, in the soup.” Led by a brass band and a squad of mounted police called in to keep order, the 250 defiant and proud homeopathic students called out their school cheer as they passed: “Rah, rah, rah, Hahnemann, Hahnemann, sis boom ah.” It was a sweet moment for homeopaths, and yet another reminder to regulars that after nearly a century, the fight to vanquish their irregular competitors was far from won.
But American medicine had changed substantially in that century. The discovery of germs, the advent of X-rays, and the growth of sterile surgery among other medical innovations began to shift healing away from individual Americans and the home and into the hands of trained experts working in hospitals. Knowledge about the structure and function of the body had finally reached the point where daily medical practice began to change. These developments could not have come at a better time.
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The closing decades of the nineteenth century brought major upheavals to nearly every aspect of life. The horrors of the Civil War had shattered the peaceful vision social reformers had promulgated earlier in the century of humanity’s perfection through right living and self-control. Americans still thought it was important to work toward the common good, but to survive and thrive now seemed to demand risk and self-indulgence rather than personal example and self-sacrifice. Many people, especially the newly wealthy, became philanthropists and donated money to causes as the nation’s now well-developed consumer ethos encouraged people to believe that good works—like good health—could be purchased. Meanwhile, immigration brought millions of new people to the United States just as the nation’s workforce shifted from predominantly rural and farm labor to urban and industrial work. Cities exploded. Advances in transportation and communication networks lessened geographical distances and reduced isolation. Technology also made work more productive and efficient. As a result, business boomed. Economic fortunes were made and lost overnight. At the same time, at least half of all workers barely made enough money to survive.
To a nation in flux and looking for answers, scientific progress appeared to be a cultural cure-all. Science held the promise of order and efficiency at a time when the nation seemed to many Americans unable to cope with the disorder and complexities of modern life. In response, nearly all fields began adopting more systematic methods and making claims of specific knowledge and expertise. Medicine, law, journalism, education, and even child rearing increasingly set boundaries defining the scope of their subject and the prerequisites for practicing.
Regular doctors had tried to set these boundaries and stake their claim on medical practice throughout the nineteenth century but to little effect. Many Americans, aided by the loud shouts of irregulars, had dismissed their argument as more mercenary than scientific, a self-interested effort to dissuade people from seeking the services of competitors—and they likely had a point. But advances in medical science now began to change the healing landscape. No longer just rhetoric, regular medicine had new tools and knowledge at its disposal that offered a tangible hope of healing. Americans did not lose their attachment to self-reliance, but many problems now seemed bigger than any one individual could possibly grasp through common sense alone. In this culture, expertise became a trait of increasing popular value. The unwillingness of some irregulars, namely hydropaths, Thomsonians, and mesmerists, to distinguish between formally trained practitioners and those who came to the field through a calling or hands-on experience now made them appear backward and less well equipped to compete with this new class of professional healers.
These scientific advances and cultural shifts fueled the revival of the medical licenses deemed undemocratic earlier in the century. In the 1880s and 1890s, most state legislatures reinstated licensing requirements at the instigation of regular medicine’s state and local societies. Until late in the century, these medical societies had largely proved ineffective at lobbying for the profession, torn apart by internal struggles over theory, practice, and leadership. These organizations grew stronger and more effective with time, and they succeeded in convincing politicians that medicine demanded a basic competency in science. By the late nineteenth century, the image of the ideal doctor had expanded to include laboratory methods rather than bedside manner and observation alone. These licensing laws did not drive irregulars out of practice, however. Homeopaths and the eclectic heirs to Thomsonism were too well established and the homeopaths far too popular to be suddenly outlawed. Regulars only succeeded in getting the licensing laws they wanted by allowing homeopaths and eclectics—the very groups they had originally organized to oppose—to be licensed as well. By the 1920s, many states had passed licensing statutes that covered newer irregular systems too, though it would be many decades until osteopathy and chiropractic achieved legal protection in every state.
Buoyed by the return of medical licensure, the American Medical Association took a far more active political role in the early twentieth century. While still concerned with berating and exposing irregular quackery, the organization also seized on widespread concerns about the dangers of urban life to campaign for sanitation laws, public hospitals, and the creation of a national health bureau to implement and coordinate public health programs. They supported diagnostic tests for cholera and vaccination for diphtheria and required reporting of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases to city and state officials. Associating themselves with these concerns helped to forge an image of regular medicine as a proponent of social welfare and community health at a time when public health had itself because a distinct field of medicine out of concern over urban life. Improving public health could only improve the status of regular medicine in the eyes of patients and the government. The AMA fought to exclude irregulars from this new arena of health care by lobbying to prevent them from serving on medical councils and city boards of health and in public hospitals, efforts in which they mostly succeeded. Irregulars protested what they saw as political moves by regulars to monopolize public health and to destroy competition on the national level. Regular medicine’s enthusiastic embrace of sanitation and hygiene was an especially paradoxical outcome for the hydropaths who had pioneered the principles and practices that underlay these public health campaigns.
Regulars also pushed for educational reforms in the nation’s medical schools. At the recommendation of the AMA, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching sent high school principal Abraham Flexner to evaluate the ability of regular, eclectic, homeopathic, and osteopathic schools in the United States and Canada to produce doctors trained in regular methods. The famous Flexner report of 1910 revealed the sorry state of medical education. Flexner wrote complete analyses of each school. Of the 155 he visited, he recommended that 120 schools should close. Flexner declared the majority of the regular schools “utterly wretched” and “hopeless affairs” and discounted all irregular institutions as “worthless” and “fatally defective.” He found most schools to be proprietary or commercial medical enterprises with minimal academic standards and little or no connection to the hospitals and laboratories that had increasingly become central to the provision of care. In the competitive rush to attract students, many proprietary medical schools, regular and irregular alike, had shortened terms and eliminated staff (or never hired them in the first place) to maximize profits. Although he had few kind words for regular schools, Flexner saved his particular scorn for irregulars. He warned that opening the profession to anyone who wanted to be a doctor endangered the well-being of society and the nobility of a profession dedicated to service.
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The Flexner report quickly achieved mythic status for catalyzing the reform of medical education in the United States, but its methods and conclusions, particularly concerning irregulars, do raise questions. Who could be surprised that irregular schools did not turn out regular physicians? That was not the goal of an irregular medical education. Flexner was also accompanied in his survey by regular doctor Nathan P. Cowell, secretary of the Council on Medical Education of the AMA. Hardly a disinterested party with regard to the outcome of the report, Cowell’s council had in fact set the standards Flexner used to assess the schools, and the AMA had never seen irregular schools as anything but counterfeit. That’s not to say that the nation’s medical education did not need improvement—better-trained doctors would result in better medicine—but the political and economic motivations of those behind the Flexner report provided just as much if not more motivation than any idealistic appeals to improve the quality of medical education.
In the wake of the report, nearly half of the nation’s regular medical schools closed. Many schools that admitted women and African Americans, which tended to be weaker and financially unstable to begin with, closed. Those that survived drastically upgraded standards. Flexner had recommended that all medical schools require entrants to have a college degree and encouraged the adoption of a four-year medical curriculum. As encouragement, he persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to make grants to those schools he hand-selected as worthy of investment. He chose mostly long-established institutions in the East as well as a handful in the South, Midwest, and West. Rockefeller’s contributions stimulated other donations to support medical education. Many irregular schools also improved their curriculum to match the new standards of regular medicine. While some of these irregular schools carried on, many failed, done in by the high costs of upgrading facilities and hiring high-quality staff. The net effect of the Flexner report was to widen rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst schools.
Not every irregular kowtowed to Flexner’s findings. Chiropractors, in particular, protested his recommendations. They argued that the adoption of Flexner’s educational standards would exclude worthy but financially strapped students from becoming doctors. In the past, a lower-class person could become a doctor through hard work and desire. Under Flexner’s plan, he or she would stand little chance because of the costs of obtaining both a college and medical education.
The chiropractors did have a point. Requiring college degrees for medical school admittance excluded a majority of the population: more than 90 percent of Americans did not have bachelor’s degrees even by 1920. Longer and more costly training made medicine more exclusive and less accessible to minorities, women, immigrants, and working-class Americans. Flexner, for his part, likely thought curbing enrollment a laudable goal of educational reform. He warned that awarding too many medical degrees only suppressed salaries and limited the field’s ability to attract the best students. “It is evident that in a society constituted as our modern states,” wrote Flexner, “the interests of the social order will be served best when the number of men entering a given profession reaches and does not exceed a certain ratio.” Raising standards was an effective means of reducing the number of doctors and increasing the social and economic status of the profession. Unlike many of his peers who believed female doctors would also lower medicine’s status, Flexner actually supported coeducation in medical schools, though he rather myopically editorialized, “[N]ow that women are freely admitted to the medical profession, it is clear that they show a decreasing inclination to enter it.”
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The path was hardly free and clear for women. Flexner speculated that fewer women entered medicine either due to a drop in demand for women doctors or less interest among women in becoming doctors. Neither was true. The closure of irregular medical schools and close alignment of others with regular medicine had a particularly detrimental effect on the women who achieved professional medical careers in irregular health care. Middle- and upper-class women had made great strides in the late nineteenth century, comprising 10 percent or more of enrollment at regular medical schools. While many attended female-only medical colleges, women still made up nearly 20 percent of the medical profession in eastern cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore by 1900. But lacking adequate financial support, especially as medicine became more technologically sophisticated, many of these schools closed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result was a sharp decline in female medical students even before Flexner issued his report. Coeducation remained an option, and one that many women themselves wanted, but regulars did not make it easy. Oliver Wendell Holmes acknowledged that women brought something unique to healing, but he stopped short of endorsing women’s professional participation in his field. “I have often wished that disease could be hunted by its professional antagonists in couples—a doctor and a doctor’s quick witted wife,” wrote Holmes. “For I am quite sure there is a natural clairvoyance in a woman which would make her... much the superior of a man in some particulars of diagnosis.” Holmes was sure that “many a suicide would have been prevented if the doctor’s wife had visited the day before it happened. She would have seen in the merchant’s face his impending bankruptcy while her stupid husband was prescribing for his dyspepsia and endorsing his note.”
Regular medical schools routinely failed to provide opportunities to women and habitually limited the number of women they would even accept at a token 5 percent until the mid-twentieth century. School administrators justified excluding qualified women by claiming that most would give up their medical practices after marriages, so they were not worth the investment. Even those men who seemed to support women’s participation in the field betrayed certain biases about women. John Dodson, dean of Rush Medical College in Chicago, praised his school’s female students as “a credit to themselves and to us” but concluded that “no matter how superior these students may have been in their college work,” they “cannot but do otherwise than rejoice when matrimony claims them.” A medical education also cost more as schools passed the expense of new equipment and faculty, expanded facilities, and lengthened training time on to students. Many women who had once financed their medical education by working could no longer afford to do so. At the same time, the propriety of men and women studying the human body together in the same room remained a potent and divisive issue.
It seems not far-fetched to say that women’s involvement in irregular health systems from the very beginning provided all the evidence some regular doctors needed to dismiss it. In 1893, Harvard professor Edward H. Clarke warned that excessive intellectual activity diverted a woman’s limited supply of energy from reproduction to the brain, which threatened not only her health but also that of her family and society. It was true that women could pursue the same educational course as men, Clarke declared, but “it is not true that she can do all this, and retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.” Worse, women engaging in men’s work “unsexed” themselves by taking on male roles, and thus supposedly male traits, rendering them unable to have the children that would sustain civilization.
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Medical texts touting the terror of women’s equality and autonomy flourished. Many used scientific and medical language to rationalize women’s exclusion from active public and professional roles. Dr. Alfred Stille, in his presidential address to the American Medical Association in 1871, declared, “Certain women seek to rival men in manly sports, and the strong-minded ape them in all things, even in dress. In doing so, they may command a sort of admiration such as all monstrous productions inspire, especially when they tend towards a higher type than their own.” The reverse was also true, though: those men who performed the same tasks as women lost their masculinity. Dr. Stille warned that “a man with feminine traits of character or with the frame and carriage of a female is despised by both the sex he ostensibly belongs to and that of which it is at once a caricature and a libel.” Working with women or spending too much time in the feminizing clutches of mothers, teachers, and wives sapped a man’s masculinity. These societal assumptions could not help but influence perceptions about irregular health systems, particularly those like hydropathy and homeopathy where women took active leadership roles. With women in charge, irregular health was marked as both dangerous and ridiculous.
Even with these barriers, women did not stop practicing medicine. Osteopaths, chiropractors, and Christian Scientists welcomed women into their professional fold. Other women, particularly homeopaths, organized locally and focused on lay practice through the first half of the twentieth century. Still more entered regular medicine in nursing and social work, careers that closely aligned with cultural assumptions about women’s more caring nature, and as such were structurally subordinated to the mostly male doctors.
The AMA’s gains and control of public health along with the quickening pace of medical advances in the first decades of the twentieth century significantly challenged the strength of irregular medicine. The introduction of the first antimicrobial drugs, known as sulfonamides, in the 1930s presented a significant breakthrough in the fight against infectious disease and paved the way for the antibiotic revolution in medicine. The mass production of penicillin in the 1940s nearly eliminated diseases that had plagued humans for centuries, including syphilis, meningitis, and rheumatic fever. Streptomycin in 1945 dramatically reduced cases of tuberculosis and plague. Even better, these drugs were some of the first non-homeopathic remedies to cause few side effects. Americans clamored for these “wonder drugs,” and doctors dispensed them with what historian James Whorton has called “antibiotic abandon.”
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The 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of even more antibiotics, vaccines for polio and measles, the CAT scan, heart and kidney transplants, and coronary bypass surgery. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick announced their findings on the structure of DNA. Controlled clinical trials became the gold standard for assessing the safety and efficacy of new therapies. As deaths from infectious disease dropped, regular medicine rose in public status, trust, and esteem.
Medicine also grew more bureaucratic, structured, and regulated throughout the twentieth century. That trend was already apparent to Mark Twain in 1900. “The doctor’s insane system has not only been permitted to continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by the State and made a close monopoly,” he wrote, calling it “an infamous thing, a crime against a free-man’s proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method of defending his body against disease and death.” Twain had long supported free choice in medicine, even as he sometimes ridiculed the options, but that freedom became increasingly constrained as the century wore on. More medical care happened in hospitals, where regular doctors controlled access and tended to exclude irregulars from practicing in their wards. Specialty boards licensed and certified practitioners, and the federal government took a more active role in subsidizing medical research and approving drugs and therapies for public use. For regular doctors, these institutional and political structures eliminated many of the economic and political uncertainties that had plagued the profession in the nineteenth century. Competition with irregulars no longer provoked the same anxiety and financial peril, even if it seemingly did little to blunt professional handwringing over irregular practice.
These structures of bureaucratic control, according to historian Charles E. Rosenberg, tightened the boundaries between regular and irregular doctors. Regular doctors tended to view the growing inflexibility of medicine as an affirmation of their system’s scientific validity and stature. To regulars, the fight over public perception and for medical authority appeared finally won.
Yet despite all of these advances in medical science, it was also becoming apparent that many of the wonder drugs were less than wonderful. Patients eager for the latest miracle drug they had learned about in newspapers and on television came asking for remedies and treatments by name. Under pressure both to cure disease and to satisfy their patients, some doctors overprescribed. Many people became addicted to the amphetamines and tranquilizers they took for anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other chronic ailments—a problem that persists to this day. The dangers became even more apparent during the thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s. The drug, marketed as a sedative, one of the most popular and widely used classes of drugs in the United States, was found to produce serious birth defects. Suddenly, the drugs that had seemed so promising now seemed to many Americans to be more dangerous than good.
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More than just the physical threat of these drugs, some also decried the breakdown of the doctor-patient relationship. Few could dispute that scientific and technical advances in medicine had improved the health of the nation and decreased the dangers of infectious diseases, but at what cost to personal health and individualized attention? Doctors gave drugs for everything, critics claimed, without listening to the particular ailments of their patients. The exam and patient history that had long defined the medical experience now took a backseat to the medicine bottle, surgical procedures, and test results. Regulars worked under growing structural and financial constraints that eroded the amount of time they could spend with patients, leading to a strained discussion of the specific problem rather than a longer conversation that took account of the context of the problem. As a result, some patients complained that their doctors paid them little attention and were unwilling to communicate with them about their health in a clear and understandable way.
Regular medicine’s increasing fragmentation into specialties also made medical care more expensive, even out of reach for many Americans. Doctors, who had already been concentrated in urban areas, accelerated their movement to city and university hospitals, leaving medical shortages in rural areas. That these specialists also made more money only encouraged this trend. Unlike before, though, the nation’s hills and back roads no longer crawled with the herb doctors, midwives, itinerant folk healers, and bonesetters who had provided care where no other existed. Critics derided the medical profession as self-serving, elitist, and insensitive to the needs of patients for these holes in the system: a condemnation as familiar in 1960 as 1860.
Growing American disillusionment with regular medical practice and the high cost of care in the 1960s and 1970s led some to explore irregular medicine. Just as in the nineteenth century, broader cultural forces were at work. The Cold War, Vietnam, and atomic energy, among other social and political forces, made life feel uncertain and beyond individual control. In response, a counterculture emerged that rebelled against the authority of the government, science, and experts. Its members, mostly white and middle class like many of the nineteenth- century reformers, focused intently on tolerance, natural living, and individual rights. They embraced a simpler, more spiritual orientation to life that integrated the mind and body into well-being. These cultural trends burnished the appeal of irregular medicine. Americans rediscovered homeopathy and botanical remedies as well as a host of other therapies like naturopathy and the hydropathic Kneipp Cure. Health foods, exercise routines, and vitamins became topics of broad popular interest. To a new generation, irregular health-care approaches represented freedom, self-reliance, personal empowerment, and affordable care, the familiar chords that had stoked American health reform in the nineteenth century.
Of course, most of these new alternatives were not new at all. Nor had Americans ever stopped self-dosing and using irregular medicine. It was certainly true that many popular nineteenth-century health systems were not as strong or as visible in the mid-twentieth century as they had once been. Many Americans did not even realize the significant historic challenge irregulars like homeopaths had once posed to regular medicine when they began to emerge again in the 1960s and 1970s. But these healers had never disappeared. The number of homeopaths, phrenologists, mesmerists, and botanic healers sharply declined in the early twentieth century, but osteopaths, chiropractors, and many other kinds of healers made up for the retreat of older systems. In the 1920s, the Illinois Medical Society found that among six thousand Chicago residents, 87 percent reported using what regular medicine had taken to calling “cult medicine.” A similar national survey carried out by the federal government between 1929 and 1931 found that irregular practitioners comprised 10 percent of all healthcare visits. And in 1965, homeopath Wyeth Post Baker released confidential reports from the Senate Finance Committee revealing that an estimated twelve million people used homeopathic remedies without the advice or consent of their doctors. The tenacity of irregular health care’s appeal to the general public alarmed regulars: many had assumed irregular medicine’s demise decades earlier and had consigned its remaining users to a small |
recognised laboratory tests.
The findings will be a blow to those iPhone 5 fans who have wrongly assumed their trendy mobile, the best-selling in the world, is also the best.
Which? used what are known as the Geekbench speed tests. The higher the score, the faster the phone. The Samsung S4 scored 3,188 and the iPhone 1,664.
The speed of the processor is important but so is the type - for instance, the winning Samsung has a 1.9GHz quad-core processor, the Apple a 1.2GHz dual-core.
But Which? said: 'Bigger processors do not always mean better speeds - that’s why we put all the handsets through the same test.
'This measures processor and memory performances across smartphone platforms to provide a standard speed rating.'
JK Shin, President and Head of IT and Mobile Communication Division, at the launch of the S4 in New York. Among the features which the company hoped would propel it to dominate the market was a bigger screen and features such as gesture controls
It added: 'If a phone has a high Geekbench score it will perform well when photo-editing, running graphically intensive games and multi-tasking across numerous apps in general.'
GEEKBENCH SCORES
1.Samsung Galaxy S4 - 3188 points
2.HTC One - 2798
3.Sony Xperia Z - 2173
4.Google Nexus 4 - 2134
5.Samsung Galaxy Note 2 - 1950
6.BlackBerry Z10 - 1698
7.Apple iPhone 5 16GB - 1664
The HTC One was in second place and Sony’s Experia ‘sneaked’ into third ahead of the Google Nexus 4 but the Google does have the advantage of being up to £200 cheaper than its rivals.
The fastest phones tend to be the most expensive, costing up to £450 is bought sim free, yet all models are eventually replaced by better and faster ones.
Which? said: 'Undoubtedly, Apple will upgrade its next iPhone with an improved processor when it launches later this autumn.
'For the moment, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is the phone to beat when it comes to speed.'In recent decades electronic structure calculations and kinetic models proposed the hydrogen abstraction–acetylene addition (HACA) mechanism to dominate the formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—organic molecules carrying fused benzene rings—in combustion flames1 and in the interstellar medium (ISM).2 Since the very first postulation of their interstellar relevance as the missing link between small carbon clusters and carbonaceous nanoparticles (interstellar grains), PAHs have been suggested to contribute up to 30 % of the interstellar carbon budget and have also been associated with the prebiotic evolution of the interstellar medium.3 Their ubiquitous interstellar presence has been inferred from the diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs)4—discrete absorption features superimposed on the interstellar extinction curve ranging from the blue part of the visible (400 nm) to the near‐infrared (1.2 μm)—and through the unidentified infrared (UIR) emission bands observed in the range of 3 to 14 μm.5 The detection of PAHs in carbonaceous chondrites strongly advocates an interstellar origin.6
Being the backbone of PAH formation, the HACA mechanism implies a repetitive reaction sequence of an abstraction of a hydrogen atom from the reacting aromatic hydrocarbon (AH) by a hydrogen atom [reaction (1)] followed by addition of an acetylene molecule (C 2 H 2 ) to the radical site [reaction (2)] with A being an aromatic species:1a–1d
(1)
(2)
Starting from benzene (C 6 H 6 ), this mechanism is suggested to lead first to the phenyl radical (C 6 H 5 ) followed by addition of an acetylene molecule (C 2 H 2 ) forming the styrenyl radical (C 8 H 7 ).7 The second step of the HACA mechanism—a subsequent acetylene addition to the ortho‐vinylphenyl radical (C 8 H 7 ) formed by isomerization of the styrenyl species (C 8 H 7 )—or hydrogen abstraction from the phenylacetylene molecule (C 8 H 6 ) followed by addition of another acetylene molecule (C 2 H 2 ) ultimately yields naphthalene (C 10 H 8 )—the simplest PAH—by cyclization and hydrogen abstraction at elevated temperatures of up to 1000 K.1c,1d, 2, 8 However, despite the popularity of the HACA mechanism, it has not been observed experimentally. Flame models are plagued by an overwhelming number of possible reaction pathways, and it is complicated to truly ascertain from which reactants distinct PAHs are formed. Therefore, mechanistic routes to PAH synthesis have remained conjectural, and the formation mechanisms of even the simplest PAH representative—the naphthalene molecule (C 10 H 8 )—by the HACA mechanism has not been experimentally corroborated.
Here, in a simulated combustion environment we provide compelling experimental evidence for the formation of naphthalene (C 10 H 8 ) by the reaction of the phenyl radical (C 6 H 5 ) with two acetylene (C 2 H 2 ) molecules in a direct observation of the HACA mechanism. By exploiting the unique advantage of fragment‐free photoionization by tunable vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light and detection of the ionized molecules via a reflectron time of flight mass spectrometer (ReTOF), we are able to identify the isomer specific reaction products of the HACA mechanism and rationalize the reaction mechanism.
The prototype PAH naphthalene (C 10 H 8 ) and the HACA mechanism byproduct phenylacetylene (C 6 H 5 CCH) were formed by a directed synthesis through reaction of the phenyl radical (C 6 H 5 ) with two acetylene molecules (C 2 H 2 ; Experimental Section). Here, a continuous beam of phenyl radicals (C 6 H 5 ) was generated in situ by a quantitative pyrolysis of nitrosobenzene (C 6 H 5 NO). The latter was seeded in neat acetylene (C 2 H 2 ), which was expanded at a pressure of 300 Torr into a resistively heated silicon carbide tube at a temperature of 1020±100 K (“chemical reactor”). The acetylene molecules did not only act as a seeding gas, but also as a reactant with the pyrolytically generated phenyl radicals. The neutral molecular beam were interrogated by quasi continuous tunable vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation in the extraction region of a ReTOF mass spectrometer. The photoionized molecules were then collected by a microchannel plate (MCP) detector. A mass spectrum was obtained at intervals of 0.025 eV between 8.0 and 11.0 eV.
Figure 1 depicts the mass spectrum recorded at 9 eV photoionization energy with product peaks at the relevant mass‐to‐charge ratios of m/z=102 (C 8 H 6 +) and m/z=128 (C 10 H 8 +). Considering the molecular mass of the reactants and of the neutral products, we can see that the C 8 H 6 and C 10 H 8 products are formed by reaction of the phenyl radical (C 6 H 5 ; 77 u) with one acetylene (C 2 H 2 ; 26 u) and two acetylene molecules, respectively [reactions (3),, –(6)] with the detected reaction products stated in italics.
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Mass spectrum of the products of the reaction of phenyl radicals with acetylene in the chemical reactor recorded at a photon energy of 9.0 eV.
The interpretation of the raw data provides convincing evidence that in the reaction of phenyl radicals with acetylene, hydrocarbons of the molecular formula C 8 H 6 and C 10 H 8 are formed. We shift our attention now to the identification of the product isomer(s) formed based on an analysis of the photoionization efficiency (PIE) curves, which report the intensities of the ions at m/z=102 (C 8 H 6 +) and m/z=128 (C 10 H 8 +) as a function of photon energy (Figure 2). The experimental data as displayed in black matches well reference photoionization efficiency curves of phenylacetylene (C 8 H 6 )9 and naphthalene (C 10 H 8 ) isomers10 overlaid in blue. Therefore, we can conclude that peaks at m/z=102 and 128 originate solely from the phenylacetylene (C 6 H 5 CCH) and naphthalene (C 10 H 8 ) isomers, respectively. For completeness, we also checked reference PIE curves of alternative isomers such as azulene (C 10 H 8 ). However, the PIE curve of azulene cannot reproduce the experimental data since the onset of the PIE arises at 7.42 eV, which is 0.72 eV lower in energy than that seen in our data. Note that the PIE curve at m/z=103 can be attributed to the presence of 13C‐substituted phenylacetylene. It should be stressed that PIE curves of C 8 H 6 and C 10 H 8 isomers are unique to each molecule implying that the presence of other isomers in the molecular beam would alter the shape of the PIEs significantly. Therefore, we conclude that phenylacetylene and naphthalene are solely responsible for the products at m/z 102 and 128, respectively. Using the photoionization cross‐sections11 and scaling for photon flux, a naphthalene (C 10 H 8 ) yield of 5±1 % compared to phenylacetylene (C 8 H 6 ; 95±1 %) is determined. Additional signals can be seen at lower masses and have been identified by matching their PIE curves to reference PIEs (see the Supporting Information). The signal at m/z=94 corresponds to phenol (C 6 H 6 O) arising from the reaction of the phenyl radical with traces of oxygen, which produces the phenoxy (C 6 H 5 O) radical followed by hydrogen abstraction. The small signal at m/z=78 is attributed to benzene and fulvene likely formed through hydrogen atom addition (and successive isomerization) to the phenyl radical. The resonantly stabilized free radicals (RSFRs) propargyl (m/z=39, C 3 H 3 ) and cyclopentadienyl (m/z=65, C 5 H 5 ) as well as cyclopentadiene (m/z=66, C 5 H 6 ) were observed also. These three species were not seen in either pure acetylene (C 2 H 2 ) or nitrosobenzene (C 6 H 5 NO) spectra. We would like to discuss briefly the origin of the product at lower masses. Recent computational investigations suggest that cyclopentadienyl radicals (C 5 H 5 ) might be formed through sequential hydrogen atom additions to naphthalene12 or as a result of phenol degradation by hydrogen atom loss to the phenoxy radical followed by carbon monoxide emission (CO) yielding the cyclopentadienyl radical.13 The cyclopentadiene (C 5 H 6 ) and benzene molecules (C 6 H 6 ) can be formed through hydrogen atom addition to their aromatic radicals, cyclopentadienyl and phenyl, respectively. Once cyclopentadienyl radicals are formed they are expected to further decompose to the propargyl radical and acetylene as demonstrated in shock tube studies14 and theoretical investigations.15 The temperature of 1020±100 K within the chemical reactor is high enough to overcome the reaction barriers to cyclopentadienyl and propargyl formation.
Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Photoionization efficiency curves (PIE) recorded at m/z=102 and 128 shown as red lines along with experimental errors defined as the hatched grey area. The blue lines show the PIE curves for determined experimentally for a) phenylacetylene9 and theoretically for b) naphthalene.10
The experiments provide compelling evidence that the naphthalene molecule together with phenylacetylene can be formed in the pyrolytic reactor under combustion‐like conditions from its phenyl radical and acetylene precursors by the HACA pathway. The detection of naphthalene together with phenylacetylene successfully demonstrate reaction pathways corresponding to the HACA mechanism as prosed by Frenklach1a–1d and through the Bittner–Howard1e route. Here, the phenyl radical (C 6 H 5 ) reacts with acetylene to form phenylacetylene through an acetylene versus hydrogen atom exchange pathway. This finding correlates with a study under single collision conditions using crossed molecular beams of phenyl radicals and acetylene, which identified phenylacetylene as the reaction product formed by atomic hydrogen emission.16 Here, phenylacetylene is formed through the barrier‐less addition of the phenyl radical to the π‐electron density of the carbon–carbon triple bond of acetylene yielding a C 8 H 7 reaction intermediate. The C 8 H 7 intermediate eventually decomposes by atomic hydrogen emission to phenylacetylene. In contrast to crossed molecular beams experiments, which are conducted under single collision conditions, collisional stabilization is possible in our chemical reactor.
Of the three HACA routes, two can proceed by addition of the second acetylene molecule to the C 8 H 7 intermediate. Firstly, the Bittner–Howard pathway is initiated through addition of the phenyl radical to the acetylene molecule to yield the collision complex C 8 H 7 ; an addition of a second acetylene molecule onto the acetyl chain forms a C 10 H 9 intermediate. The C4 chain with the radical located on the terminal carbon cyclizes via radical addition to the phenyl ring and subsequent hydrogen elimination yields naphthalene. Secondly, Frenklach’s route1a involves shifting the radical center of the C 8 H 7 intermediate to the phenyl ring by hydrogen migration.17 A second acetylene addition to the C 8 H 7 aromatic radical intermediate forms a di‐substituted C 10 H 9 intermediate; cyclization and hydrogen atom emission leads to naphthalene. The third route, and original HACA mechanism proposed by Frenklach involves first the formation of phenylacetylene, followed by hydrogen abstraction from the phenyl ring to form a C 8 H 5 intermediate.1b–1d A subsequent addition of acetylene to the ring forms a di‐substituted C 10 H 7 intermediate, cyclization of the radical acetyl group forms a naphthyl radical (C 10 H 7 ) to which atomic hydrogen can be added to reach naphthalene. Based on the calculated rate constants and barrier heights there is no preferential route discernible between the three routes.7 However, in our experiment we can rule the last reaction route out since we do not see any evidence for a second hydrogen abstraction from phenylacetylene. If the reaction proceeded with a second hydrogen atom abstraction, we would observe products from acetylene addition to the meta and para positions of the aromatic ring which would not cyclize to naphthalene, and therefore change the PIE curves. Additions to the meta and para positions would also likely result in a spread of products with different mass‐to‐charge ratios such as C 10 H 6 (m/z=126) and C 10 H 10 (m/z=130), which are not detected. Considering that we only observe the formation of naphthalene (m/z=128) we can rationalize the reaction mechanism proceeds through a second acetylene addition to a C 8 H 7 radical intermediate, either by the Frenklach or Bittner–Howard routes.New Version Questions
Why are you updating the forecast pages?
With this update, the forecast pages have been rewritten to modernize the structure, remove duplications, and provide a service-oriented data structure or API. Developers using the NWS API will need to update their application to reflect the new version. It has been improved to provide richer data sets through linked data to other resources. Please refer to the "API Reference" tab for more details.
What will change on the web site?
The user experience remains mostly the same, as the primary goal of this update is to provide more consistent service. The URLs of many pages will change, including all forecast pages, and this will break existing bookmarks that users may have. A link on the error message of the old page will guide users to the new location. Users can now select a location on a mobile device, and the hourly weather was added to the mobile site.
What happened to the text-only forecast?
The most common use of the current text-only forecast was by low-bandwidth users. This also meant low-bandwidth users missed out on basic navigation and other information. Rather than completely eliminating the information, the new version of the forecast pages will present the same information using a low-bandwidth display. The low-bandwidth display will now apply to all pages, not just the forecast.
Enable this presentation by setting the "view" parameter to: plain. For example: https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/point/38.9588,-94.624?view=plain. Also see the question "Can I embed the forecast on my web page" that will further reduce the overall page bandwidth, which would result in this example: https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/point/38.9588,-94.624?view=plain&mode=min. Note that this feature is still being optimized for best performance.
Will the web site work on my mobile device?
The web site was designed to replace mobile.weather.gov, and uses a responsive design that displays well on any device. Key features of the mobile site were transferred to the new version, including a mobile-friendly search page and the hourly forecast.
What happened to the link to the Spanish forecast?
The link is now named "Pronostico en Espanol" and is located in the "Additional Forecasts and Information" section on the forecast page.
What happened to the "Share" link to social media?
The "Share" social media links and icons were removed because of technical concerns. This feature will be revisited soon.
Where did the red, "Hazardous Weather Conditions" box on the forecast page go?
All warnings are now contained within the extended forecast section on the forecast page, and are limited to the NWS watches, warnings, advisories, and other similar products in the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) version 1.2. Please refer to the CAP 1.2 service change notice for more details.
What if I experience an issue with the web site?
Please review the "Known Issues" tab on this page and contact us if the problem is not already identified.
General Functionality Questions
How do I print the forecast?
All pages are now designed to be print-friendly. Click the print button in your browser for a presentation that is environmentally friendly to print.
Can I embed the forecast on my web page?
Yes. You can also customize the appearance of this forecast using the mode parameter. There currently three modes: min, widget, and ext.
The min mode will only display the basic components: header, navigation, and detailed forecast.
The ext mode will display the header, navigation, and the extended forecast.
The widget mode will display the observation, extended forecast, and detailed forecast, but removes the header/footer(a common request when using an HTML iframe).
Example: https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/point/38.9588,-94.624?mode=min.
A future version of the forecast page will provide a JavaScript library that will place the forecast onto your site without an iframe.
Why is the zone page showing on the forecast page?
The forecast will redirect to a zone page when there was is a technical issue with the forecast page, indicated by a blue banner with the message, "The zone data will be displayed until your location has been refreshed." This condition can occur when the forecast page cannot process the data provided by the field office or the data has expired. The field offices work quickly to issue updated data, and you do not need to submit a support ticket unless you experience this issue for a prolonged period of time.
Why is the forecast not using the closest observation station?
If the closest observation station does not have a current observation then the forecast page will use the next closest observation station. The list of observations stations is determined by the field office responsible for the forecast. Please use the contact information in the footer of the forecast page to contact the field office concerning observation issues.
API Use Questions
What is an Accept header?
The new API will use headers to modify the version and format of the response. Every request, either by browser or application, sends header information every time you visit any website. For example, a commonly used header called "UserAgent" tells a website what type of device you are using so it can tailor the best experience for you. No private information is shared in a header, and this is a standard practice for all government and private sites. Developers can override these headers for specific purposes (see the "API Specifications" tab for more information). You can get full details by visiting the header field definitions page at the World Wide Web Consortium site.
Why does the API require multiple requests for all the information?
There are many uses for the weather information provided by the API, and, historically, the service responded with everything but the kitchen sink. This design bloated bandwidth and make caching efforts difficult. One goal of the new API was a design that allowed repeat users of specific data the ability to access only the information needed. Another goal was to expire content based upon the information life cycle. The new approach using JSON-LD achieves both of these goals. While this requires additional requests, future enhancements, especially HTTP2, will make this design more efficient than a catch-all approach.
How do I discover weather data using the API?
The API uses linked data to allow applications to discover content. Similar to a web site that provides HTML links to help users navigate to each page; linked data helps applications navigate to each endpoint. The /points/location endpoint is the most common endpoint to discover additional API content given the popularity of weather data based upon a location (latitude and longitude).
For example, to discover the endpoint of the raw forecast, the application would first request:
https://api.weather.gov/points/39.7456,-97.0892
This response tells the application where to find relative information–including office, zone and forecast data–for a given point. The application can then use the linked data in the previous response to locate the raw forecast:
https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80
If an application knows the office and grid position for a location (through caching—a similar concept to a bookmark for users), the link data would not be needed to locate the content for raw forecast data.If you’re looking for Corvus Belli’s N3 Human Sphere spoils, here are a bunch. I trolled through 4Chan so you wouldn’t have to. I’m sure Human Sphere is hitting the shelves shortly but taking a peek never hurt.
Random N3 Human Sphere Spoils:
– iKohl got a buff, it now is part of an order. This combines into silly things with Camo/ODD: i.e. If I iKohl+Camo move into melee, you get -3 Camo and -X (3 x Level) if you declare shoot.
– Mechanical Transformation occurs at the beginning of the Order like Stand Up/Prone. Su-Jian got way better.
– Muyibs got a huge upgrade Sectorial-wise as across the board profile-wise they got No.2. They’re a Link Team that won’t drop.
– Dogged no longer cancels Link Teams, so Muyibs are super resilient link.
– Tohaa get more Pokemon abilities.
– Surprise Shot L2 is a thing, enjoy more -6.
– Guard and Protheon are now leveled abilities like Martial Arts.
– Natural Born Warrior lost Courage but I’m going to assume that’s just added to all the NBW profiles. NBW either gets a massive CC boost or you negate all CC Skills (which is a counter to iKohl now)
– 0-Visibility Smoke got renamed to Eclipse. Yay, less confusion.
– Specialist got renamed to Specialist Operative.
– Chest Mines: Disposable 2. They can be added to a Shoot roll for Twin Fire; i.e. Combi AND Chest Mine. They can be used in CC to give +3 CC. OR If lose a CC combat, they detonate all their Chest Mines on any opponents in CC with them.
– D-Charges now detonate on the turn you place them if used in CC but you have -3 CC. Still, vast buff over N2.
– Electric Pulse stuns for 2 turns and is no longer a roll but automatically a result of 7. If your opponent loses the FtF from this 7, full turn paralysis!
– New Weapon: Red Fury: Molotok Ranges, B4 D13 Shock.
– Pulzar: I think this is going to replace the Nanopulser.
– Pitcher: I think this replaces the Marker.
– Biometric Visor: Anti-Impersonation. On PanO only model.
– Ghazi Mutts got Smoke Grenades and didn’t increase in cost.
– BrandoCastro’s Meta-Agility has been removed, they’re using both Climbing+ and Super Jump.
– Metachemistry L2 has fewer options but they combine abilities, i.e. BioImmune and SuperJump, NWI and Arm 2, etc. (These aren’t actual examples, lost track of where that was but to give you an idea)
– Asawira now BTS 9
– Voronin, the HVT, is also playable model: 21 pts, BS 11 Rifle plus Assault Pistol. Guard 1, Strategos 1, SS2, can be Lt.
– Basic Uxia got point discount, Assault Pistols stayed same I think.
– Haris got a.5 SWC discount across the board. Haris on Asawira now free because only Haris profile is Spitfire.
– Hafza gain HRL
– Muyibs have 11 profiles!!!! Panzerfaust nolonger costs SWC. Gained a FO.
– Basic Barid now 14 points (16 before). Barids have two different Hacking devices with Special Programs.
– Reverend Custoders got 2 new profiles with Assault Hacking Devices with Icebreaker.
– Nomads got a unit called Taskmaster, me gusta name. ARM 5 Heavy Infantry with Fireteam Duo, Free Agent (You can swap between Battle Groups before Orders are calculated at the beginning of your turn) and lots of heavy weapon profiles: BSG, HMG, Red Fury, HRL.
– Gecko BTS 6
– Morlock CRAP loadout now 8 points.
– Hector in Aleph: BS 13 2W HI with NWI, Plasma Rifle or Spitfire. MA4, Kin2, Strategos 1, X-Visor. 71 with Rifle, 70 with Spitfire plus lots of stuff.
– Devabots now have different names to say what they do: i.e. one with Repeater, one with Albedo, etc.
– Albedo is a skill that lets you set up White Noise somehow.
– Proxies now have Mk 4 and 5. Mk4 HI with HMG/HRL; Mk5 MI with NWI Mk12 Marksman X or Dual SMGs FO.
– Devas now have 3 Lt. Options. Basic Lt, Devabot Lt or Sensor.
– Proxy Jumper no longer dies if host dies, need to kill each body.
– SuJian Fireteam Duo
– Shikami JSA HI with Super Jump, Climbing+, Dual AP DA CCW, ODD, Kine2, MA3, Specialist. 47pt Combi, 45 with Contender and Assault Pistol. This just screams fucking awesome.
– Karakuri gained Haris profile
– No one plays aliens, skipping that. And I don’t care for PanO. So… Done!GENEVA (Reuters) - The world must ditch austerity and economic neo-liberalism and undertake a global “New Deal” to rebalance the global economy and achieve prosperity for all, the U.N. trade and development agency UNCTAD said in a report on Thursday.
FILE PHOTO: A clock is seen in London's Financial centre at Canary Wharf In London, Britain, May 25, 2017. REUTERS/Russell Boyce/File Photo
UNCTAD chief Mukhisa Kituyi said the global economy was picking up but still not lifting off.
“A combination of too much debt and too little demand at the global level has hampered sustained expansion of the world economy,” he said in a statement.
Much of the blame was aimed at “neo-liberalism”, a term used to refer to governments cutting back on their own role and leaving the private sector to lead economic and social development within a free-market capitalist system.
After decades of such policies, the system was perceived to be unduly biased in favor of a handful of large corporations, financial institutions and wealthy individuals, the report said.
The world now needed a “21st century makeover”, it said.
“The whole neo-liberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ has begun to fall apart,” Richard Kozul-Wright, UNCTAD’s globalization director, told a news conference.
“There are plenty of alternatives out there and they are urgently needed given the kind of economic and social imbalances that we are currently facing.”
He said central bank chiefs such as Mark Carney in Britain and Janet Yelland in the United States seemed to think they had solved the crisis and blamed any continuing risks on China.
But the global system was still serving narrow interests, and the change that was needed went beyond simply “tinkering with education or credit for poor people or... putting the word ‘inclusive’ in front of every possible economic process you can imagine and believing you’ve solved the problem”.
“We need a global ‘New Deal’,” he said, referring to the policies that revived the depressed U.S. economy in the 1930s.
The aim should be to end fiscal austerity, imposed in 13 out of 14 leading advanced economies between 2011 and 2015, and prioritize reflation, full employment and decent jobs, rather than tackling inflation and cutting government debt.
“It needs a serious regulation of corporate abuse in both the financial and the corporate sector and it requires serious redistributionary measures – both fiscal and more innovative measures,” he said.
Kozul-Wright said there were signs of a backlash against austerity in the Anglo-Saxon world, in countries such as New Zealand and Britain, and the United States could also potentially follow suit.
But mainland Europe seemed to be extremely resistant to such a change of direction, he said.Many draft pundits, reporters, and fans (including myself) believed the Rockets would select a PG if they did not trade out of the 18th spot in the 2015 NBA Draft. I personally had Tyus Jones or RJ Hunter penciled in as the selection. Both filled a certain need on the team.
Tyus Jones would provide depth at point-guard, a possible long-term solution to the inconsistent play from those already on the roster. As for RJ Hunter, he's a great shooter and a wing who can create for others off the dribble and alleviate some pressure from James Harden in the half-court. But I'm not the general manager. Daryl Morey is. And he surprised many by selecting SF Sam Dekker 18th overall.
2014-2015 Season Stats
Per Game
Year POS PTS AST RB BLK STL TOV PF 3PA FGA MP
Shooting
Year POS FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% FT FTA FT%
Courtesy of http://www.pointafter.com/
Shot-chart and Shooting
Sam Dekker is most effective around the paint. He attempted 53.6% of his field-goals from inside the paint, converting 71.1%. He struggles shooting from the top of the key (30.6%), which accounted for 31.6% of his field-goal attempts. He's very good from the right side of the floor (right-corner withstanding), where he likes to initiate dribble penetration opportunities and attack the defender's three-point close out.
In the 2015 NCAA tournament, Dekker averaged around 21 points per game. He continued to struggle from the top of the key, but continued success from the right wing and in-fact shot 50% from the right corner. Most of his baskets around the rim were from cuts, drives, or attacks from the right side of the floor. Seldom was he successful when attacking with his left hand dribble, an area where he must improve. In the tournament, he was 41% from the right mid-range area, while a poor 24% from the left mid-range area. For Sam Dekker to become successful and earn Kevin McHale's trust, he'll need to improve his shooting stroke and transform from a streaky into a consistent three-point shooter.
Speaking of his shooting, let's take a look at his mechanics and breakdown how good of a three-point shooter he can be.
Sam Dekker's shot has improved considerably since he got to Wisconsin. Their coaching staff worked with his form, trying to improve his release and fundamental mechanics over time.
During his time in Wisconsin, he developed into a nice off-the-dribble shooter while working on his spot-up shooting. He doesn't waste much time off the catch, quickly setting his feet and getting into his motion. However, this is where we see trouble in his mechanics; his fluid release.
Let's take a look at an example from a game this past season versus University of Milwaukee. It was in transition where Sam drifted towards the corner, spotted-up, and released a three. We'll go through his shooting motion, step-by-step, and breakdown the inconsistencies I mentioned above.
Shooting is not only about the release (upper-body), but also the lower-body. When moving off-ball, and getting into position off-catch, the shooter must set themselves up to jump/set/shoot in one motion. Three-point shooters in particular must turn their body and feet at the same time once the ball reaches their hands. This is because you want to be going up for the shot-attempt as if you had been standing at that spot the entire time.
In this situation, Dekker comes and turns with the ball -- setting his feet to attempt the wide open three-pointer. Also notice while he turns and spots-up, Dekker attempts what is called the 'dip'. This represents the split-second movement of the ball once received and before the jump-shot. The player brings the ball down a few inches around their waste, allowing for the release and shot to be more loose and in rhythm. It is between the second and third frames where Dekker catches, dips the ball to gather himself, and sets-up to what will be a fluid three-point jumper.
Dekker has angled his strong shoulder and strong hip-side towards the basket. This alleviates tension from the neck and shoulders, and generates more strength with less effort and pressure on the lower/upper body depending on form.
A problem that DraftExpress acknowledged in their 'weaknesses' video for Sam was that Dekker sometimes dipped his left-shoulder. Here he doesn't do it in the gathering phase, but rather as he's attempting to release the ball. This adds more weight to the shot, and more likely than not will result in a long jumper off the back of the iron.
His release incorporates a fling-like movement of his strong-hand, meaning that he lets the ball go with a strong force and catapult-like high arcing release. In the NBA, he'll need to work on his follow through and practice releasing with index finder rather than manipulating his wrist (and strong-hand four fingers) to fling the ball higher. The index finger makes the shot straighter, aiming it towards the intended location. If multiple fingers are used, sometimes the ball gets a mind of its own. Therefore a skill that's focused on during development of shooters is the follow-through of the index finger. This a fundamental flaw which can be corrected with coaching.
It's hard to tell somewhat from the screen-shots, but Dekker comes down just in front of where he attempted the jumper. This takes away the stress from his upper-body muscles, relaxing his shoulders and making his jumper more fluid. If he relies on his arm strength, the shoulders, back, and neck will tense up and constrict him from finding his target. By improving his lower-body and foot-work, he'll have better power and shooting balance which will properly guide the ball toward the hoop. He'll need to work on his shoulder dip and release, but he's only a few corrections away from having solid mechanics and a consistent shooting form.
Role on Offense
Sam Dekker is very versatile on the offensive end. In Wisconsin he was very limited due to the system itself and didn't have ample opportunities to run pick-and-rolls or staples of NBA offenses. However, from his skill-set and strengths I see a great potential to fulfill a role this team needs on offense in order to space the floor and get the defense off-balance. Let's go through some of his strengths as an offensive player and breakdown Rocket comparisons.
In Wisconsin, Dekker was a fantastic cutter and slasher -- made smart, calculated decisions when Frank Kaminsky was down low in the post. He's learned to attack from either direction, at his best when cutting into the middle from the right side of the floor.
The Rockets not too long ago had a player on their roster with a very similar skill-set as a slasher. Chandler Parsons was great at reading the defense, making the intelligent off-ball decision, and attacking the defense and its mismatches.
Last season without Parsons, the Rockets struggled when defenses took away the passing lanes. With only one capable ball-handler to attack off the dribble, defenses can overload the strong-side. When Parsons was on the team, the Rockets had a weak-side playmaker who could punish |
I don’t know because I really want to travel everywhere, like every single place on this Earth… no exceptions.
Do you have any advice for future LC-Wide photographers?
Have fun. Never leave your camera behind. Shoot more, ask more, make mistakes more and you will learn more. Always try new experiments with your cameras and films (that’s the beauty of it). Be confident and be different.
What’s your favourite subject take photographs of?
Weddings, couples, double exposures and some random stuff.
Can you describe the LC-Wide in five words?
I Grow Old With LC-Wide.
Who/what do you draw inspiration from for your photographs?
My family, my wife and my friends – they are my motivation and inspiration to keep me shooting and go even further.
What’s your motto for shooting Lomography?
Lomo On! Never Off!!Image copyright AP Image caption Anti-nuclear activists in Tokyo and elsewhere have been protesting moves to restart reactors
Japan is restarting a nuclear reactor in Sendai, the first to go online after the 2011 Fukushima disaster prompted a nationwide shutdown of all plants.
The move has generated great controversy in Japan.
How do you stop and start a nuclear reactor?
A nuclear reactor generates power with nuclear fission, the decaying of unstable materials like uranium contained in fuel rods.
This generates radiation which in turn gives off heat, and this heat is transferred to electricity-generating turbines by a coolant - usually water.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption This July 2015 picture shows fuel rods placed inside a reactor vessels in the Sendai plant
The process, if unchecked, could create a dangerous release of energy. It is controlled by inserting rods containing material whichs absorb some of the radiation.
You stop a nuclear reactor by inserting enough of these control rods. "Although the nuclear fission is still happening, it's not generating enough radiation for electricity," says Shaun Hendry, a physics professor with the University of Auckland.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Control rods, seen here in a French nuclear power plant, usually contain material such as boron or silver
To restart a reactor, workers remove enough of the control rods so that nuclear fission ramps up until it reaches a point called criticality - where it is generating enough heat to produce electricity and the process is self-sustaining.
Sendai's plant is expected to reach criticality by the end of Tuesday.
What are the dangers?
The Fukushima meltdown in 2011 happened because the plant lost power after it was swamped by the tsunami. It lost the ability to cool the nuclear reactor, leading to an explosive build-up of heat and gas.
Critics said that nuclear plants near the sea should have higher sea walls and better back-up generators.
Image copyright Tokyo Electric Power Co Image caption The Fukushima Daiichi plant was badly damaged by the earthquake and tsunami
The Japanese government has since required energy companies to implement better safety measures.
These range from more stringent safety checks on nuclear plants' ability to withstand earthquakes and meltdowns; better back-up power systems; and improving remote control systems so that reactors can be safely shut down from a distance.
They are also required to have more reliable evacuation and contingency plans which cover a wider area than before.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Workers have been decommissioning the Fukushima plant
Why has Japan decided to go ahead with the restart?
Japan, a resource-poor country, has relied on nuclear power to supply up to 30% of its energy needs.
But since the shutdown of reactors, the country's nine energy companies have had to buy expensive fossil fuels to cover the shortfall. They have been paying 3.6 trillion yen (£18.5bn, $28.9bn) more every year.
Some of these costs have been passed on to consumers, resulting in electricity prices going up by about 30%.
Using fossil fuels has made it more difficult for Japan to meet its targets in reducing carbon emissions.
Energy companies have also been saddled with huge amounts of spent fuel and plutonium, which are usually recycled into usable nuclear power fuel.
The companies have heavily lobbied the government to restart the Sendai power plant.
Image copyright Jiji Press Image caption Locals and anti-nuclear activists have been protesting the Sendai plant restart
Why are people angry about the restart?
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Many Fukushima residents do not believe Japanese scientists who say radiation fears are exaggerated, as Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports
Though many Japanese are unhappy with having to pay more for electricity, they remain wary of another nuclear meltdown after Fukushima, which not only contaminated surrounding land but had a huge social impact on evacuated communities.
Many have called for greater reliance on renewable energy. But while the government intends to eventually have wind and solar energy make up 30% of Japan's energy supply, it is still less constant and reliable than nuclear, says Nobumasa Akiyama, a public policy professor at Hitotsubashi University.
Image copyright AP Image caption Protesters staged a rally outside the gates of Sendai on Tuesday
He adds: "The basic idea now is a mix of reducing fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy, and keeping nuclear power, as well as investing in more technology to save energy."
There are 25 other plants applying to restart, but the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo says it is doubtful that all will get approval soon because of the significant public opposition.You know, I’m quite the scheduler. Not only in life, but when it comes to the blog. If you would go to my little posts area on WordPress, if I’m organised then you’ll usually see the weeks 3 posts all lined up, along with a whole lot of drafts in various states. Buuut well, I went to the Magical Lantern Festival last night in Chiswick, and really, I want to try and share it with you guys before it ends on the 6th of March. So here we are, on a little unplanned, scheduled post. I may even just press publish when I finish writing (what am I kidding, I’ll definitely still schedule it to pop up in a couple of hours!).
So Chiswick? Yeah, not the location which many people hit up in London. But we have been a few times actually, when it’s summer (oh how I miss you), we would get on our little bikes and cycle through Hammersmith to Chiswick and Banres. Mainly ’cause this is the home of awesome riverside pubs. Seriously, so many. But also, if you ever want house envy, then come to Chiswick. I swear every house must be worth millions, they are all huuuuge!
Anyway, when I saw the Magical Lantern Festival was on at Chiswick House and Gardens, I was very keen as I haven’t made it there yet. In my mind, when I booked, I figured we could jump on the bikes and cycle. But, well as I’m working in East London, that didn’t happen. But don’t fret friends, even if you are in Central or East London, the journey over wasn’t too shabby – a train from Waterloo to Chiswick, then a quick 12 minute walk. Easy.
Onto the lanterns, with Chinese New Year just past, this is the first time the Lantern Festival has come to the UK. As is traditional in Chinese New Year, lanterns are made and displayed in various locations. This has the same background but just on a huuuuge scale! Lanterns have been made of everything from a giant dragon, to a hoard of pandas, and a whole lot centering around the Year of the Monkey.
When you first arrive, there is an area for food, Paul got a freaking delish venison and halloumi burger, whereas I sprang for a ham and cheese crepe. You need energy to keep warm in this chilly weather! When you buy a ticket, it is timed to allow less crowds when you enter the festival.
Firstly, I was so impressed by how huge it was! Honestly, it probably took us an hour alone just to walk through it all, then it obviously depends on how often you stop as to how long it will take you. At the beginning we were taking snaps of everything, but then we realised just how much there is!
The lanterns themselves are all organised in sections, dotted throughout the garden. The route is well designed so you can usually get a good view of the lanterns from various angles. They are also well defined in that you will stand to one side to view it, meaning even if there are a few people around, you can still get a really good view and snap some pictures.
The lanterns are amazing, there are some seriously huge displays, think Noahs ark and all the various animals. However, I really liked how they were set out, that there was always more coming up, and it wound you through the park in a one way flow which worked well with the crowds. About half way through there is another area where you can pitstop for food, and they also had marshmellows which you can sit and roast on the fire!
I do really recommend if you have some time over the next few weeks to head out that way, it was half term when we went so was full of children but if you go next week then will likely be a bit quieter. The big thing I recommend is that it will be freezing, and although I was wrapped in a coat and scarf, I really regretted not bringing gloves. My hands were burning by the end with all the snaps that I was taking. Wear some good shoes too, it can get a bit muddy as you wander through.
It’s something a bit different, and one of the main things I love about London is the variety of cool things which are available to see and do! And yes, we did end up getting an Uber home ’cause tired, but the journey home would have been just as easy!
What do you think of the Chinese lanterns?At some point in Dodger Stadium’s 54-year history, the pitch speed display became as much a part of the scenery as the San Gabriel Mountains. More than a gimmick but less than essential, it helps tell the story of each game, two or three digits at a time.
Now, in baseball’s booming information age, the velocity of a pitch seems as quaint as a transistor radio. The data can still be found on the main video board at Dodger Stadium, but it’s been joined by a graphic showing something called “speed off bat” — a novice translation of exit velocity for each ball in play.
Dodger Stadium is believed to be the first National League park, and the only MLB park outside of Cleveland’s Progressive Field, to integrate exit velocity data into its displays.
The idea was suggested by Tom Darin, the Dodgers’ director of broadcast engineering, and incorporated into the display by director of graphic design Ross Yoshida. “Speed off bat” made its debut at the Dodgers’ first regular-season home game Tuesday.
Lon Rosen, the Dodgers’ chief marketing officer, said fans have requested more advanced data on display in recent years.
“The genesis,” he said, “is to give fans more info.”
Others in the ballpark have noticed, too.
“The first time I noticed it was when Howie (Kendrick) had his base hit to right,” Dodgers infielder Charlie Culberson said. “It was like 110 (mph). Pretty cool.”
Culberson’s reaction was typical of his teammates: Exit velocity in real time satisfies a curiosity, but little more.
As Justin Turner came to find out Tuesday, he couldn’t check his exit velocity by looking at the scoreboard even if he wanted to.
“When a ball gets put in play, you watch the ball,” he said. “By the time you look up, it’s gone.”
Of course, this and other data are available to the players on demand once they leave the field. A couple years ago, when Trackman data was first integrated into the front office’s decision-making dictionary, Turner recalled a gofer popping into the dugout regularly with exit velocity data.
For now, he and others believe the knowledge is of little consequence to players in real time.
“It might change if they say, ‘If you hit the ball hard constantly, you’re going to get paid more.’ Then I might start paying attention,” Kiké Hernandez said. “But I don’t think it affects anything.”
Kendrick starts in left
Howie Kendrick’s second game of the season took him a long way from the right side of the infield. He was the Dodgers’ starting left fielder for Tuesday night’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The last time Kendrick started a game in left field was Aug. 13, 2011, for the Angels. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said the possibility of reprising the role was discussed when Kendrick re-signed in January.
“Hopefully,” Kendrick said after finishing Monday night’s game in left field, “it’ll help us win some ballgames.”
Kendrick has started 1,062 games at second base in his career, including Tuesday. This was his 21st start in left field. The position has become a sore spot for the Dodgers lately: Andre Ethier, Carl Crawford and Scott Van Slyke are all on the disabled list. So is Alex Guerrero, who’s dabbled in left in the past.
Trayce Thompson, Hernandez and Culberson are the other healthy Dodgers with experience at the position. Roberts said he wanted Kendrick’s bat in the lineup against Arizona Diamondbacks right-hander Rubby De La Rosa.
“In a perfect world, we would’ve gotten (Kendrick) more repetitions (in left field) this spring,” Roberts said. “The way Chase (Utley) is playing, I want to keep him in the lineup.”
Also
Crawford could begin a rehab assignment next Wednesday, then rejoin the team on its road trip to Denver, Roberts said. Crawford was placed on the 15-day disabled list Saturday with lower back tightness and has already been cleared to resume full baseball activities.At a time when the United States is preparing to increase Pentagon spending and escalate troop deployments overseas, an analysis of U.S. military interventions since the country’s founding highlights two important and related dynamics.
First, the empirical distribution of military interventions––that is, the deployment of U.S. armed forces to other countries––is not evenly distributed; and in fact is highly skewed, in terms of frequency, to favor the historical period following the end of the Cold War (1991).
Second, U.S. military interventions since WWII have only rarely achieved their intended political objectives. That is, the United States has lost more than won; and when it has “won,” it has generally won at a cost far in excess of what would have been considered reasonable prior to the intervention.
This leads to an important puzzle: if U.S. military interventions are failing more often, what accounts for the dramatic increase in their use since 1991?
Basic Statistics
If we look at the distribution of the 392 U.S. military interventions since 1800 reported by the Congressional Research Service in October 2017 by fifty-year increments, the data show a dramatic increase: from 1800–1849 there were thirty-nine interventions; forty-seven from 1850–1899; sixty-nine from 1900–1949; 111 from 1950–1999; and 126 from 2000–2017—a period of only seventeen years as compared to fifty years in the other periods.
As these data reveal, the rate of intervention across time is not monotonic, but jumps during the two world war periods (1917–18), as well as the Cold War (1948–91). One implication being that the world wars forced the United States into a permanently international posture, and at the same time, as a consequence, resulted in the conscious development of reach: the raw and almost unique capacity among peer competitors to rapidly move armed forces across the globe and support them during sustained offensive operations.
If we further refine the data to compare Cold War and post–Cold War intervention rates, something truly striking emerges: while the United States engaged in forty-six military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188.
These statistics introduce two important puzzles. First, why would military interventions rise at the same time success in military interventions has been declining? Second, why would military interventions increase after the Cold War, when both an ideological rationale for interventions (say, to rescue peoples in danger of falling into a Soviet, and by extension, authoritarian, orbit) and a material existential threat to U.S. national security (no more dominoes, a reduced threat of deliberate thermonuclear war) had declined? In other words, if the United States only intervenes with armed force when its vital interests are at stake, why intervene more often when there are arguably fewer vital interests at stake? The answer is that Washington too often intervenes militarily when it should not—and U.S. security and prosperity have both suffered as a result.
Winning at Losing
Since 1950, strong actors in asymmetric conflicts (not limited to, but certainly including the United States) have lost a majority of fights with nominally much weaker adversaries (up until 1950 strong actors had won a majority of such fights). As Ivan Arreguín-Toft revealed in his 2005 book, How the Weak Win Wars, large actors like the United States beat small actors such as Vietnam 88 percent of the time from 1800–49; and their chances of victory declined from there. They won 80 percent of their conflicts from 1850–99, but only 65 percent from 1900–49. For the last period, 1950–98, success proved elusive. Strong actors—including the United States and Soviet Union, the two so-called ‘superpowers’—lost more wars than they won: losing 45 percent of the wars they fought.
An important theoretical contribution related to the above puzzles includes T.V. Paul’s (1993) and my own on time horizons as a rationalist explanation for war (2007). Paul’s work engaged the puzzle of why weak actors initiate armed conflicts with much stronger adversaries. Paul demonstrated that one answer to the question of how a rational actor might pick a fight with a much stronger adversary had to do with time horizons: often calculations of net benefit involve very short term assessments. If time is extended, the likelihood of net benefit plummets. Thus, it may be that something structural in U.S. calculations tends to concentrate assessments of risk and benefit into short time horizons, explaining both unwarranted optimism and a high failure rate. My work on time horizons demonstrated that Paul’s conjecture was correct: if two rational actors come to a conflict of interests with very different valuations of time-to-objective, they may find themselves escalating to unwanted war which in retrospect appears irrational.
A Nonthreatening Environment
Going forward we are left with a number of important questions. First, we know that along with material considerations, culture, identity, and history affect states calculations of the risks and benefits of military intervention. After years of struggle and investment, China has at last succeeded in creating a military and economy capable of securing it against any outside attack, but its history of insecurity and a desire to redress past ‘humiliations’ drive its calculations just as surely as material considerations. To outsiders, the past five years have called into question whether China remains insecure, as it insists, or is actually bent on global hegemony, which would be more consistent with its accelerated military spending and its provocative deployments in the South China Sea. Similarly, a common reading of recent increased U.S. military spending, along with its accelerated deployment of armed forces abroad, is that the United States is an aggressive power, committed to maintaining the post–Cold War status quo. So assuming states weigh gains and losses of national identity along with material costs and benefits in determining whether to intervene militarily abroad, how does identity compare? For example, in considering direct military intervention in Vietnam after 1963, what was more important to the United States? The material loss of a tiny and very distant ally, or its own reputation as leader of the free world, and defender of the weak?
Second, given the dismal record of failure in military interventions since WWII and especially after 1991, what accounts for its persistence as a tool of U.S. statecraft? One strong possibility is that the costs of failure––given the extraordinary reach of American armed forces and the relative geopolitical isolation of the continental United States––have never risen to the level of an existential threat as compared to the possibility of success, however small. Another is that military interventions both signal ‘toughness’ and, as just observed, don’t appear to entail a serious risk to U.S. sovereignty and security. Thus, the benefits for political elites in Washington, of looking tough outweigh the costs and risks of failure, which can almost always be blamed on factors beyond their control, or on political opponents or third parties. Our elites don’t pay the costs.
Finally, given that under very limited circumstances, a U.S. military intervention might prove a necessary option, what can we learn from past failures and successes to maximize the chances that future U.S. military intervention will succeed, and do so at an acceptable cost?
Answers in the academic literature include an emphasis on more modest political objectives (say, simply stopping whatever horrible thing is ongoing and then leaving), multilateral efforts (acting in tandem with allies entails considerable joint operations costs, but these are almost always redeemed by the boost in legitimacy multilateral efforts bring), ensuring long-term public support (U.S. support for publicly known military interventions rarely lasts more than three years, yet most experts agree that interventions capable of ‘winning the peace’ tend to require at least seven to ten years to succeed), and increased reliance on other-than-military resources in support of interventions (armed force will almost always be needed to some degree, but if as a proportion of resources applied armed force is excessive as compared to say, aid, law enforcement and diplomatic efforts, interventions will fail).
U.S. Military Interventions in the 2020s
The United States does not view itself as an aggressor state, but with the brief exception of the Obama administration (2009–16), whose core energies were absorbed with holding the U.S. and global economy together along with mitigating the impact of two unwinnable wars, the United States has become both more interventionist and less likely to cleave to its core principles of opposing genocide (e.g. Rwanda, Darfur) and abiding by the rule of law (e.g. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib). It has fought two fantastically costly wars, won neither, and then insisted that Iran not acquire the means to defend itself. Allies and adversaries alike may therefore be forgiven for reimagining the United States as an aggressor and a possible threat to the international order.PBS’ animated “Nature Cat” may be aimed at kids, but it boasts the voices of “SNL” veterans Bobby Moynihan, Taran Killam, Kate McKinnon and Kenan Thompson.
The crossover casting makes plenty of sense to Moynihan, who told television critics on Saturday that animation, sketch comedy and even the Muppets all exist under basically the same umbrella.
“I’ve always been a big Muppet guy,” Moynihan said of his participation in an animated children’s show. “‘The Muppet Show’ to me, and ‘Sesame Street’ … they’re in the same world as ‘SNL.'”
“It’s all a variety show — it just happens that some of them are puppets,” he continued, joking: “I mean, we’re puppets too.”
Also Read: 'Survivor's Remorse' Creator Mike O'Malley Tackles Domestic Abuse: 'There's No Excuse'
If Killam’s Nature Cat is the Batman of the new series, then Moynihan’s Hal is “a very stupid Robin,” in his own words.
“Nature Cat” was created by brothers Adam Rudman and David Rudman; the latter has played Cookie Monster on “Sesame Street” for the past 15 years. In addition to the “SNL” voice talent, “Nature Cat” also stars Kate Micucci from “Scrubs.” The show is a co-production of Spiffy Pictures and WTTW Chicago.
“We just wanted to get the funniest people,” the creators told TV critics during their Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour panel. Mission accomplished.
“Nature Cat” — which is for kids ages 3-8 — premieres Wednesday, Nov. 25 on PBS Kids.Visitors to Libya must obtain a visa from one of the Libyan diplomatic missions unless they come from one of the visa exempt countries.
Libya currently does not issue tourist visas.[1] As of 2014 there are plans to reintroduce tourist visas.[2] Libyan borders with Chad, Niger, Sudan and Algeria are closed.[3] In reality these borders are not controlled by the Government but by Tuareg people and Toubou people.[4]
As of 2013, governments of the United States,[5] New Zealand,[6] Australia,[7] Canada,[8] Republic of Ireland,[9] the United Kingdom,[10] Spain,[11] France,[12] Hungary,[13] Latvia,[14] Germany,[15] Austria,[16] Bulgaria,[17] Norway,[18] Croatia,[19] Romania,[20] Slovenia,[21] Czech Republic,[22] Russia,[23] Denmark,[24] Slovakia,[25] Estonia,[26] Italy,[27] Poland[28] and Iran[29] advise their citizens against all (or in some cases all but essential) travel to Libya.
Visa policy map [ edit ]
Libya Visa free access Provisional and restricted visa-free access Entry ban Visa required Visa policy of Libya
Visa exemption [ edit ]
Citizens of the following countries can visit Libya without a visa:[30]
Jordan - for visits up to 1 month; only if holding a 5-year passport, which must be valid for at least one year on arrival. [31]
Jordan - for visits up to 1 month; only if holding a 5-year passport, which must be valid for at least one year on arrival. Tunisia[32]
Provisional and restricted visa-free access
Egypt - for residents of Matrouh Governorate on Wednesdays and Thursdays. [33]
Egypt - for residents of Matrouh Governorate on Wednesdays and Thursdays. United States - if holding a letter from an established company in Libya sponsoring their visit.[34]
Visa is not required for holders of a copy of a letter issued by the Libyan immigration authorities confirming that a visa will be granted on arrival at the airport
Holders of diplomatic, official or service passports of Azerbaijan, Italy, Malta, Morocco, Pakistan, Slovenia, Sudan and Venezuela and holders of only diplomatic passports of Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Togo do not require a visa for Libya.
Visas for nationals of Turkey were introduced as a reciprocal measure in August 2015.[35]
Compulsory Currency Exchange [ edit ]
Visitors travelling to Libya for touristic purposes are required to convert US$1,000, or equivalent, in freely convertible cash or debit the amount from a valid credit card upon arrival. Failure to do so will result in the traveler being refused entry. Exempt are those visiting a resident, provided holding proof of sponsorship covering entire stay and those traveling as part of a paid tourist package if holding a valid visa.[36]
Entry ban [ edit ]
Visitors will be refused entry if holding travel documents containing a visa (valid or expired) for Israel or any evidence of entry in Israel.[36]
Entry and transit is refused to Israeli citizens, even if not leaving the aircraft and proceeding by the same flight.[37]
Entry is also refused to nationals of the following 6 countries:
See also [ edit ]More than three quarters of Jewish Israelis are in favor of allowing same-sex civil unions and marriages, according to a poll released Wednesday by advocacy group Hiddush and cited by the Times of Israel.
Seventy-six percent of Israelis agreed that same-sex couples should have the option, a notable increase over the 64 percent that responded affirmatively in 2015.
The telephone poll surveyed 500 people across religious and political lines, according to the Times of Israel.
While same-sex marriages are not forbidden in Israel, all marriages must be conducted via a religious institution, so no institution is authorized to conduct a same-sex marriage. Israel's Interior Ministry does register same-sex marriages performed abroad.
The poll found that 90 percent of the secular Jewish public, 77 percent of the traditional Jewish public, 46 percent of national religious Jews, and 16 percent of ultra-Orthodox Jews are in favor of civil unions or same-sex marriage, the Times of Israel said.
A 74-percent majority of respondents from the former USSR, often seen as conservative on LGBT issues, expressed support.
A political breakdown of results found that 74 percent of people who voted for Likud, the largest party in parliament, supported permitting same-sex marriage or civil unions, as did 93 percent of Kulanu voters, 80 percent of Yisrael Beytenu voters, and 57 percent of Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) voters. The two ultra-Orthodox parties in the government, Shas and United Torah Judaism, had a majority of 73 percent and 95 percent, respectively, that believed same-sex unions and marriages should not be allowed.
Center and left-wing parties' voters were strongly in favor, with 98 percent voters of the largest opposition party, the Zionist Union, supporting the idea.
According to the poll, 80 percent of Israelis think that if same-sex couples get married, they should get the same rights as heterosexual marriage.
The poll was published during Tel Aviv's Pride Week and ahead of Friday's parade in the city. Pride events are expected to involve some 100,000 participants.Hydro utilities warn of electricity rate shocks. A blackout paralyzes much of Toronto on a summer afternoon. Ontario vows to shut down its coal-burning power plants – which make up 18 per cent of the province’s generating capacity – and replace it with green energy. Years of dramatic change loom for the power system. The Star takes a look at some of the main components. Making electricity takes energy
Electricity has to be created from other forms of energy. None comes cheap and easy. Read more.
The Niagara River is one of few sites in Ontario where large-scale hydro generation is possible. This makes developing other sources a necessity. ( REUTERS FILE PHOTO )
Ontario’s cheap power advantage is gone, says industry
Adam White, who represents major power users, says high electricity prices have eliminated Ontario’s industrial advantage. Read more. Ontario Hydro’s legacy of debt
Ontario residents can look forward to paying off the debts of the old Ontario Hydro for many years to come. Read more. New power lines will cost $4 billion
The Ontario Power Authority has estimated Ontario will have to spend $4 billion on new high-voltage transmission lines by 2025. Read more.
Article Continued Below
Old nukes and dirty coal plants squeeze Ontario power
Aging nuclear plants and a d ecision to close coal-burning stations will squeeze power supplies in Ontario. Read more. Power planners downplay new supply line for Toronto
A third major power line for Toronto was once considered essential, but power planners now downplay the need. Read more.by Scott Jameson
An earlier post established that Omega 3 fatty acids are an important nutrient of which hardly anybody is getting enough, and that this deficiency is making us Westerners a bit dumber and a bit crazier on the whole. Description sometimes obligates prescription, so this post is where I spitball about possible solutions, and welcome you to join me in the comments.
I’m reminded of the gubbermint mandating the lacing of our salt with sorely needed iodine, or the enrichment of white flour with nutrients lost in the removal of the bran and germ as well as the bleaching of the endosperm.
For yourself and your family, fish oil pills are fine- kelp oil if you’re one of those people. But we need solutions that work for nearly everybody, and the brilliance of the examples I listed above is that everybody eats that stuff (bread and salt) and now it’s laced with nutrients they’ve been needing. So we could produce N3s at low cost and legally mandate that certain foods contain them. Chia is a promising source: it’s cheap, it’s loaded with N3s, and it doesn’t taste fishy. Flax also works, but it’s loaded with phytoestrogens. Tons of seeds have those, I think Chia as well, but I’ve been told (incorrectly?) that flax is a particularly bad offender. Anyway, how do we load Chia or a similar seed into people’s diets?
Omega 3 eggs are one way to go. Chickens metabolize plant ALA (such as from chia or flax) into DHA and store both in their eggs. Just as we made use of the auroch and tarpan’s efforts to have a brain, we can hijack the chicken’s futile attempts to provide brain-material for her nonexistent offspring, using her eggs as a vehicle to get N3s into ourselves. It’s as simple as a mandate that a certain percentage of all chicken feed must be N3 rich seeds and/or insects.
Another obvious place to look is the plant oils that go into our food. Check out the table on the Wikipedia page for ALA: soybean and rapeseed oils have a pathetic showing for ALA content, and they’re put in absolutely everything. The State mandates that all gas will be a bit ethanol: why not all soybean and canola be 10, 20% Chia or some comparably high ALA crop?
It’s worth pointing out that you can genetically modify ALA rich vegetable oil to be on a quality closer to par with fish oil, having some of the ALA converted into the more useful EPA. Forget any concerns about GMOs you may have because the oils I’m talking about lacing with GMOs are already themselves GMOs.
We also must mandate that all infant formula be laced with N3s: EPA and DHA in particular, and tested for stuff like mercury if it comes from fish. You probably know at least one person who is autistic because they were bottlefed.
Comment your potential solutions below. I want to hear them. Double points for anyone playing the game on hard mode: free market solutions (libertarians) or animal-free solutions (vegans). If you try both, you’re a masochist and you need help.
AdvertisementsThe Ben Affleck-Bill Maher-Sam Harris dispute: Anti-Muslim bigotry and American imperialist policy
By David Walsh
9 October 2014
The dispute that occurred on the October 3 edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” between Maher and author Sam Harris, on the one hand, and prominent actor Ben Affleck, on the other, was revealing. In particular, it helped clarify the relationship between anti-Muslim bigotry, the “identity politics” of the affluent middle class and defense of American imperialist policy in the Middle East.
The argument erupted when Harris, a right-wing political commentator and defender of Israeli repression of the Palestinians, seconded by Maher, denounced “the treatment of women and homosexuals and public intellectuals in the Muslim world,” suggesting this alleged mistreatment was intrinsic to Islam as a religion. “Liberals have failed us,” he went on, by essentially inventing something called “Islamophobia” and refusing to criticize Islam as a doctrine.
Affleck heatedly responded that those positions were “gross” and “racist.” He commented, “It’s like saying ‘you shifty Jew.’” When Harris went on to claim that “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas,” Affleck responded, quite legitimately, “That’s an ugly thing to say.”
The actor continued, “How about the more than a billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches… and don’t do any of the things that you’re saying all Muslims [do]?… [It’s] stereotyping.”
Harris persisted in his contention that keeping “women and homosexuals immiserated” was imbedded in Muslim culture. Affleck responded pointedly, “We’ve killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us by an awful lot. We’ve invaded more Muslim countries … and yet somehow we’re exempted from these things because they’re not really a reflection of what we believe in.” He added sarcastically, “We did it by accident … that’s why we invaded Iraq.”
Maher thereupon insisted that Islam was “the only religion that acts like the Mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.”
This is pretty rich. The chief Mafioso in the world today is President Barack Obama, who presides over kill lists, drone strikes and universal, illegal surveillance, and now has engaged the US in a new war in Iraq and Syria behind the backs of the population. Affleck’s point could be elaborated upon: the US military and CIA are responsible for the deaths of over one million Iraqis, the destruction of its cities and infrastructure and the fomenting of murderous, sectarian warfare, as well as the devastation of Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, at the cost of countless casualties and immense social misery.
Moreover, as is quite well known (and the vice president of the United States recently admitted), ISIS, Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groupings are either the former recipients of US funding and encouragement, the response to previous disastrous, hated American interventions in the Middle East, or both.
In any case, Maher later seamlessly switched the discussion to one about US policy in relation to ISIS and Syria. The issue of “ground troops” arose, with Harris suggesting that seeing as there was “a genocide under way,” American and foreign military action was clearly needed. As though the global population has not heard the same lies and justifications for “humanitarian intervention” before, time and time again, in the past two decades, from the military operation in Bosnia onward!
In short, adopting the language and the arguments of the identity politics “left,” Maher and Harris used the “Real Time” discussion to promote Washington’s policy in the Middle East and Central Asia, which has nothing to do with the rights of women and homosexuals—and everything to do with oil and geopolitics. The effort to cloak the US ruling elite’s plundering of the region in the mantle of “human rights” has become one of the chief means by which layers of the upper middle class are swung behind imperialist war. Affleck, albeit in a limited fashion, disrupted that effort. Inevitably, the latter has come under attack from right-wing and pro-Zionist sources as a result.
Sam Harris has made a career for himself, since the attacks of 9/11, as a specialist in “rationalist |
the calls that are common. At the very bottom are two calls that are part of the twisted IO loop, and so that can be tuned out. But contrast the block of blue to the left; that shows that all those previous calls were doing something quite different; and the big block of red to the right show that subsequent samples were very much in the same area of code.
This is a really great way to understand your calls!
There could be more information captured and presented; the user and system times, for example, and the stack traces of other threads and so on. I chose to not present that in my graph simply because they were not interesting to my cause.
You can easily extend will_profile.py to capture all stacks; for example:
id2name = dict([(th.ident, th.name) for th in threading.enumerate()])
for ident,frame in sys._current_frames().items():
thread_name = id2name.get(ident,"")
stack = traceback.extract_stack(frame)
...
I hope my quick scripts are useful to you when you have to debug a long-running, CPU-intensive task in the future!
Notes
"share"LGBTQ rights made huge strides recently with the supreme court’s historic decision on same-sex marriage. But an ongoing situation in San Francisco’s Mission District shows that there’s still pushback, even in the most liberal of cities.
A mural on the outside wall of Galería de la Raza, a Chicano/Latino art and cultural center, has been repeatedly defaced since it went up last month. The mural, titled “Por Vida”,portrays images of queer Latinos in lowrider style art.
San Francisco police are classifying the vandalism as a hate crime.
Most recently, arsonists set fire to the mural after a historic Pride weekend. The mural features three vignettes of lesbian women, a trans man and a gay male couple. Now the image of two men embracing is charred and peeling.
In response, several hundred people gathered at a rally in support of the burned artwork with a unified message: what happened to this mural will not define us.
Mission residents, LGBTQ allies, clergy, elected officials, activists, artists and dancers organized in protest of what has been done to the mural and what some see as an attack on this community.
“The queer Chicano community is very real and is welcome here, too, and belongs here, too,” says Alejandra Mojica.
Mojica grew up in the Mission District and says she is standing solidarity with the neighborhood that raised her.
“I think homophobia is a longstanding, deeply-rooted issue within the Latino community and there’s different viewpoints here,” she says. “You know there are Latinos who don’t feel safe to be themselves, there are Latinos who are not accepting and there are Latinos who belong also to the LGBT community.”
Flowers and offerings lie before the burnt mural, a digital printout that costs $3,000 to reproduce. So far, it’s been replaced twice due to vandalism.
The artist is Manuel Paul, a member of a Los Angeles-based queer Latino art collective. Although the mural received homophobic backlash on social media, Ani Rivera, executive director of Galería de la Raza, says the physical destruction was unexpected.
“If we would have known this was the case we would have done a different type of outreach,” she says. “It’s been a shock to us and a learning experience in terms of the homophobia that’s still present in all of our communities.”
Mission resident and artist Luciano Sagastume spoke before the crowd about how this incident impacted him as a transgender man.
“This man right here in the middle is a Latino trans man. And I have never seen a Latino trans man depicted before,” he tells the crowd to loud applause.
Galería de la Raza is located on the corner of 24th and Bryant Streets, in the heart of Calle 24, the neighborhood’s Latino Cultural District. While machismo culture and Catholicism can be barriers to LGBTQ acceptance, supporters say this isn’t just about the Latino community, it’s a wake up call for all communities to demand tolerance.
Akheel Mesteyer came as an ally. He believes the the Mission is a mostly tolerant neighborhood.
“This is a community of artists and normal folk just trying to live,” he says. “I mean the district supervisor is gay.”
David Campos is the San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District.
“It was very painful to see what happened with this mural because it’s something that disrespects our contributions, that disrespects us as queer people,” Campos says. “And the fact is, the LGBT community is present in every community, and... we cannot celebrate the entirety of the Mission without celebrating that part of it as well.”
Campos says the suspected arsonist was caught on video surveillance footage and that it’s a “top priority” for SFPD.
For now, Rivera says they’re repairing the exterior wall that was burned. A decision hasn’t been made about whether to replace the mural a third time. There will be a community forum later this month.
This piece originally aired July 7th, 2015.Air Force Research Laboratory
Prepare yourself for a future filled with real-life pew pew! The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working with Lockheed Martin to test "a new beam control turret... to give 360-degree coverage for high-energy laser weapons operating on military aircraft."
In other words, it stuck a primitive (by rebel standards) "Star Wars"-style laser cannon on a fighter jet and flew it over Michigan eight times.
"These initial flight tests validate the performance of our ABC turret design," Lockheed's Doug Graham said. in a release.
That ABC stands for Aero-adaptive Aero-optic Beam Control, which is designed to allow high-energy lasers to fire on enemy aircraft and missiles from a full 360 degrees -- above, below, and behind the aircraft.
The test flights demonstrated the airworthiness of the turret, but it doesn't appear that anyone or anything in the Great Lakes region was actually zapped as part of testing.
Still, this represents a significant move toward the inevitable merging of the "Star Wars" universe with our own so-called "reality." We've already seen the Navy's laser weapon that's set to deploy, and science has discovered how to create a real-life lightsaber, so perhaps it would be wise to start scanning the galaxies not just for potentially habitable exoplanets, but for planet-size super weapons as well.TBILISI, DFWatch–Irakli Alasania, the former defense minister and leader of the Free Democrats who ‘temporarily left’ politics after his party failed to reach the minimum 5% in the election, may be hired by the president’s administration.
According to domestic media, President Giorgi Margvelashvili is considering him as the new secretary of the National Security Council, a post which is currently vacant.
The president’s spokesperson Eka Mishveladze told DFWatch that there are currently no negotiations with anyone about assuming the post as NSC secretary.
“As soon as a decision is made about the candidacy, you will all know. No candidates have been considered so far,” she says.
The post as secretary of the NSC has remained vacant since Irina Imerlishvili was nominated by the president as a judge of the Constitutional Court on September 10.
Alasania said October 10 that he was going to leave politics because of his party’s defeat in the parliamentary election. Himself a majoritarian candidate, he also refused to participate in the second round of the election on October 30, in which he was to have competed against a Georgian Dream candidate in Gori.
Alasania explained that although he has temporarily left politics, he remains the leader of the Free Democrats, unlike other of the party tops, who have left, like Aleksi Petriashvili, Zurab Abashidze, Gia Tsagareishvili and Davit Onoprishvili.
Member of parliament for Georgian Dream Eka Beselia claims that her party is not involved in the process of selecting a new NSC secretary; this is up to the president to decide.
There are reports that Georgian Dream may offer former Free Democrats members posts in the new government. This could be Foreign Ministry or Georgian embassies abroad. None of the former Free Democrats members rule out the possibility of cooperating with Georgian Dream but they deny reports that they have been offered anything by Georgian Dream.Syracuse, N.Y. — Pro hockey has changed a lot since the legendary movie "Slap Shot'' was filmed 40 years ago.
Various rough-housing teams and players have done their parts to re-create the fighting mayhem portrayed in that movie, but the changing rules of the sport have all but eliminated such sideshows.
For one night this spring, however, the look and feel of the flick will come to life on the ice of the War Memorial.
Syracuse Crunch owner Howard Dolgon said at a fan forum Saturday night that his team has been given permission to wear the replica jerseys of the fictional Charlestown Chiefs squad from that film. Syracuse will bust them out March 31 for a game against Toronto.
Dolgon had to get permission from Universal Studios to wear the sweater because that company owns the rights. Dolgon said the Crunch will be the first team to wear the replica jerseys in a game.
Parts of that movie were filmed in the War Memorial. That tie-in, plus the 40th birthday of the film, made Syracuse a natural fit for the sweaters.
Dolgon said the jerseys will be auctioned after the game.Fatropolis
A Novel
Tracey L. Thompson
November 2012
Original trade paperback 308 pp ISBN 9781597190572 $18.95 | Adobe PDF, ePub & Mobipocket Ebook ISBN 9781597190589 $4.99 | About the Author
Press release (PDF) | Fatropolis Media Kit (PDF)
Fatropolis Book Discussion Guide (PDF)
Library Request Form (PDF)
A Conversation with Tracey L. Thompson,
author of Fatropolis (hour-long mp3 recording)
The alternative history, paranormal romantic adventure of a young fat woman with low self esteem who falls into another world where fat people lead happy, normal, guilt-free lives.
Most of her life Jenny has felt she's not good enough, not attractive enough, because she's fat. Then one day she stumbles through a portal between a world that values thinness and one that values roundness.
Sometimes falling can wake you up.
Buy Fatropolis directly from Pearlsong Press:
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PRAISE for Fatropolis
"Fatropolis delves into a fantasy where fat people have no need for 'Fat Acceptance' because they are already accepted as they are. Thompson weaves a fun, thoughtful tale that puts our own struggle for acceptance into stark relief. It's great escapism for those who may feel overwhelmed by the judgements and insults we must endure on a daily basis and I highly recommend it."
Atchka
Fierce, Freethinking Fatties
"I'd like to live in Tracey Thompson’s Fatropolis. The food is delightful, potential boyfriends and girlfriends are properly appreciative of the abundant figure, and all the accommodations are scaled to fit large bodies!
"Thompson's heroine Jenny accidentally finds this alternate Manhattan where the population hasn’t swallowed the poison pill of fat hatred. Jenny begins the book in a miserable condition. Friends, relatives and total strangers feel justified in ridiculing and judging her because of her plus-sized body. She accepts the verdict that she is lonely and a failure because she cannot succeed in losing weight and nothing else she might accomplish matters. I really felt for Jenny, who is a good, kind person trapped in a painful situation.
"When Jenny literally stumbles through a hidden portal into alternate world where her body size is valued, her first reaction is that someone is playing a cruel joke on her. Gradually she recovers from disbelieving shock and begins to realize that the men who pursue her in Fatropolis really do find her irresistible and the women envy her 'hearty' figure. She discovers that food is a pleasure rather than the enemy and that she deserves to live in a world set up to fit rather than to squeeze out her generous proportions.
"Jenny's journey takes us on a path many of us have traveled to accept our bodies and enjoy our lives just as we are. It would be easier if we could find one of those portals into Fatropolis, so let me know if you do and let's go!"
Lynne Murray
author of The Falstaff Vampire Files
"Welcome to Fatropolis, where to be 'hearty' is to be desirable and sought after—where foodmakers are valued and warmongers are nonexistent. Welcome to Fatropolis, where to eat and drink is fraught with fun, not with sin.
"In a few places in Manhattan, with the help of miniature carved stone goddesses, one can pass through the portals between a world that values thinness and Fathattan, in Fatropolis, a world that values roundness.
"All her life Jenny has been told that she is not good enough, not attractive enough, because she is fat. While shopping for a gown for the key social event of the company for which she works, Jenny stumbles through a portal into a different country and a different dimension. Suddenly her round beauty is appreciated, she is fawned and fought over by men, and women are happy to befriend her.
"Through her journeys to Fatropolis Jenny learns to value her body and herself and to stand up for what she believes and intuitively honors. But most of all, as Fatropolis gives her a second lease on life, Jenny learns what it is to love herself, to love life, and to love."The Wakayama District Court on Friday ordered the town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, to pay ¥110,000 in compensation to an Australian woman who was barred from entering the town’s whale museum in February 2014.
Sarah Lucas, 31, a member of conservation group Australia for Dolphins (AFD), had sought around ¥3.3 million in compensation, claiming the town’s actions constituted unjust discrimination and an obstruction of freedom of thought and conscience.
The court found the Taiji Whale Museum had illegally interfered with Lucas’ access to information inside the facility.
In her suit, Lucas argued the refusal was “aimed at excluding those opposed to whaling from the museum.”
She claimed the facility regularly refuses entry to foreign nationals.
The town called for the suit to be dismissed, arguing Lucas had visited the museum four days before she was refused entry and shot footage inside the facility with large camera equipment without authorization.
The museum’s barring of Lucas was not intended as discrimination against foreign nationals but to avoid further trouble, the town claimed.
According to the suit, the museum turned away Lucas and her late father, Alastair, in February 2014, citing a written notice saying people opposed to whaling cannot enter the facility.
The pair were wearing clothes bearing the AFD’s logo.
When they persisted, asking about the entrance fee and trying to photograph the notice with smartphones, museum staff covered up the notice and gestured at them not to photograph it, according to the suit.
Alastair Lucas was also listed as a plaintiff in the suit, but has since died.
Taiji has received global criticism for its continuation of a dolphin drive hunting practice. The town is also one of Japan’s major whaling bases.A second man is claiming he slept with South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, but her campaign blames "the good old boys" for the allegations. Who's right?
Jim Davenport of the AP reports that lobbyist Larry Marchant, who until yesterday worked for the campaign of Haley rival and current South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, says he had a one-night stand with Haley in 2008. Like blogger Will Folks, who claimed a past relationship with Haley last week, Marchant hasn't offered direct proof, saying, "I didn't have any evidence because you can't have any evidence on a one night affair - you don't have that." And as with Folks, Haley's campaign has been quick to deny the allegations. Haley herself says of Marchant's claims, "This is just disgusting politics. Two or three months ago I was Nikki who? and nobody was saying anything and a couple weeks ago we started going double digits up in the polls and now we have had everything thrown at us." And her campaign manager Tim Pearson alleges sexism: "As Nikki Haley rises in the polls, the good old boys in Columbia see their taxpayer-funded fraternity party coming crumbling down, and they will say or do anything to hold onto their power."
It's not clear if Haley, who's been endorsed by Sarah Palin and shares her small-government beliefs, is actually a victim of sexists who want to see a woman brought low, of cynical politicians who would seek any form of attack regardless of gender, of her own indiscretions, or all of the above. Marchant does seem a little shady — while Haley hinted that Folks might be paid by one of her opponents, Marchant actually was — at least until yesterday, when he resigned from Bauer's campaign due to "inappropriate conduct not in keeping with the goals of this campaign." Andre Bauer denies "shopping" Marchant's story, and Marchant says it's "crazy" to think he was paid to bring Haley down, but his stated reasons for going public don't sound terribly convincing. He says that after Haley claimed to have been completely faithful to her husband, "It just gnawed at me to the point I had to confide in my wife and then we both made a joint decision that I was not going to push the issue but that if I was confronted, I was not going to lie about it." But why didn't the one-night stand "gnaw at him" before Haley launched her campaign and started doing well in the polls? And was he really "confronted?" Marchant says Bauer asked him to resign when a reporter started asking about the affair, but the AP's Davenport notes that publicly acknowledging Marchant's "inappropriate conduct" was an "unusual step." It's almost like Bauer's camp wanted reporters to keep asking.
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Both Folks and Marchant have claimed they were goaded by an indefatigable press into making their confessions, but they may have their own reasons for going public that have nothing to do with journalists. Meanwhile, at least one member of the media retains some focus on the issues. The Times's Gail Collins points out that, aside from who slept with whom, the biggest question in South Carolina's Republican gubernatorial primary appears to be "which Republican dislikes government most." She continues,
During the Tuesday debate, Bauer claimed that illegal immigration was caused by lavish government welfare payments, which caused poor people to refuse to do manual labor. Haley bragged that she had opposed the federal stimulus program. The attorney general, Henry McMaster, who is currently suing to try to stop the federal government from bringing health care reform to South Carolina, attributed the failures of the state's public schools to teachers' being so busy "filling out federal forms that they can't teach."
Mike Huckabee may have called Andre Bauer "tea party before there was a tea party," but really all the candidates appear engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of what their state should do for its people. And while it's possible that Haley, as a woman of color, has become the target of the "good old boys," ideologically she's right there with them.
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Female SC Gov Hopeful Denies Claim Of 2nd Affair [AP, via Traverse City Record-Eagle]
S.C. Governor Candidate Denies 2nd Tryst Claim [AP, via MSNBC]
Palmetto Political Passions [NYT]
Earlier: Why Nikki Haley's Sex Scandal Matters (Updated)
Palin BFF Shows Women Can Have Sex Scandals TooYou must include a low quality stream of no more than 64 Kbps for your app to resort to when network conditions demand it, along with the higher quality streams you want to deliver to your customers when the network can support it.
We could hear the echoing howls of discontent over the weekend as thousands finally received their very own iPad 3G and learned they couldn't watch Dancing With the Stars whilst on the go. Now we have the details on why, exactly, and the repercussions. As it turns out, it's simply a carry-over of an iPhone OS HTTP Live Streaming rule that states quite clearly:It seems the ABC Player devs chose to skip that option, so when you lose WiFi you also lose Tom Bergeron's charm and wit. Other apps, like Netflix and YouTube, do provide a lower bitrate fallback, but that of course results in nasty compression artifacts when on the go. In other words: there's a very good chance that 3G streaming will come in a future ABC Player release, but when it does it ain't gonna be pretty.Essence just released its February issue, celebrating the "#BlackGirlMagic Class of 2016." I first noticed the popular term "Black Girl Magic" as a hashtag on Facebook and Twitter, attached to posts by girlfriends celebrating themselves, their loved ones, their babies, their lives. I've seen it on t-shirts spread out on the tummies of little smiling black girls, showing all of their teeth. These are statements and images of pride in blackness and girlhood, created and celebrated by black women and girls, and that's a positive thing.
But something doesn't smell right.
Maybe it's just me. As someone who has lived with the chronic, incurable illness MS for almost ten years, I know that illness and disability can make the person who has it feel like a failure. No matter what doctors, friends and family members say–no matter what the scientific establishment says, she can carry around a sense that she did something wrong. She might think that if she'd just done something different, something better, something magical, then maybe things would not be as they are.
"I'm thinking to myself: 'I've heard this one before.' And, reader, so have you."
In the past ten years of my illness, I've developed coping skills. I've learned breathing techniques. I've made sure to feel grateful for lightness and laughter. But one attitude I'll never take on is the idea that I can be a "magical black woman." That somewhere within me is some black girl magic. Because there isn't. Everything inside and outside of me is flesh and bone and a nervous system (with bad signaling). Nothing magical.
But there's something else that rubs me the wrong way about the phrase "black girl magic," something less personal. When I see it I smile and feel warm inside because I will always find delight in the sight of happy black girls and women. But then I pause, and my smile gets a little stale. It freezes in that way you notice in photos, when you can tell everyone's pleased but getting a little bit tired of feigning enthusiasm. My face hardens and I start to feel plastic, and it's because I'm thinking to myself: "I've heard this one before."
And, reader, so have you.
The "strong, black woman" archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all, that we can withstand it. That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing.
Saying we're superhuman is just as bad as saying we're animals, because it implies that we are organically different.
Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human. That might sound nitpicky, but it's not nitpicky when we are still being treated as subhuman. And there's a very long history of black women being treated as subhuman by the medical establishment, in spite of the debt Western medicine owes to them. It doesn't begin or end with Henrietta Lacks and the cancer cells taken from her cervix without her or her family's knowledge or permission. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving less anesthesia, if at all, in surgeries because of the widely held belief that black women felt no pain. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving improper and dangerous prenatal care or compulsory sterilizations.
One of our most collectively celebrated images of a black woman is the black woman who perseveres, who survives, who continues on. In pain. Suffering. It is the beautiful tragic epitome of that strong black woman type we also collectively celebrate and simultaneously criticize. Shonda Rhimes' trifecta of Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder are among the best portrayals of this tension: the tension of celebrating and criticizing, dismantling this notion of the strong, silently suffering (black) woman.
But it is portrayed as just that: a tension. None of Rhimes's main characters (even white Meredith Grey) are wholly healthy women (they're subsisting on a diet of popcorn and red wine or using sex as a weapon). They're not perfect, and they're not magical. What they are is incredibly, lethally, terrific at what they do. That's not magical. That's what women do. In order to survive, we don't fly, we don't acquire superhuman characteristics. We woman up. And perhaps black women tend to do it better than most but that's because we have to, not because we're magical. (Most of us fail miserably, by the way; when one of us doesn't, we call them magical.)
These days, when racist practices occur in medicine, they're more often reported on. But I find it not coincidental that as certain language started disappearing and certain practices started going underground, another language and practice started showing up: the idea of the magical black woman—#BlackGirlMagic.
Is it because we're magical that Daniel Holtzclaw thought he could stalk, rape and threaten us and get away with it?
Is it because we're magical that Daniel Holtzclaw thought he could stalk, rape, threaten us, and get away with it? Maybe the Texas policeman who threw a bikini-clad black girl to the ground at a pool party thought she was magical and wouldn't feel anything. Maybe the school security guard who grabbed a 14-year-old black girl, body slammed her and threw her across the room, thought she was magical and would bounce off the floor.
Saying we're superhuman is just as bad as saying we're animals, because it implies that we are organically different, that we don't feel just as much as any other human being. Black girls and women are humans. That's all we are. And it would be a magical feeling to be treated like human beings–who can't fly, can't bounce off the ground, can't block bullets, who very much can feel pain, who very much can die. When I see "black girl magic," I think, was Sandra Bland not magical enough? Renisha McBride? Miriam Carey? Perhaps she'd been trying to be magical and, failing, started to blame herself instead.
Read Ashley Ford's response, "There Is Nothing Wrong With Black Girl Magic," here.
Dr. Linda Chavers is a writer, teacher, and scholar of 20th century American and African American literature with specializations in race and visual culture. Her research interests include southern literature, postmodernism, and fiction. She holds a B.A. in Race and Gender from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study (magna cum laude). She obtained an M.A. in English and Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University in 2013. Passionate on service, Dr. Chavers has worked in prison education, foster youth mentoring, and rape crisis intervention for over a decade.From Skulepedia
The Iron Ring is a ring worn by many engineers in Canada, serving as a symbol and reminder of the obligations and responsibilities of the profession. The ring is acquired through a ceremony available to students graduating from an accredited Canadian engineering program, or engineers from abroad who can demonstrate their eligibility for membership in a Canadian Professional Engineers' Association. The ceremony, known as The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, was developed with the assistance of English poet Rudyard Kipling after a request from Professor H.E.T. Haultain, and is administered by The Corporation of the Seven Wardens Inc./Société des Sept Gardiens inc. The request was made on behalf of seven past presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada, who would become the original seven Wardens of the Corporation.
The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer [ edit ]
The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer (known informally as the Iron Ring Ceremony) is the ceremony in which Iron Rings are conferred to graduating engineers who choose to obligate themselves to the highest professionalism and humility of their profession. The process of the ritual is symbolic of the moral, ethical, and professional commitments made by the engineer who will wear the Iron Ring. The ceremonies are private and not open to family and friends who do not have Iron Rings. The Iron Ring is presented to each graduating engineer by a Warden of their Camp, or by a presenter that has demonstrated their devotion to the engineering profession (i.e. a relative or mentor, but not an instructor).
Design, Symbolism, and Practice [ edit ]
The Iron Ring presented at most ceremonies is actually made of stainless steel, although the option to receive a ring of wrought iron still exists at universities that are part of Camp One (Toronto). The rings are distributed at ceremonies held by each accredited university, operated by one of the 25 Camps of the Corporation of the Seven Wardens across Canada.
Origins [ edit ]
The first iron rings were given out in 1922 as part of the first Rituals administered in Canada.
The Camp One fonds at the University of Toronto Archives describes the construction of the original iron rings:
The iron rings were initially made from puddled wrought iron, sometimes called cold iron, hand-hammered by convalescing First World War veterans at the Christie Street Military Hospital, under the care of the Military Hospitals Commission which became the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment (DSCR). Haultain had a longstanding association with the DSCR; he arranged for the rings to be manufactured and delivered to the various camps. After 1948 the responsibility for their manufacture was taken over by the Corporation of the Seven Wardens, based in Montreal. Camp One continued to manufacture its own rings, considering them to be Ancient Landmarks. While many members still wear a rough iron ring, most of the rings manufactured today are made from stainless steel.
A common myth about the Iron Ring is that the earliest rings were forged from the unusable iron and steel from the first collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907. During the incident, 75 of the 86 workers on the bridge were killed, and the rest injured. The collapse was attributed to poor planning and design by the overseeing engineers. This misconception may be related to the common practice of attaching a symbol of an engineering failure, such as a bolt from that bridge, to the chain that is held by the participants of the ritual. More accurately, the ring symbolizes the pride which engineers have in their profession, while acting as a constant reminder of their humility. The ring serves as a reminder to the engineer and others of their obligation to live by a high standard of professional conduct. It is not a symbol of qualification as an engineer - this is determined by the provincial and territorial licensing bodies.
Construction [ edit ]
The Ring itself is small and understated, designed as a constant reminder to the wearer, rather than an aesthetic piece of jewelry. The Rings were originally hammered manually with a rough outer surface. The modern machined ring design is unique, a reminder of the manual process. Twelve half-circle facets are carved into the top and bottom of the outer surface, with the two halves offset by one facet radius. Kipling explained the unpolished wrought-iron ring "is rough as the mind of the young man. It is not smoothed off at the edges, any more than the character of the young."
Symbolism [ edit ]
The Iron Ring is worn on the little finger of the working (dominant) hand. There, the facets act as a sharp reminder of one's obligation while the engineer works, because it would drag on the surface while the engineer is drafting or writing. This is particularly true of recently obligated engineers, whose rings bear sharp, unworn, facets that will smooth out over time. Protocol dictates that the rings should be returned by retired engineers or by the families of deceased engineers.
From the University of Toronto Archives:
Kipling regarded the ring as a symbol. It is rough, not smoothed, and hammered by hand as, in the words of Kipling, “the young have all their hammering coming to them.” The ring has no beginning or end. Kipling’s use of cold iron as a symbolic metal for the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer stems from his interest in iron as a metal of power and a symbol of human innovation. Likewise, the Ancient Landmarks upon which the obligation is taken are made of cold iron of “honourable tradition” without inscription. Landmarks have typically included anvils, chains and hammers. A frequently circulated myth about the iron rings is that they were made from the pieces of the collapsed Pont de Quebec Bridge that killed 76 people in 1907. The rings, however, have always been made from commercial sources.
Other Ring Programs [ edit ]
Based on the success of the Iron Ring in Canada, the Order of the Engineer was founded in the United States in 1970, and conducts similar ring ceremonies at a number of U.S. colleges. The recipients sign an "Obligation of the Engineer" and receive a stainless steel Engineer's Ring (which, unlike the Iron Ring, is smooth and not faceted).
At the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, there is a post-convocation ring ceremony at which each new graduate is given a silver ring to symbolize his or her entry into the kinship of architects and landscape architects. The ring is also worn on the little finger of the drafting hand, but has no other associated symbolism or obligation tied to it.
References [ edit ]Image caption George Athor did not attend the January signing ceremony
At least 16 people have been killed after rebels attacked south Sudan's army, shattering a ceasefire, officials say.
Forces loyal to George Athor blew up two army trucks near the town of Fangak in Jonglei state, a southern military spokesman said.
Mr Athor took up arms last year, alleging fraud in state elections, but signed a ceasefire last month.
The clashes come as Southern Sudan prepares to secede from the north.
Some 99% of southerners voted for independence in last month's referendum, according to official results announced this week.
'Surprised'
Southern army spokesman Philip Aguer said four soldiers and 12 rebels were killed but he feared that many more people had died.
"We are still waiting for full details of the casualties," he said.
Two sites in Jonglei state, including Fangak town, were targeted on Wednesday afternoon by Mr Athor's men, who had also been planting land mines, he said.
Fresh fighting broke out on Thursday morning in the Fangak area, but the gunmen fled after the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) fought back.
Jonglei is the south's most populous state.
When Mr Athor took up arms last April, the south accused him of being used by the north to stir up trouble and derail the referendum - charges denied at the time by northern officials.
He agreed to the ceasefire deal with the SPLA days before the referendum vote began - although he did not attend the signing ceremony in person.
"Indeed, we were surprised by the attack, because the SPLA were busy transporting food to the sites of assembly, where the men of Athor are due to gather under the terms of the agreement," Col Aguer told AFP news agency.
Mr Athor has blamed the SPLA for attacking his forces, but said that he was open to new talks.
"If the other side is willing, we can continue talks but if they are not willing, then I would say this is the end of the peace agreement between us and them," he told the Reuters news agency via satellite phone.
The BBC's Peter Martell in the southern capital, Juba, says the fighting is another sign of the challenges the south faces in bringing its people together and improving security.
The week-long referendum vote itself passed off peacefully, but tension remains high in parts of the oil-rich area which straddles the north and south. Fifty-four people were killed over the weekend in fighting in Southern Sudan's Upper Nile state.
Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir has promised to accept the outcome of the referendum.
On Wednesday, Sudan's UN ambassador hinted that the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Mr Bashir should be withdrawn as a "reward" for him accepting the south's independence.
Mr Bashir is accused of links to war crimes in a separate conflict in the western region of Darfur.
Southern Sudan is to become the world's newest independent state on 9 July.Thinkstock
Orthodox Jews often make poor decisions when talking about sex with young people, particularly regarding discussing (or not discussing) nocturnal emissions and masturbation with boys.
I recently attended a question and answer session at an Orthodox institution in which a rabbi was asked how and when, if at all, a Jewish father should talk to his sons about those two subjects. Before he could answer, a rebbetzin warned “There are children here!” (The youngest person in the room was two months shy of his bar mitzvah. I can think of no person who needs such information more urgently than a 12-year-old boy.) Then the rabbi said he didn’t know and would probably ask his own rabbi when his children grew older.
The event’s attendees included a few dozen unmarried Orthodox yeshiva guys. Nearly all — or perhaps all — have struggled with pornography and/or masturbation at some point in their lives, no doubt including recently. But yeshivas almost never address these matters. And when prompted, the young rabbi literally had nothing to say.
Several years ago, I asked a rabbi I’m close with whether he had discussed wet dreams with his son then experiencing puberty. He said, “Not yet.” I asked again a few years later, after the young man had physically matured, and he said, “No, it just never came up.” Giving a boy zero information about why his sheets are sometimes sticky is a prescription for confusion, shame and guilt. It is cruel to keep truths about human biology a secret from our youth just because we feel uncomfortable.
Silence by my fellow Orthodox Jews about these matters only increases the suffering of boys and men who struggle with them |
be seen as removing from ‘top-down’ messages the redundant ‘bottom-up’ information from lower areas that has been already been accounted for.
Learning the precision of the causal links
As in all hierarchical inference problems solved by the brain, we distinguish between the inference of the unknown states of the world (binary hidden causes, such as ‘trees’ and ‘leaves’) and the parameters mediating causal dependencies (e.g. what is the probability of a leaf given the presence of a tree). Belief propagation computes the probability of the hidden causes on a fast time scale after exposure to a single stimulus. In contrast, the learning of the causal dependencies occurs over a slower timescale, during exposure to multiple stimuli. We will demonstrate how abnormalities of inference lead to severe abnormalities in learning.
Uncertainty not only is at the heart of decision strategies, but also controls the learning of internal predictive models (Dayan and Yu, 2003). For example, if a high level of confidence for ‘green’ often co-occurs with a high level of confidence for ‘stem’, then there is support for the existence of a higher order common cause for these two observations, e.g. a ‘leaf’ (Fig. 1A). Here, however, we will not consider the learning of latent variables or of the structure of the graph; instead, we will concentrate on the much simpler problem of learning the strength of causal relationships, or precision with which one variable predicts another, i.e. the parameters and , from experience.
To illustrate the impact of circular inferences on learning causal relationships from experience, we compared the result of learning based on the beliefs that are computed by the intact and circular belief propagation networks (i.e. belief propagation and circular belief propagation, respectively). For illustration purposes, we only learned the connection between ‘tree’ and ‘leaves’, setting other connections to their true values. We also used a simplified toy example, without the variables ‘root’ and ‘stem’. Thus, in this simplified network, ‘forest’ caused the presence of a tree with probability and , ‘tree’ caused the presence of a leaf with probability and , and ‘tree’ caused the presence of green with probabilities and . We initialized the network connections with parameters , , , and , whereas the unknown (i.e. to be learned) connections between ‘tree’ and ‘leaf’ and were set to a random value that was close to 0.5 (Supplementary material). For each training example, we sampled the presence or absence of a tree randomly from a probability of 0.5 and then sampled tree, leaves and green from their true causal probabilities. ‘Tree’ and ‘green’ were assumed to be completely observable [i.e. their beliefs were set to (0,1) if present and (1,0) if absent]. We relied on belief propagation or circular belief propagation to compute the beliefs of the hidden variables (i.e. ‘tree’ and ‘leaves’) and then applied a learning algorithm called ‘expectation maximization’ (Supplementary material) to update the estimates for and . Note that the results are not crucially dependent of the learning algorithm. In the Supplementary material and Supplementary Fig. 2, we show that a less standard (but more biologically plausible) Hebbian learning rule leads to the same qualitative effects.
Results
We describe here the main impairments in causal inference and perceptual decisions as predicted by the circular belief propagation algorithm. Interpretations of these impairments, both in terms of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia as well as the other dimensions of this disorder, are provided in the ‘Discussion’ section.
Normal and circular inference
We first consider the case in which upward and downward loops are equally impaired, i.e. when . The impairment of inhibitory loops causes redundant top-down and bottom-up information to be propagated multiple times in the network (Fig. 1C and D). Quite surprisingly, however, this circular belief propagation does not generate completely ‘false’ percepts, i.e. the signs of LORs are unaffected (Fig. 1D). For example, if the presence of a tree is more likely than its absence according to a normal inference, then it is also found to be more likely by the impaired network. This pattern is illustrated with the binary toy example in Fig. 2A and B. In Fig. 2A, strong sensory evidence is provided for the presence of ‘green’ and ‘stem’, which leads the network to correctly conclude the presence of trees and a forest. In Fig. 2B, no sensory evidence is provided (e.g. the eyes are closed), but there is a strong prior expectation against the forest, which leads both belief propagation and circular belief propagation to correctly predict the absence of trees, leaves, green and stems.
Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Results for normal and circular inference when inhibitory loops are equally impaired. In each panel, the computed beliefs for all of the nodes x 1 to x 6 are plotted for different iterations of the network equations (blue circles: physiological network; red lines: impaired network with α c = 0.1, α d = 0.1). (A) If sensory evidence is entered as an Log-Odd Ratio (LOR) of 1 for « green » and an LOR of 2 for « stem », then the network converges toward the correct percepts (i.e. the beliefs are on the same side of 0.5), but the confidence is overestimated. (B) The same as in A, but with no sensory evidence and a prior belief that corresponds to an LOR for a forest of −3 (i.e. a strong prior belief against the forest). (C) If the network receives very weak sensory evidence for green and stem, then the final belief corresponds to technically correct percepts (on the correct side of 0.5) but with an excessively high confidence for such weak sensory evidence. (D) Finally, when the network receives contradictory priors and sensory evidence, i.e. the prior is against a forest (LOR of −2), but when sensory evidence suggests the presence of green and stems (LORs of 1), intermediate representations become frustrated and oscillate between prior-based and sensory-based beliefs, specifically for « tree » and « root ».
Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Results for normal and circular inference when inhibitory loops are equally impaired. In each panel, the computed beliefs for all of the nodes x 1 to x 6 are plotted for different iterations of the network equations (blue circles: physiological network; red lines: impaired network with α c = 0.1, α d = 0.1). (A) If sensory evidence is entered as an Log-Odd Ratio (LOR) of 1 for « green » and an LOR of 2 for « stem », then the network converges toward the correct percepts (i.e. the beliefs are on the same side of 0.5), but the confidence is overestimated. (B) The same as in A, but with no sensory evidence and a prior belief that corresponds to an LOR for a forest of −3 (i.e. a strong prior belief against the forest). (C) If the network receives very weak sensory evidence for green and stem, then the final belief corresponds to technically correct percepts (on the correct side of 0.5) but with an excessively high confidence for such weak sensory evidence. (D) Finally, when the network receives contradictory priors and sensory evidence, i.e. the prior is against a forest (LOR of −2), but when sensory evidence suggests the presence of green and stems (LORs of 1), intermediate representations become frustrated and oscillate between prior-based and sensory-based beliefs, specifically for « tree » and « root ».
The fact that circular belief propagation converges to posterior probabilities on the correct side of 0.5 has been reported previously in the context of circular binary graphs (Frey and McKay, 1998; Murphy et al., 1999). These results predict specifically that networks with equally impaired upward and downward loops (the ‘equally’ is important, as we will see later) can still infer the most probable interpretations of their sensory input and priors. Even a total absence of inhibitory controls does not predict any systematic bias in perceptual or behavioural decisions as long as these decisions are based on reliable sensory evidence and/or on general agreement with prior expectations. The main explanation for this phenomenon is as follows: while top-down and bottom-up messages are indeed counted too many times, the number of over-counted messages is equal in both directions, leaving the relative weighting of the sensory evidence and priors intact.
Over-confidence
Even if the LOR's sign is correct, the levels of confidence that are reached by the impaired and ‘normal’ networks, i.e. the amplitude of the LOR, are widely different in the circular belief propagation and belief propagation networks. Because circular belief propagation accounts for sensory and prior evidence not once, but multiple times, it generates levels of confidence that are out of proportion when compared with the available sensory and prior information (Fig. 1D). In the example shown in Fig. 2C, the sensory evidence provided to the network is extremely weak. Such small likelihoods could be the result of: (i) processing extremely unreliable sensory inputs; (ii) completely ambiguous sensory inputs; or even (iii) a pure background sensory noise.
Weak sensory evidence can be partly processed and analysed (e.g. we can sometimes see faces in the random shapes of clouds), but the confidence that is associated with these interpretations should be very low. Indeed, the unimpaired network correctly maintains LORs close to zero in these situations, which indicates the absence of any reliable conclusions. If perceptual decisions (and any other forms of decisions) are based on the confidence in these interpretations, then the system should not perceive trees or forest when the evidence is too weak. In contrast, the circular belief propagation network ‘jumps to conclusions’ and reaches a high level of confidence even when the sensory evidence and/or the prior are extremely weak. In fact, the circular belief propagation network cannot stably maintain the LORs of any variable near zero but will amplify any small biases until reaching the maximum level of confidence that is allowed by the strength of the causal links . In other words, it is forced to derive a highly confident interpretation from meaningless or non-significant sensory information. The same phenomena are observed in the presence of a weak prior (not illustrated here). For example, even a small expectation of being in the forest could lead the system to perceive trees, leaves and the colour green.
Dissociation between ‘low-level’ and ‘high-level’ representations
In addition to being overconfident, the circular belief propagation network exhibits a striking dissociative effect between low-level sensory areas and high-level representational areas in cases in which sensory evidence contradicts prior beliefs (Fig. 2D). For example, this type of situation could occur when we are inside a city building and see stems and the colour green (e.g. from a potted plant). This phenomenon goes against prior expectations because we are not in a forest, but rather a building, where plants are rare. Normal belief propagation in the unimpaired network correctly concludes that while the presence of ‘leaves’ is likely, the presence of a tree is unlikely. Indeed, while ‘tree’ is supported by ‘leaves’, it is contradicted by the absence of ‘forest’. Top-down and bottom-up evidence cancel each other at an intermediate level in the hierarchy, preventing the propagation of false beliefs up and down the hierarchy. Only a few iterations for the belief propagation algorithm are sufficient to reach this stable belief state.
Instead of quickly converging to low confidence in intermediate layers, however, the circular belief propagation algorithm alternates (over successive iterations of the circular belief propagation algorithm) between strong beliefs that are based on sensory evidence alone (a consequence of over-counting bottom-up messages) and strong beliefs based on prior expectations alone (a consequence of over-counting top-down messages) (Fig. 2D). Because both belief states are mutually incompatible, this pattern results in incoherence between ‘high level’ and ‘low level’ sensory representations. These oscillations are strongest in the intermediate layers (where prior and sensory evidence should cancel to give an LOR that is close to zero). At these intermediate stages, the network alternates between one interpretation of the sensory observations and its exact opposite. When the loops are completely impaired ( ) and the causal links are strong ( , ), such oscillations can even be sustained indefinitely, which prevents the network from converging to any stable conclusions. When loops are only partially impaired ( ) and causal links are less extreme, the amplitude of these oscillations is progressively dampened until the network reaches stable beliefs, but not before many iterations of the circular belief propagation algorithm have occurred.
Impact of a circular inference on learning causal relationships
Uncontrolled reverberation of messages is as detrimental to learning as it is to inference. For example, if the node ‘tree’ is frequently co-activated with ‘leaf’, the strength of their causal link should be reinforced, but only if the activation of ‘tree’ is not solely due to processing information from ‘leaf’ and comes from other (non-redundant) sources of information, such as the presence of ‘forest’ or the colour ‘green’ or ‘stem’ (Fig. 1). Otherwise, the causal link would be reinforced indefinitely, even in the absence of any true causality, simply because any pre-existing connection between ‘leaf’ and ‘tree’ will introduce spurious correlations between their associated beliefs, leading to a reinforcement of this link and thus leading to more correlations.
Even when the causal model is accurate, as in the examples above, circular inference causes over-confidence and dissociative beliefs on a trial-to-trial basis. However, on a more permanent (and most likely disruptive) basis, it also results in the learning of delusional causal relationships, as illustrated in Fig. 3. Figure 3A represents the learned conditional probability estimate as a function of the number of training examples, in a situation of high sensory and prior uncertainty (i.e. , 0.3). Let us assume that ‘green’ and ‘leaf’ are in fact completely independent events in the real world, i.e. . This construct could correspond to the imaginary case of an observer living in a world where leaves are not carried by trees. The intact belief propagation network accurately learns that the two variables are not causally linked, i.e. converges to a value close to 0.5. In contrast, the estimate of the circular belief propagation network ( ) does not stay close to 0.5; instead, it diverges to a value that is close to 0 or 1, which implies that the model gradually learns a strong but completely ‘delusional’ (because it does not exist in the real world) causal relationship between ‘green’ and ‘leaf’.
Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Learning in circular and intact belief propagation networks using the expectation-maximization (E-M) algorithm. (A) Representation of the learned conditional probability estimates as a function of the number of trials in a situation of high sensory and prior uncertainty. Although the belief propagation network quickly converges to a value that is close to 0.5 (green), the circular belief propagation network gradually diverges to 0 or 1 (red), which models how such an impaired system could aberrantly detect coincidences that do not rely on observable causal relationships. Note that the different curves were obtained by running the E-M algorithm on a different random sequence of training trials, with different initial values for the parameters. (B) Learned conditional probabilities between uncorrelated causes as a function of the number of trials, when sensory and prior evidence is more accurate. (C) Learned conditional probabilities between truly correlated causes as a function of the number of trials in a situation of high sensory and prior uncertainty.
Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Learning in circular and intact belief propagation networks using the expectation-maximization (E-M) algorithm. (A) Representation of the learned conditional probability estimates as a function of the number of trials in a situation of high sensory and prior uncertainty. Although the belief propagation network quickly converges to a value that is close to 0.5 (green), the circular belief propagation network gradually diverges to 0 or 1 (red), which models how such an impaired system could aberrantly detect coincidences that do not rely on observable causal relationships. Note that the different curves were obtained by running the E-M algorithm on a different random sequence of training trials, with different initial values for the parameters. (B) Learned conditional probabilities between uncorrelated causes as a function of the number of trials, when sensory and prior evidence is more accurate. (C) Learned conditional probabilities between truly correlated causes as a function of the number of trials in a situation of high sensory and prior uncertainty.
With respect to overconfidence, this problem arises only in situations that have a high level of uncertainty, i.e. when sensory and prior evidence are relatively unreliable and between variables that are completely uncorrelated. If priors and likelihoods are strong and unambiguous, or if the causal relationship is real (i.e. most of the time), both the intact and circular networks learn accurate causal links. For example, by using more accurate evidence in Fig. 3c ( , 0.1, while = 0.5), we found that the circular belief propagation network estimates converged to the true estimate of 0.5, inferring that ‘tree’ is unrelated to ‘leaf’. Similarly, even when sensory and prior evidence are weak ( , 0.3), both intact and circular networks can accurately learn a non-random causal relationship , (Fig. 3B). These examples illustrate how the acquisition of delusional causal relationships is observable only between ‘highly uncertain’ variables that are truly unrelated, and at the same time, are not strongly corroborated by direct sensory evidence. For example, a tingling sensation in the arm is only weak evidence for the presence of a micro-chip and, in principle, is not related to the existence of ‘invisible’ aliens; nevertheless, a patient suffering from schizophrenia can strongly believe that aliens (that he never directly observed) implanted a micro-chip (that he did not really feel) in his arm.
Asymmetric impairments of upward and downward loops
Because upward and downward inhibitory loops most likely rely on distinct sub-populations of interneurons and/or cortico-basal or cortico-thalamic loops (see ‘Discussion’ section), both types of loops could be differentially affected in schizophrenia. Here, we consider the consequence (for inference) when upward loops are altered while downward loops remain relatively intact, or vice versa. Figure 4 illustrates the differential effects of disturbing mainly upward loops (Fig. 4A, black) or mainly downward loops (Fig. 4B, green). As described previously, both types of dysfunctions lead to overconfidence (Fig. 4C). Similarly, contradictions between sensory evidence and priors lead to oscillations in intermediate layers and dissociations between high-level and low-level representations, albeit to a lesser extent (Fig. 4D and 4E). In addition, however, the two types of impairments affect the relative weighting of the sensory evidence and priors in strikingly different fashions.
Figure 4 View largeDownload slide Results of circular inference with an imbalance between upward and downward loops. (A) When upward loops are impaired but downward loops are not, sensory evidence that is sent up in the hierarchy is reverberated back as if it were additional prior evidence (magenta arrows). However, prior evidence sent down the hierarchy is not reverberated back up, i.e. the system does not mistake its own expectations for sensory evidence (violet arrow). As a result, sensory evidence is overcounted, but not priors. (B) When downward loops are impaired, but not upward loops, the prior expectation sent down the hierarchy is reverberated back as if it were additional sensory evidence (violet arrows). However, sensory evidence sent up the hierarchy is not reverberated back down, i.e. the system does not mistake its sensory evidence as prior expectations (magenta arrow). As a result, prior expectations are overcounted, but not sensory evidence. (C) Impaired networks in the presence of weak sensory evidence (in this example, against the presence of green and stem). Blue: intact network. Green: networks with impaired downward loops, i.e. α c = 0.9, α d = 0.1 (as illustrated in B). Black: networks with impaired upward loops, i.e. α c = 0.1, α d = 0.9 (as illustrated in A). Both dysfunctions result in overconfidence, i.e. weak sensory evidence leads to highly confident beliefs. (D) Impaired networks in the presence of contradicting prior information (for the presence of forest) and sensory evidence (against the presence of green and stem). The network with impaired upward loops bases its highly over-confident conclusions entirely on the sensory evidence. The network with impaired downward loops, in contrast, bases its final beliefs entirely on the prior information. The two networks reach such opposite conclusions for the low-level variables, even when a normal network typically concludes that the states of these variables are highly uncertain. (E) The same as in D, but for a different combination of likelihoods and priors.
Figure 4 View largeDownload slide Results of circular inference with an imbalance between upward and downward loops. (A) When upward loops are impaired but downward loops are not, sensory evidence that is sent up in the hierarchy is reverberated back as if it were additional prior evidence (magenta arrows). However, prior evidence sent down the hierarchy is not reverberated back up, i.e. the system does not mistake its own expectations for sensory evidence (violet arrow). As a result, sensory evidence is overcounted, but not priors. (B) When downward loops are impaired, but not upward loops, the prior expectation sent down the hierarchy is reverberated back as if it were additional sensory evidence (violet arrows). However, sensory evidence sent up the hierarchy is not reverberated back down, i.e. the system does not mistake its sensory evidence as prior expectations (magenta arrow). As a result, prior expectations are overcounted, but not sensory evidence. (C) Impaired networks in the presence of weak sensory evidence (in this example, against the presence of green and stem). Blue: intact network. Green: networks with impaired downward loops, i.e. α c = 0.9, α d = 0.1 (as illustrated in B). Black: networks with impaired upward loops, i.e. α c = 0.1, α d = 0.9 (as illustrated in A). Both dysfunctions result in overconfidence, i.e. weak sensory evidence leads to highly confident beliefs. (D) Impaired networks in the presence of contradicting prior information (for the presence of forest) and sensory evidence (against the presence of green and stem). The network with impaired upward loops bases its highly over-confident conclusions entirely on the sensory evidence. The network with impaired downward loops, in contrast, bases its final beliefs entirely on the prior information. The two networks reach such opposite conclusions for the low-level variables, even when a normal network typically concludes that the states of these variables are highly uncertain. (E) The same as in D, but for a different combination of likelihoods and priors.
When upward loops are affected, but downward loops are not, sensory evidence that is sent up the hierarchy is reverberated back down (Fig. 4A). As a result, high-level interpretations of the current sensory information are mistaken for prior knowledge. However, prior knowledge sent down the hierarchy is not reverberated back up, i.e. the system does not mistake its own expectations for sensory evidence (Fig. 4A). As a result, sensory evidence accumulates over successive layers of the hierarchy and becomes severely over-counted. However, priors (descending messages) are processed normally because the downward loops are intact. Because they are not reverberated, prior evidence is not over-counted. This scenario introduces an effective imbalance in the relative weighting of sensory evidence and priors. The network with impaired upward loops relies more on its current sensory observation than its prior knowledge or its past experience (Fig. 4D and E).
In contrast, when downward loops are affected, but upward loops are not, prior expectations that were sent down the hierarchy are reverberated back as if they were additional sensory evidence (Fig. 4B). Thus, the system mistakes its own prior expectations for new (supporting) sensory observations. In contrast, sensory evidence that is sent up the hierarchy is not reverberated back down, i.e. the system does not mistake sensory evidence for prior expectations (Fig. 4B). As a result, predictions based on priors are over-counted and accumulate over successive layers. In contrast, sensory evidence is not reverberated and is counted only once. As a consequence, the network with impaired downward loops relies more on its priors that on its new sensory evidence when making perceptual decisions (Fig. 4C and D).
We thus can say that, quite paradoxically, an imbalance between upward and downward loops (Fig. 4) has an even more drastic and disruptive influence on perception and belief formation than when both loops are equally impaired (Fig. 2). In contrast to the case of equally impaired loops, a selective impairment creates an imbalance and results in ‘false percepts’, i.e. in subjects believing in interpretations that are opposite to the results of normal inference (LORs are of the wrong sign).
Let us finally consider the case of perceptual illusions. In a normal inference (belief propagation), a strong prior (i.e. slow motions are more likely than fast motions) combined with weak sensory likelihood (i.e. a visual motion stimulus at a low contrast) results in a systematic bias in the direction of the most a priori probable interpretations (i.e. the motion of a low contrast visual stimulus is perceived as slower than it actually is because slower motions are more likely). This effect is gradual, i.e. the weaker the sensory likelihood, the stronger the effect of the prior. This phenomenon accounts specifically for many perceptual illusions (Yuille and Bülthoff, 1996; Weiss et al., 2002; Bogadhi et al., 2011). Figure 4D and E show two examples in which weak sensory evidence is combined with a strong prior. The circular belief propagation framework predicts a strong disruption of the normal perceptual biases when the upward and downward loops are differentially impaired. Whereas a selective impairment of the downward loops predicts dominance of the prior and thus a stronger effect of perceptual illusions, a selective impairment of the upward loops results paradoxically in fewer perceptual illusions than are normally expected. Thus, assessing the relative weighting of sensory observations and priors is an indirect way to assess whether upward or downward loops are primarily impaired (or vice versa).
Discussion
The aim of the current paper was to introduce the concept of circular belief propagation in causal networks as a result of an excitatory to inhibitory imbalance in hierarchical cortical networks. We now discuss more conceptually how it could account not only for inappropriate causal attributions, bizarre beliefs and hallucinations in the schizophrenia spectrum but also for emerging aberrant coincidence detections during the transition phase to psychosis.
The ‘jumping to conclusions’ phenomena
The most salient effect of circular belief propagation is to reach levels of confidence that are out of proportion with the true levels of uncertainty that are associated with the sensory data and/or prior knowledge. Such over-interpretation of weak sensory observations could account for the ‘jumping to conclusions’ bias that is observed in schizophrenia patients (Huq et al., 1988). The jumping to conclusions phenomenon is traditionally described using probabilistic reasoning tasks such as the ‘beads task’. Two jars are presented to the participant with different proportions of ‘red’ and ‘black’ beads, and the task is to successively sample beads from one of the two jars. The subject must decide from which jar the beads are taken (based on the proportion of beads in each jar). Using such a paradigm, a number of behavioural studies have showed that patients with paranoid schizophrenia, when faced with probabilistic choices, base their decision on far less evidence while reporting much higher confidence than healthy controls. Crucially, the jumping to conclusions phenomenon seems to be specifically associated with delusional tendencies (Huq et al., 1988; Garety et al., 1991; Moritz and Woodward, 2005; Speechley et al., 2010; Averbeck et al., 2011).
Importantly, the circular belief propagation framework can be distinguished from Bayesian models assuming degraded sensory information or the use of suboptimal decision criteria (Averbeck et al., 2011; Moutoussis et al., 2011), but considering that the inference itself is not affected (Fear and Healy, 1997). In line with an impaired inference process, a recent experiment confirmed that when explicitly required to report their confidence level in a variant of the ‘beads task’, patients with schizophrenia systematically overestimated the weight of the sensory evidence (Speechley et al., 2010).
Uncertainty, hallucinatory and delusional experiences
Interestingly, the dysfunctions observed in the circular belief propagation models were not found to be perpetual in the sense that the system was able to interpret appropriately the stimuli most of the time. Erroneous beliefs [e.g. jumping to conclusions (phenomenon)] were shown to emerge only when the system was facing ambiguous or contradictory information, i.e. when the probabilities were close to 0.5. Such situations are presumably relatively rare in everyday life, where our senses and priors provide us (most of the time) with strong and unambiguous information. The low frequency of ambiguous situations could account for the very intermittent nature of hallucinatory experiences (Jardri et al., 2013) but could also explain why hallucinations are more frequent when there is sensory deprivation (Zubek, 1964). A lack of sensory input could, in this situation, put causal networks into a state of high uncertainty, leading to an increased occurrence of erroneous percepts. Furthermore, this scenario could account for the frequent persecutory nature of paranoid delusions because social inferences are tainted with much more uncertainty than simple perceptual inferences in which the relationship between the cause and the evidence is more straightforward (Chambon et al., 2011).
Learning of delusional causal models
We showed that circular belief propagation disrupts the control of messages and results in the reverberation of top-down and bottom-up evidence, which occurs multiple times. Thus, even in the absence of any true causal relationships in the outside world, top-down and bottom-up messages can be strongly correlated (e.g. the messages are mixtures of violet and magenta arrows, in Fig. 4). As a result, inaccurate causal links can be progressively and recursively strengthened, which leads to highly trusted causal models that are not corroborated by sensory experience. This dynamic phenomenon fits especially well with the abnormal experiences that are described in the initial phase of psychotic experiences (Woods et al., 2009). During this prodromal period, patients describe the appearance of mild or brief non-specific symptoms, such as a noticeable feeling of strangeness or aberrant coincidence detections. Interestingly, a low dose administration in healthy volunteers of ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist drug, also appears to mimic prodromal states rather than the full picture of schizophrenia (Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2006). Such a drug-induced prepsychotic state supports the progressive learning of aberrant causal associations that has been demonstrated by circular belief propagation models.
Beyond the emergence of delusional ideas, circular belief propagation models also account for their remarkable persistence. Indeed, an insufficient compensation for internally generated correlations by inhibitory loops could lead to the consolidation of extremely strong delusional causal models based on weak or insignificant sensory evidence or prior beliefs, thus forcing paranoid interpretations (though not entirely illogical) of random events or meaningless coincidences. This finding is clearly confirmed in the clinical setting, in which psychotic patients were shown to specifically over-emphasize evidence that inflates the veracity of their delusional beliefs but not evidence that could disprove it (Garrett and Singh, 2012; Kaliuzhna et al., 2012). This phenomenon accounts for the abnormal maintenance, over time, of beliefs that cannot be criticized (Corlett et al., 2009b).
Selective impairment of upward loops in schizophrenia?
The circular belief propagation framework distinguishes between different classes of circular inference by considering bottom-up and top-down streams separately. We have seen that impaired upward loops result in sensory evidence that is reverberated as if it were a prior expectation, which causes sensory evidence to be over-counted. The opposite also occurs: impaired downward loops result in prior expectations being reverberated as if they were sensory evidence, which causes priors to be over-counted. These two forms of impairment could both be implicated in the schizophrenia spectrum, which would account in part for the large heterogeneities that are observed in patients’ behaviours (Tandon et al., 2009).
It has been previously proposed in the literature that positive symptoms could result from an underestimation or impairment of prediction errors, which would lead patients with hallucinations and delusions to rely more on their priors (Grossberg, 2000; Friston, 2005a; Fletcher and Frith, 2009). Such a hypothesis is in line with an impairment of downward loops in the current framework. However, an over-counting of the prior does not appear to be fully compatible with the spectrum of behaviour that is observed in schizophrenia. For example, let us return to the jumping to conclusions phenomena that were previously described. In the beads task, patients with delusional tendencies base their decision on far fewer samples (often only one sample suffices) while reporting much higher confidence compared with healthy control subjects. If these patients under-estimate the reliability of new sensory observations (i.e. a newly sampled ‘black’ bead) compared to what they already know (i.e. the probability of each urn based on beads that were observed previously), they should, in contrast, give a smaller weight to each new sample, thus accumulating evidence and confidence more slowly than healthy controls. Jumping to conclusions suggests, in contrast, that patients over-interpret their sensory evidence compared to their prior knowledge, which could be the result of impaired upward loops.
In additional support of this hypothesis, patients with schizophrenia are paradoxically less vulnerable to illusory percepts than healthy control subjects (Dakin et al., 2005; Tschacher et al., 2006; Crawford et al., 2010; Williams et al., 2010). This attenuation specifically appears in patients with schizophrenia prone to positive symptoms (Shergill et al., 2005), but may also be observed in healthy individuals that score highly on delusional beliefs (Teufel et al., 2010). Knowing that the biases that were introduced by prior beliefs are considered to be at the root of perceptual illusions (Geisler and Kersten, 2002; Weiss et al., 2002), these findings support an over-estimation of the strength of sensory evidence and an underweighting of the prior, which is compatible with an impairment of the upward loops.
Based on these converging data, we thus propose that hallucinations and delusions originate primarily from the reverberation of sensory evidence as top-down expectations from high-level areas to low-level areas, leading to an over-interpretation of the sensory evidence. This, however, does not rule out the possibility that some patients are also impaired in their downward loops, and thus, over-count their priors (Friston, 2008; Chambon et al., 2011). Importantly, these two hypotheses could be tested experimentally by measuring how patients weight their likelihood and priors during decisions. Finally, an impairment of downward loops (i.e. the reverberation of top-down expectations as if they were sensory evidence) could cause vivid mental imagery, as observed, for example, during normal human development before complete frontal GABAergic maturation (Uhlhaas et al., 2010).
We would like to highlight that, in the circular belief propagation framework, positive symptoms are understood in terms of false inferences in a causal hierarchy and not as the consequence of focal brain damage (the previously described diffuse inhibitory loops impairment is clearly different from what could be expected from a neural lesion). As shown in Supplementary Fig. 3, low-level damage (e.g. at the level of the retina or of the pedonculus) can generate erroneous sensory inputs (Supplementary Fig. 3A), but because inferences are correctly processed during belief propagation, the subject continues to be able to challenge and disprove these percepts. Such a preserved insight is effectively a prominent feature of hallucinosis (Ey, 1973; Blom, 2010), compared with the psychotic hallucinations that are observed in schizophrenia. In contrast, when lesions are located in high-level brain structures (e.g. at the level of the pre-frontal cortex), incorrect priors can be generated, which results in common symptoms of the dysexecutive syndrome, such as perseverations; however, these patients do not suffer from abnormal sensory judgements (Supplementary Fig. 3B).
The relationship between circular belief propagation and gain control
False inference has now become a dominant theme in the study of the positive symptoms (reality distortion) of schizophrenia and related syndromes. Generally, this is cast in terms of abnormal representations of uncertainty or—more specifically—estimates of the precision of sensory evidence relative to top-down prior beliefs (Friston, 2005a; Fletcher and Frith, 2009). In the Bayesian formalism, the precision of sensory evidence and prior knowledge determines their gain, i.e. their relative contributions. Interestingly, one of the main consequences of circular belief propagation is the resulting change in the confidence assigned to sensory evidence and top-down priors. This is mediated by multiple reverberations of the same redundant message, and will worsen with the number of layers and the number of iterations of the algorithm. As a result, the ‘normal’ gain of the sensory evidence and/or prior drastically increase as α c and α d decrease from 1 (normal inhibition) to zero (no inhibition).
The relationship with predictive coding
In this paper, we focus on simple models with discrete states that do not change with time. In the case of continuous time-varying variables, belief propagation can be efficiently approximated (or in some cases exactly implemented) by a form of generalized predictive coding. As in belief propagation, the generalized predictive coding framework has been used to interpret hallucinations and delusions as an impairment in the neural representation of uncertainty (Friston, 2005a; Adams et al., 2013). In addition, belief propagation and generalized predictive coding are algorithmically similar. Both belief propagation and |
was this was received very well and built a great community of fans, who have come out in droves to support Cold Water’s Steam Greenlight campaign. The downside was that Atlantic Fleet for PC was underpriced, impeding our ability to continue financing its expansion and development.
Cold Waters will be a full PC game with a dynamic campaign and mod support. We’ll have to price it accordingly.
RPS: Did Atlantic Fleet sell as well as you had hoped on PC and did the feedback influence the Cold Waters design in any way?
Paul: Atlantic Fleet actually exceeded our expectations, especially given its mobile heritage and the stigma associated with mobile ports to PC and yes, feedback influenced Cold Waters greatly. First it validated our decision to move to PC as there was clearly a market for players wanting the type of naval games we do. Secondly, and as expected, we found PC gamers are more sophisticated and desire deeper detail and realism, hence the switch to a real time simulation. Finally the feedback highlighted the crucial need for mod support which has been central to Cold Waters development from the beginning.
RPS: Your ‘About’ page suggests that Killerfish is a two-man outfit. Is that the case?
Paul: There’s myself (programmer) and Nils Dücker (lead artist) full time. In addition we have another consulting artist Przemek Starkiewicz who focuses mostly on 2D art and special effects full time. After that we outsource music composition and other tasks that our core group might lack the time or expertise for.
RPS: Thank you for your time
* * * *
While none of the cars/sims competing in last week’s comment-powered Flare Path Grand Prix managed to complete a full lap of the malodorous Tupwell Park, there were enough votes cast and thoughtful opinions shared (A big thank you to everyone that took part) for useful conclusion drawing.
Anyone interested in singleplayer race simming clearly needs to purchase Automobilista ASAP if they haven’t already done so. When the vote stream dried up, the Brazilian dark horse was way ahead of its closest rival, the Italian prancing pony, Assetto Corsa.
That portion of the RPS readership that like their grids botless expressed a marked preference for iRacing. Automobilista and RaceRoom put in spirited performances on the MP side but lost touch with Kaemmer’s blistering brainchild very early.
* * * *Terrorism 2002-2005
View printable version (pdf)
U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Foreword
Since the mid-1980s, the FBI has published Terrorism in the United States, an unclassified annual report summarizing terrorist activities in this country. While this publication provided an overview of the terrorist threat in the United States and its territories, its limited scope proved inadequate for conveying either the breadth or width of the terrorist threat facing U.S. interests or the scale of the FBI’s response to terrorism worldwide. To better reflect the nature of the threat and the international scope of our response, the FBI expanded the focus of its annual terrorism report in the 2000/2001 edition to include discussion of FBI investigations overseas and renamed the series Terrorism.
This second edition of Terrorism provides an overview of the terrorist incidents and preventions designated by the FBI as having taken place in the United States and its territories during the years 2002 through 2005 and that are matters of public record. This publication does not include those incidents which the Bureau classifies under criminal rather than terrorism investigations. In addition, the report discusses major FBI investigations overseas and identifies significant events—including legislative actions, prosecutorial updates, and program developments—relevant to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The report concludes with an “In Focus” article summarizing the history of the FBI’s counterterrorism program.
While the discussion of international terrorism provides a more complete overview of FBI terrorism investigations into acts involving U.S. interests around the world, Terrorism is not intended as a comprehensive annual review of worldwide terrorist activity. The chronological incidents, charts, and figures included in Terrorism 2002-2005 reflect only those incidents identified in the Terrorism/Terrorism in the United States series. For more complete listings of worldwide terrorist incidents, see the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center at www.nctc.gov and the Terrorism Knowledge Base compiled by the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism at www.tkb.org.
The FBI hopes you will find Terrorism 2002-2005 to be a helpful resource and thanks you for your interest in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Program. A full-text and graphics version of this issue, as well as recent back issues of Terrorism and Terrorism in the United States, are available for on-line reference on the FBI home page at www.fbi.gov.
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Counterterrorism Division
FBI Policy and Guidelines
In accordance with U.S. counterterrorism policy, the FBI considers terrorists to be criminals. FBI efforts in countering terrorist threats are multifaceted. Information obtained through FBI investigations is analyzed and used to prevent terrorist activity and, whenever possible, to effect the arrest and prosecution of potential perpetrators. FBI investigations are initiated in accordance with the following guidelines:
Domestic terrorism investigations are conducted in accordance with The Attorney General’s Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise, and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations. These guidelines set forth the predication threshold and limits for investigations of U.S. persons who reside in the United States, who are not acting on behalf of a foreign power, and who may be conducting criminal activities in support of terrorist objectives.
International terrorism investigations are conducted in accordance with The Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Foreign Intelligence Collection and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations. These guidelines set forth the predication level and limits for investigating U.S. persons or foreign nationals in the United States who are targeting national security interests on behalf of a foreign power.
Although various Executive Orders, Presidential Decision Directives, and congressional statutes address the issue of terrorism, there is no single federal law specifically making terrorism a crime. Terrorists are arrested and convicted under existing criminal statutes. All suspected terrorists placed under arrest are provided access to legal counsel and normal judicial procedure, including Fifth Amendment guarantees.
Definitions
There is no single, universally accepted, definition of terrorism. Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).
The FBI further describes terrorism as either domestic or international, depending on the origin, base, and objectives of the terrorist organization. For the purpose of this report, the FBI will use the following definitions:
Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.
International terrorism involves violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or any state. These acts appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping. International terrorist acts occur outside the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to coerce or intimidate, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.
The FBI Divides Terrorist-Related Activities into Two Categories:
A terrorist incident is a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, in violation of the criminal laws of the United States, or of any state, to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
A terrorism prevention is a documented instance in which a violent act by a known or suspected terrorist group or individual with the means and a proven propensity for violence is successfully interdicted through investigative activity.
Note: The FBI investigates terrorism-related matters without regard to race, religion, national origin, or gender. Reference to individual members of any political, ethnic, or religious group in this report is not meant to imply that all members of that group are terrorists. Terrorists represent a small criminal minority in any larger social context.
Terrorism 2002-2005
Introduction
This edition of Terrorism highlights significant terrorism-related events in the United States and selected FBI investigative efforts overseas that occurred during the years 2002 through 2005. Additionally, this report provides a wide range of statistical data relating to terrorism in the United States during the past two decades. This material is presented to provide readers with an historical framework for the examination of contemporary terrorism issues.
In keeping with a longstanding trend, domestic extremists carried out the majority of terrorist incidents during this period. Twenty three of the 24 recorded terrorist incidents were perpetrated by domestic terrorists. With the exception of a white supremacist’s firebombing of a synagogue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, all of the domestic terrorist incidents were committed by special interest extremists active in the animal rights and environmental movements. The acts committed by these extremists typically targeted materials and facilities rather than persons. The sole international terrorist incident in the United States recorded for this period involved an attack at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, which claimed the lives of two victims.
The terrorism preventions for 2002 through 2005 present a more diverse threat picture. Eight of the 14 recorded terrorism preventions stemmed from right-wing extremism, and included disruptions to plotting by individuals involved with the militia, white supremacist, constitutionalist and tax protestor, and anti-abortion movements. The remaining preventions included disruptions to plotting by an anarchist in Bellingham, Washington, who sought to bomb a U.S. Coast Guard station; a plot to attack an Islamic center in Pinellis Park, Florida; and a plot by prison-originated, Muslim convert group to attack U.S. military, Jewish, and Israeli targets in the greater Los Angeles area. In addition, three preventions involved individuals who sought to provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, for attacks within the United States.
Whereas the violent global jihadist movement manifested itself primarily in terrorism preventions in the United States from 2002 through 2005, internationally the movement claimed major attacks against U.S. and Western targets that resulted in American casualties. Most of these incidents were perpetrated by regional jihadist groups operating in primarily Muslim countries, and included attacks committed by Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiya and al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula. The coordinated suicide bombing of London’s mass transit system by homegrown jihadists, however, brought the violent jihadist movement and the tactic of suicide bombing to a major European capital.
In addition to these incidents and preventions, the years 2002 through 2005 saw the resolutions to high-profile prosecutions in the fight against terrorism. These included the October 4, 2002, sentencing of John Walker Lindh to 20-years in prison for conspiring with the Taliban to kill U.S. citizens; the January 30, 2003, sentencing of Richard Colvin Reid to life in prison for attempting to bomb a transcontinental flight using a shoe bomb; the December 2003 sentencings of the Lackawanna Six terror cell members, who received prison terms ranging from seven to 10 years for providing material support or resources to al-Qa’ida; the sentencings in 2003 and 2004 of members of a Portland terrorist cell, who received prison terms ranging from three to 18 years for plotting to provide assistance to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in fighting against U.S. troops in Afghanistan; the September 29, 2004, sentencing inYemeni court of six individuals for their roles in the USS Cole bombing, two of whom received the death penalty; the April 6, 2005, sentencing of Matthew Hale, leader of the white supremacist Creativity Movement, to 40 years in prison for solicitation of violence and obstruction of justice; the July 18, 2005, sentencing of Eric Robert Rudolph to life in prison for perpetrating several bombings, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia; the April 26, 2005, sentencing of Ali Al-Timimi to life in prison for encouraging others to receive military training from the designated foreign terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan; and the August 30, 2005, sentencing of white supremacist Sean Michael Gillespie to 39 years for the synagogue firebombing in Oklahoma City.
FBI counterterrorism initiatives since the 9/11 terrorist attack have focused on preventing future attacks through the timely gathering, analysis, and dissemination of information; the facilitation of appropriate sharing of terrorism-related information between federal, state, and local partners; and the advancement of intelligence and law enforcement partnerships worldwide. FBI and U.S. counterterrorism organizational changes from 2002 through 2005 include the creation of the National Joint Terrorism Task Force; the establishment of the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the consolidation of government terrorist watch lists into the Terrorist Screening Center; the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and the restructuring of the U.S. Intelligence Community under the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These and other federal initiatives are discussed in greater detail in the concluding In Focus retrospective of the FBI’s counterterrorism program.
2002 In Review
The FBI recorded seven domestic terrorist incidents, one international terrorist incident, and one terrorism prevention in 2002. The seven domestic terrorism incidents included a string of attacks over a period of several months claimed by special interest movements. These attacks are attributed either solely to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an extremist environmental movement active in the United States during the past 20 years, or jointly to the ELF and the Animal Liberation Front, an extremist animal rights movement that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks since 1987. The international terrorist incident involved fatal shootings at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport.
In the one terrorism prevention, law enforcement in Florida exposed a plot to attack Islamic facilities in the United States in response to international events, including the September 11 attacks.
Two deaths resulted from terrorist activity carried out in the United States in 2002.
A major international terrorist incident during 2002 involved the October 12 bombing of the Kuta Beach nightclub area on Bali, Indonesia. The attack, carried out by the Jemaah Islamiya, a terrorist organization active in Southeast Asia, resulted in 202 deaths, including those of seven Americans.
Terrorist Incidents
March 2002 – November 2002
Vandalism and Arson
Erie, Harborcreek, and Warren, Pennsylvania
(Six acts of Domestic Terrorism)
Between March 2002 and November 2002, a series of animal rights and ecoterrorism incidents occurred in Erie, Harborcreek, and Warren, Pennsylvania. On March 18, 2002, Pennsylvania State Police discovered heavy equipment used to clear trees at a construction site in Erie, Pennsylvania, spray painted with the statements “ELF, in the protection of mother earth,” and “Stop Deforestation.” On March 24, 2002, police responded to the same construction site, where a large hydraulic crane had been set on fire, causing approximately $500,000 in damage. A facsimile, purportedly from ELF, claimed responsibility for the arson and vandalism. ELF also claimed responsibility for an August 11, 2002, arson on the U.S. Forestry Scientific Laboratory in Warren, Pennsylvania. In separate incidents in May and September 2002, unknown subjects released approximately 250 mink from a fur farm in Harborcreek, Pennsylvania. On November 26, 2002, the barn on the same Harborcreek fur farm was destroyed by arson. On the ELF Web site, ELF and ALF jointly claimed responsibility for these mink releases and the arson. On August 11, 2002, unknown individuals committed arson on the U.S. Forestry Scientific Laboratory in Warren, Pennsylvania.
In separate incidents in May and September 2002, unknown subjects released approximately 250 mink from a fur farm in Harborcreek, Pennsylvania. On November 26, 2002, the barn on the same Harborcreek fur farm was destroyed by arson. On the ELF Web site, ELF and ALF jointly claimed responsibility for these mink releases and the arson. On August 11, 2002, unknown individuals committed arson on the U.S. Forestry Scientific Laboratory in Warren, Pennsylvania.
July 4, 2002
Attack on El Al Ticket Counter in Los Angeles International Airport
Los Angeles, California
(One act of International Terrorism)
On July 4, 2002, Hesham Mohamed Ali Hedayat began shooting randomly while standing in line at the ticket counter of El Al Israeli National Airlines at the Los Angeles International Airport. During the attack, an El Al ticketing agent and a bystander were killed. Hedayat was subsequently killed by an El Al security officer. A worldwide investigation determined that Hadayat’s religious and political beliefs were the primary motivation for the attack, and not personal revenge. Following these investigative findings, this case was officially designated as an act of international terrorism.
August-October 2002
Vandalism and Destruction of Property
Henrico County, Virginia
Goochland County, Virginia
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
During the period of August–November 2002, Aaron L. Linas, John B. Wade, and Adam V. Blackwell carried out several acts of vandalism and destruction of private property, in apparent acts of environmental terrorism. Many of these acts were attributed to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).
On several days in August 2002, the individuals damaged 12 construction vehicles at a construction site in Goochland, Virginia, by pouring sugar into the gas tanks. The individuals also vandalized two homes under construction in the area, writing the word “sprawl” on one of the homes.
In September 2002, the individuals vandalized construction vehicles in Henrico County, Virginia, and attempted to burn a backhoe and construction crane. On September 28, 2002, 25 sport utility vehicles (SUVs) were damaged at an Henrico County Ford Dealership, including the etching of the letters “ELF” and “SUV” into some of the vehicles. Also in September, vandalism occurred at two fast food restaurants. A Jeep Liberty was also damaged, and the vandals left a note on the vehicle stating “SUVs are killing the world” and “Earth Liberation Front.”
In October of 2002, vandals claiming to be part of ELF apparently used an axe to damage three SUVs parked in the River Lake Colony subdivision of Henrico County, Virginia. Notes were left on all of the vehicles claiming the attack was an effort to raise environmental and political awareness.
Linas, Wade, and Blackwell pled guilty to conspiracy to commit these acts and were subsequently convicted and sentenced to three years and six months, three years and one month, and 10 months in federal prison, respectively, and ordered to divide the total restitution payment of $204,021.86 between them.
Terrorist Preventions
August 22, 2002
Planned Attack against Islamic Center of Pinellas County
Pinellas Park, Florida
(Prevention of one act of Domestic Terrorism)
On August 22, 2002, police in Pinellas County, Florida, responding to a domestic dispute detained Robert J. Goldstein after finding numerous weapons and explosives and a “mission statement” threatening to attack Islamic facilities in the United States. Goldstein was later arrested and charged with weapons violations and an attempt to destroy property. Michael Wallace Hardee, Samuel V. Shannahan III, and Goldstein’s wife, Kristi Goldstein, were also arrested and charged in connection with the plot. An investigation revealed that the intended target of Goldstein’s planned attack was the Islamic Center of Pinellas County, in Pinellas Park, Florida, and that the attack had been planned to coincide with the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Investigators also determined that Goldstein intended to target the Islamic Center in perceived retaliation for Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel. The four pled guilty in the Middle District of Florida to their roles in the plotting, and in 2003 received federal prison sentences ranging from three years to Robert Goldstein’s 12 years and seven months.
Significant Events
January 19, 2002
Kathleen Ann Soliah Sentenced.
On January 19, 2002, Kathleen Ann Soliah was sentenced to two consecutive 10 years to life terms for her role in a 1975 car bombing plot associated with the Symbionese Liberation Army. On October 31, 2001, Soliah pled guilty to two counts related to the car bombing plot. Soliah remained a fugitive for 23 years until her arrest on June 16, 1999, when she was living under the alias Sara Jane Olsen.
March 14, 2002
Appeal Denied in the Pan Am 103 Bombing Case.
On March 14, 2002, an appeal filed by Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, seeking to overturn his conviction of bombing Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was denied. Al-Megrahi had filed the appeal at the Scottish Court of Appeal in Camp Zeist, The Netherlands. Al-Megrahi was convicted on January 31, 2001, for the 1988 bombing, which killed the 259 passengers of the flight and 11 individuals on the ground. Al-Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.
June 15, 2002
Donald Rudolph Sentenced for 1999 Propane Plot.
On June 15, 2002, Donald Rudolph was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a plot to destroy a propane storage facility near Elk Grove, California. Rudolph had pled guilty on January 19, 2001, to withholding knowledge of a conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction in connection with the propane plot.
The plot to attack the propane storage facility was disrupted on December 3, 1999, when members of the Sacramento Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles. Patterson, Kiles, and Rudolph were associated with an antigovernment group active in the central region of the state. When arrested, Patterson and Kiles were in possession of a detonation cord, blasting caps, grenade hulls, and various chemicals—including ammonium nitrate—and numerous weapons. Patterson and Kiles were convicted in May 2002 for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to use a destructive device.
October 12, 2002
Nightclub Bombing
Bali, Indonesia
On October 12, 2002, three bombs, including a large vehicle bomb and a possible suicide bomber, devastated a nightclub area at Kuta Beach on the Indonesian island of Bali. The blasts killed 202 people, including seven Americans, and injured as many as 350. Most of those killed and injured were foreign tourists. This bombing has been attributed to members of the Jemaah Islamiya (JI) terrorist organization, a Southeast Asian-based terrorist network with links to al-Qa’ida, which allegedly helped finance the attack. The Bali bombing may have been carried out in response to audiotaped appeals from al-Qa’ida leader Usama Bin Ladin and his senior deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri broadcast on the al-Jazeera network beginning on October 6, 2002, that urged renewed attacks on U.S. and Western interests.
The FBI joined several other international antiterror agencies to assist Indonesia in the investigation of the attack. The investigation has yielded approximately 30 convictions overseas; including three suspects sentenced to death after being convicted of planning and carrying out the bombing. Notable among the convictions is Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who is suspected of being the spiritual leader of JI. Bashir was sentenced in March 2003 to 30 months in prison for his part in the criminal conspiracy leading to the attack, although he was cleared of charges of planning a terrorist attack.
Investigators believe JI militants Noordin Mohammad Top and bomb-maker Azahari Husin were the masterminds behind the Bali nightclub attacks and several other Southeast Asian terrorist attacks. Husin was killed by Indonesian police during a shootout on November 9, 2005, in East Java, Indonesia. Top remained a fugitive at the end of 2005.
On October 23, 2002, President George W. Bush designated JI as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order 13224. Investigation into the Bali bombing is ongoing.
June 21, 2002
Two Smugglers Convicted in Terror Financing Case
On June 21, 2002, Mohamad Hammoud and Chawki Hammoud were convicted for their roles in a Charlotte, North Carolina-based, cigarette smuggling ring with ties to terrorism financing. Both men were convicted of cigarette smuggling, money laundering, racketeering, and credit card fraud. Mohamad Hammoud was also convicted of providing financial support to Hizballah, a designated foreign terrorist organization believed to have received financing through Hammoud’s smuggling enterprise. Chawki Hammoud was not found guilty of Hizballah ties.
June 21, 2002
FBI Fly Team Established
On June 21, 2002, FBI Director Mueller announced the creation of the Fly Team in the Counterterrorism Division to enhance the Bureau’s capabilities in the areas of counterterrorism and intelligence collection. The Fly Team deploys rapidly and proactively worldwide on missions to identify and prevent acts of terrorism, respond to crisis incidents, and pursue the arrests and prosecutions of terrorists who have engaged in or aided and abetted those who engaged in acts of terrorism.
July 2002
Creation of National Joint Terrorism Task Force
In July of 2002, the National Joint Terrorism Task Force (NJTTF) was created by order of the Director of the FBI. The NJTTF, staffed by representatives from 40 federal, state, and local agencies, is tasked with coordinating the flow of information between its participating entities and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) located in FBI field offices and resident agencies across the country.
October 4, 2002
John Walker Lindh Sentenced
On October 4, 2002, U.S. citizen John Walker Lindh was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in July to terrorism charges related to his association with the Taliban in Afghanistan. In February, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Lindh on 10 counts, charging him as an al-Qa’ida-trained terrorist who conspired with the Taliban to kill U.S. citizens. In addition to criminal charges that had previously been levied against Lindh, the indictment added charges of conspiracy to contribute services to al-Qa’ida, contributing services to al-Qa’ida, conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban, and weapons charges.
November 25, 2002
Signing of the Homeland Security Act of 2002
On November 25, 2002, President Bush signed House Resolution 5005, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, officially establishing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The act combined various government agencies dealing with transportation, border, and other security issues from the U.S. Departments of Justice, Defense, Treasury, and Commerce into a single cabinet department, consolidating the U.S. government’s homeland security efforts.
2003 In Review
In 2003, the FBI recorded six terrorist incidents and five terrorism preventions. Domestic terrorists, specifically animal rights and environmental extremists, were responsible for each of the six incidents. Three of the incidents were perpetrated by followers of the Earth Liberation Front extremist movement and involved acts of arson or vandalism and destruction of property. The other three incidents were perpetrated by extremists within the animal rights movement, and included and act of vandalism claimed by the Animal Liberation Front, and two bombings at businesses affiliated with Huntingdon Life Sciences, a frequent target of the extreme animal rights movement.
Each of the five preventions involved domestic terrorist organizations or extremists. These included a white supremacist in Pennsylvania, who planned attacks against abortion clinics and minority targets; a constitutionalist and tax protestor in Idaho, who attempted to arrange for the murders of federal persons involved in a tax evasion case against him; an individual in Texas associated with antigovernment militia members, who was found in possession of heavy weaponry, sodium cyanide, and plans to weaponize sodium cyanide; an anarchist, who planned to bomb a U.S. Coast Guard; and an anti-abortion extremist in Florida, who planned to bomb abortion clinics.
No deaths or serious injuries resulted from terrorist activity carried out in the United States in 2003.
Major international terrorist incidents involving U.S. casualties included two attacks stemming from the violent global jihadist movement. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, al-Qa’ida operatives conducted coordinated assaults on three residential compounds housing Western workers. Nine of the 35 people killed in the attack were Americans. In addition, Jemaah Islamiya bombed the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. The attack resulted in 11 fatalities and 144 injuries, including injuries to two U.S. citizens.
Terrorist Incidents
January 1, 2003
Arson
Girard, Pennsylvania
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On January 1, 2003, an unknown individual(s) set two pickup trucks and one sport utility vehicle on fire at a car dealership in Girard, Pennsylvania, causing $96,000 in damages. This arson followed the series of environmental and animal rights extremist incidents in northwest Pennsylvania discussed in the preceding 2002 terrorist incidents section. ELF claimed responsibility for the arson.
March 3, 2003
Vandalism
Chico, California.
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On March 3, 2003, an unknown number of individuals placed two one-gallon jugs filled with kerosene near a McDonald’s restaurant in Chico, California, and vandalized the restaurant with graffiti. The graffiti included statements such as “Animal Liberation Front,” “Meat is Murder,” and “Species Equality.” Two communiques were discovered claiming responsibility for the attack. Robert Brooks and Harjit Singh Gill were convicted in the Eastern District of California for making false statements to a grand jury in connection with the attack, and, in June 2005, received sentences of a $500 fine and 36 months probation, respectively.
August 1, 2003
September 19, 2003
Arson
San Diego, California.
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On August 1, 2003, the San Diego Fire Department and San Diego Police Department responded to an arson fire at the Garden Condominium, a five-story, 206-unit condominium complex under construction in the University Town Center area of San Diego. The fire caused an estimated $20 million in damages to the building and surrounding construction equipment. Investigators found graffiti at the site implicating Earth Liberation Front (ELF) extremists with the incident, including the message “IF YOU BUILD IT – WE WILL BURN IT. THE ELF’S ARE MAD.
On September 19, 2003, two other new home sites were also set on fire, with similar messages left at the scene. The fires destroyed four homes and damaged two others, causing an estimated loss of $3 million. The August 1 and September 19 arson incidents remain under investigation.
May 12, 2003
Bombings of Residential Compounds
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia On the evening of May 12, 2003, al-Qa’ida operatives assaulted three residential compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that house Western guest workers. At least fifteen assailants in six vehicles, two vehicles at each location participated in the attacks against the Al-Hamra Oasis Village, Jedawal compound, and Vinnell Company compound located in suburban Riyadh. After breaching manned security barriers at two of the three sites, the attackers detonated vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) in the compounds, killing 35 people, including nine Americans, and injuring nearly 200 others. This assault followed a string of al-Qa’ida operations, including the August 7, 1998, East African embassy bombings; the October 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen; the September 11, 2001, attack in the United States; and attacks on November 28, 2002, carried out against primarily Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya, involving simultaneous attacks against multiple targets. The May 12 attack reflected a high degree of planning, pre-operational surveillance, and coordination among teams—traditional hallmarks of al-Qa’ida operations. It also reflected a highly refined approach to suicide bombings that may have incorporated lessons learned from the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and other attacks. Preliminary investigation indicates that operatives traveling in lead vehicles attacked guards at each of the sites with small arms fire and hand grenades to quickly breach gates and other security measures to gain access to the compounds. Once inside the compounds, assailants may also have fired weapons to draw the attention of residents to window areas to maximize casualties. The FBI and foreign partners have identified approximately 30 individuals thought to be involved in the planning and execution of the attack. Nearly all of these individuals have been killed or arrested by Saudi security forces.
August 5, 2003
Bombing of JW Marriott Hotel
Jakarta, Indonesia On the afternoon of August 5, 2003, a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) exploded in front of the JW Marriott Hotel located in Mega Kuningan, South Jakarta, Indonesia. The blast killed 11 people, not including the suicide bomber, and injured 144 others, including two U.S. citizens. The blast caused extensive damage to the hotel and an adjacent office building. Investigation by the Indonesian National Police, the Australian Federal Police, and the FBI traced responsibility for the bombing to Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a transnational Southeast Asian terrorist organization based in Indonesia with close links to al-Qa’ida, which helped to finance the bombing. The international investigation has identified over 30 individuals involved in the conspiracy to bomb the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Witness testimony has identified Noordin Mohammed Top as the leader of the operation and Dr. Azahari Husin as the bombmaker. Approximately 30 of the conspirators have been arrested, tried, and convicted in Indonesian courts and have received prison sentences ranging from three to 14 years. Husin was killed by Indonesian police during a shootout on November 9, 2005, in East Java, Indonesia. Top remained a fugitive at the end of 2005. The investigation into the bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta is ongoing.
August 22, 2003
Vandalism and Destruction of Property
West Covina, California.
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On August 22, 2003, individuals associated with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) carried out acts of vandalism in the Los Angeles, California, area, damaging roughly 125 vehicles and one commercial building. Much of the damage was caused by spray-painted graffiti, although in two cases, individuals set fire to sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Some of the graffiti associated SUVs with “terrorism.” On April 18, 2005, William Jensen Cottrell was sentenced to eight years and four months in federal prison and fined $3.5 million for the incident. Two other suspects in the attack—Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe—remained at large at the end of 2005.
August 28, 2003
Bombing
Emeryville, California
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On August 28, 2003, an improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated near the front door of Chiron Life Science Center in Emeryville, California, causing damage to the building. A second device detonated in another Chiron building shortly after first responders arrived at the scene, also damaging the building and the surrounding area. Chiron had previously received harassing e-mails, telephone calls, and faxes, and some Chiron employees had been harassed at their residences. Chiron, an animal testing laboratory, is associated with Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS). HLS, and individuals and companies associated with it, have regularly been targeted by animal rights extremists. Daniel Andreas San Diego is suspected of having carried out the bombing and remained a fugitive at the end of 2005.
September 26, 2003
Bombing
Pleasanton, California.
(One act of Domestic Terrorism)
On September 26, 2003, an improvised explosive device was detonated at Shaklee Corporation in Pleasanton, California. Shaklee Corporation is a subsidiary of Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., which has been targeted by animal rights extremists in the past. Daniel Andreas San Diego is suspected of having carried out this bombing and the August 28, 2003, bombing at Chiron Life Science Center. San Diego remained a fugitive at the end of 2005.
Terrorist Preventions
February 13, 2003
Planned Attacks on Abortion Clinics and Minority Targets
Amwell Township, Pennsylvania.
(Prevention of one act of Domestic Terrorism)
On February 13, 2003, law enforcement officials arrested David Wayne Hull, a long-time member and self-professed leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Hull had been exploding pipe bombs on his property in Amwell Township, Pennsylvania, had built and detonated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during KKK events, and was recorded instructing individuals on how to place IEDs to cause maximum damage. Hull had also made threats against minorities and abortion clinics. Hull was indicted in March 2003 for firearms charges, witness tampering, and instructing persons on procedures for creating destructive devices. A jury in the Western District of Pennsylvania convicted Hull on seven counts of the ten-count indictment. On February 25, 2005, Hull was sentenced to 12 years in prison, followed by three years of probation.
April 4, 2003
Planned Murder Plots against Federal Judge, AUSA, and IRS Agent
Grangeville, Idaho
(Prevention of one act of Domestic Terrorism)
On April 4, 2003, the FBI arrested David Roland Hinkson, a constitutionalist and tax protestor, for attempting to arrange the murders of a federal judge, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and an IRS Agent whom he blamed for his legal problems regarding a tax evasion case against him. Between December 2002 and March 2003, Hinkson offered two individuals $10,000 for committing all three murders. On January 27, 2005, Hinkson was found guilty on three counts of solicitation to commit murder after a three week jury trial in Boise, Idaho. On June 3, 2005, Hinkson was sentenced to 43 years in federal prison.
April 10, 2003
Planned Cyanide Attack
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appropriate to not make false type assumptions like in scripting languages :) ). Nim provides metaprogramming capabilities on par with Lisp and syntax extension capabilities on par with… TBH I don’t know any language that would match here. Nim compiles its code to C, C++, and JavaScript, which covered our needs, so all those features looked really sweet. However like with all new technologies there were scary risk factors that had to be evaluated very thoroughly.
Compiler bugs. Lots of bugs that either needed to be worked around or fixed. What if the core maintainers will not fix those for us timely? How hard would it be to fix those ourselves. And if there are some bugs that can’t be fixed in a timely manner, how hard would it be to workaround those? And Nim has successfully passed that evaluation. 2 simple reasons:
Nim compiler codebase is rather concise and comprehendable for the most part, despite highly sophisticated stuff it does. Overtime we have contributed quite a bunch of fixes and features. Nim allows you inline target backend code (be it C or JavaScript) right into the Nim source code. So we are always confident that neither of Nim bugs shall prevent us from getting to the point, we always can fallback to C where needed.
Community and available third-party packages. What if there’s no package available in Nim that we suddenly need, while in a mainstream language you can easily find dozens of libraries that do the same thing. Can we implement the needed packages on our own, and if not, how easy it is to bind to a lib from a foreign ecosystem? And the answer is YES again.
Productivity that the language offers is extremely high, the needed parts can be reinvented much faster than, say in C++ or a typeless scripting language. It turned out to be very easy to bind to existing C/C++/JS code, be it in a static lib, dynamic lib, C header file, or just copypaste the needed code and inline it, no strings attached.
So after all risks considered, we have started, there were huge wins and small losses, and I still think that the choice was right, and I’m not leaving Nim anytime soon. It is simply brilliant.
Technical Insights of the Game
For those interested in what libraries we are using. There are around 60 direct and indirect dependencies in the client and around 20 dependencies in the server. Thankfully, nimble package manager installs those with a single command. And Travis makes sure that at least our packages are working properly with the actively developed ecosystem. The core of the game is nimx and rod. There are around 15 other libraries that we developed along the run, such as jsbind, preferences, nimongo, nimsl, and others.
I’ve been asked a question about Nim JS backend, whether it is good or not. And the answer is yes, it is pretty darn good (especially with closure compiler), and we’re using it for our tools, but not the game itself. At some point we had to switch from JS to Emscripten, just because Asm.js is much faster, and thanks to Nim the transition went pretty quickly. Hopefully we shall soon support WebAsm target as well.
To Conclude
As it is likely clear from the post Nim turned out to be a great language for any kind of software development, be it commercial production grade software, or a couple-of-lines one shot script, not to mention the huge amount of fun you get when using it. It is very easy to do early prototypes. As you may know prototyping involves chaotic moving of chunks of code around, copy-pasting, changing the semantics of your types (e.g. I though it should be immutable, but now it looks like it has to be mutable), so at the prototyping stage you want to use some low friction language like, say Python or JS. And Nim also falls into this category. No need to fight the compiler to prove anything. But when the prototyping is done, the code is cleaned, you’re done. No need to port it to lower level language because everything you can optimize in C, you can do in Nim.
So hopefully I have answered some of the main questions. If not, ping me on the #nim IRC channel, or Twitter, will be happy to elaborate, and maybe even post more articles here, who knows :).On Silver Surfer's Day, a UK academic has blamed unnecessarily complicated user interfaces for putting older people off joining the Government-backed Race Online.
According to Mike Bradley, senior lecturer in product design and engineering at Middlesex University, efforts to be more inclusive are being undermined by software and hardware design that is exclusively targeted at younger users.
The idea of looking after your user and understanding where they start from and allowing them to improve skills before you throw the big, heavy stuff at them is probably best shown in gaming
We caught up with Bradley, who is working on projects to design simpler interfaces, to find out why the current icon-based software interfaces are alienating older users.
Q. Is modern technology really any more exclusive than earlier generations for older people?
A.The older graphical user interfaces were, compared to today, a lot simpler. There was a lot less going on, the icons were simpler – with some designed to work in black and white, they tended to be more obvious.
Also, if you look at the number of icons on each package and compare, say, Microsoft Word today to the first incarnation of Word, there's about three times as many icons. If you're a novice, that's much more difficult to get your head around.
For people like us who have grown up with computers, the change has been easy, it's incremental. But the developments have skewed most mainstream software packages towards the expert user. If you're designing an application you get feedback from customers who say – “I'd like this feature or that feature” and they stick it in, evolving it towards the needs of their current customers.
It's good business practice, but the net effect is that packages get more complex. Unless there's a recognition and a reset they will get progressively more difficult for novices to master.
Q. Is there an argument for a tiered approach - one package with several interfaces?
A. It's been talked about in the research community, the idea of progressive disclosure, where you're not going to show the full functionality to people from the off, but you allow them to discover the basic and then move onto an intermediate level.
I've not seen a good implementation of that in software yet. The idea of looking after your user and understanding where they start from and allowing them to improve skills before you throw the big, heavy stuff at them is probably best shown in gaming.
Q. Do developers of technologies such as smartphones take too much knowledge for granted?
A. They certainly do. In our research, we've been getting older people to use things like the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab. With both Apple and Android – they are much easier than trying to learn to use a PC, but you do get to a point where you have to understand iconography, and work quite laterally to complete tasks.No, it’s not a dream. Low carb cereal really does exist! This easy keto Cinnamon Crunch Cereal is a delicious grain free and sugar free breakfast option. Perfect for busy mornings. Instructional video included.
It was time to give this well loved low carb cereal recipe an update. This post was first published in December 2o13 but I decided it was time to update the recipe, the photos, and even add a video to show you just how easy it is to make.
It’s no secret that diet, exercise and fitness are very important to me. It’s truly the whole reason for this blog. I love being creative in the kitchen and playing around with my ingredients, certainly. But more than that, I love knowing that my recipes are helping those of you on a weight-loss or health journey find your love of food again. Because food is fuel, but it’s also happiness and comfort. A healthy diet shouldn’t be about deprivation because that inevitably leads to failure. We are so much more likely to succeed when we love what we eat.
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Giving up cereal on a keto diet can be difficult for a lot of people. I get that, it’s a convenience food most of us grew up with. There’s nothing easier than pouring some cereal out of a box, adding some milk, and going on your merry way.
Well, you really don’t have to give that up at all. This low carb Cinnamon Crunch cereal proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it’s remarkably easy to make too. Perhaps not quite as easy as pouring your cereal from a box but it’s close.
How To Make Low Carb Cereal
This easy cinnamon crunch has been a reader favorite for a long time and with good reason. You only need 5 simple ingredients:
Almond flour Shredded coconut or flax seed meal An erythritol based sweetener Cinnamon Butter
The recipe takes no eggs, which I know many people appreciate. It relies entirely on the butter, sweetener, and almond flour to set and crisp up. The sweetener is important here as erythritol based sweeteners, like Swerve, are best for a truly crispy cereal.
You could cut it into nice little squares if you so choose, but that’s an extra and unnecessary step, in my opinion. You can simply break the cereal into bite sized pieces with your hands.
But you absolutely must make sure to let the cereal cool completely before breaking it up. When you first take it out of the oven, it will be quite soft and it only becomes crispy as it cools.
Can you have cereal on a low carb diet?
Well now you can! You actually have a lot more options than you think. I’ve made quite a number of keto cereal and granola recipes and they are all delicious.
When it comes to crunchy keto cereal, you can make it with nuts, pork rinds, coconut, nut butter, nut flour, sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, chia seeds, and so on. Some recipes require eggs to help bind the the cereal together, and others don’t. You can make them into flakes or just leave them chunky like granola. You can even make low carb hot cereal for a comforting breakfast on a cold day.
There are so many wonderful options and they are usually quite easy to make. And many of them can be stored for up to a few weeks without issue. I like to store mine in glass mason jars on the counter and my kids love being able to pour themselves a bowl of low carb cereal in the mornings.
This is keto convenience food at its finest.
Want more delicious low carb cereal recipes?
Peanut Butter Power Granola
Chocolate and Orange Spiced Granola
Banana Nut Hemp Seed Cereal
Coconut Cacao Nib Granola
Chocolate Crunch Cereal
Breakfast Crunch CerealAt 19, Atlanta upstart Lil Yachty is marching into the most uncertain chapter of his career. The self-proclaimed “King of Teens” is up against the increasingly irrelevant barometer of success—the debut album. His first LP, Teenage Emotions (out today) will be dissected critically, commercially, and culturally. But measuring Yachty’s artistic credibility against the benchmark of a debut album is almost beside the point, given how Yachty has positioned himself.
In a December interview with the New York Times Yachty explained that “I’m not a rapper, I’m an artist. And I’m more than an artist. I’m a brand.” In an episode of Everyday Struggle (and on Twitter), Lil Yachty has claimed to be a shrewd businessman, which might seem antithetical to the inclusive and optimistic pop music he is very good at making.
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Yachty heeded the words of Wu-Tang Financial and diversified his bonds. He has deals with Sprite and Target, both of which have resulted in memorable collaborative commercials, with LeBron James and Carly Rae Jepsen, respectively. Nautica saw something in his lightning rod existence and invited him aboard as a creative designer to revive the brand for a new generation. And last year he modeled for Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show at Madison Square Garden. He gifted D.R.A.M. and Kyle top 5 Hot 100 singles with “Broccoli” and “iSpy.” Chance the Rapper bestowed Lil Boat with the honor of his favorite verse on the Grammy-Award-winning album Coloring Book.
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With this success comes scrutiny. Yachty’s become the symbol for everything that’s wrong with the latest generation of rap, according to various dusty rap talking heads. It isn’t a position that Yachty has tried to evade; if anything he’s embraced it, and used it to use advantage to build buzz. (He didn’t have to appear on Everyday Struggle, after all.) For his lack of familiarity with rap history—he told Billboard he couldn’t name five Tupac or Biggie song, and later called the Notorious B.I.G. “overrated”—he’s been branded the rap antichrist by some critics and fans.
All of this applies a certain kind of pressure to Teenage Emotions to show and prove his talent. But at the same time, it doesn’t matter.
2017 is not 1997. The classic album is still a signifier of greatness and relevance for some, but it doesn’t have shit to do with Yachty’s popularity or staying power—especially since he shrugs off the title of rapper. And what’s more, debuts don’t matter like they used to. A host of rappers from the last decade—J. Cole, Migos, Mac Miller, Wale—have bounced back from critical or commercially disappointing debuts. In some ways, if the album is hated by critics, it reinforces Yachty’s brand. He can’t lose.
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So, how is the music? Teenage Emotions reflects the fragmented, hormonal chaos of one’s formative years, when pubescent feelings run amok. Across 21 tracks Yachty is joyous, horny, angry, grateful, paranoid, and a bunch of other things, sometimes all in a single track. In other words, it’s of a piece with the larger Lil Yachty narrative.
If you had to box it up, Teenage Emotions alternates between three styles: Trap Yachty (“Peek-A-Boo,” “X Men”), Pop Yachty (“Forever Young,” “Lady In Yellow,” “Bring It Back”), and Emo Yachty (“Like a Star,” “All You Had to Say,” “Running With a Ghost”). They are all real and sincere in their own right, and speak to the fact that the Lil Yachty brand appeals to disparate group of fans who have come to the Lil Boat show in different ways. As cynical as it may sound, Teenage Emotions is another asset in Lil Yachty’s portfolio. It is an outcast marketing being an outcast to other outcasts. It doesn’t delegitimize the art, because Yachty has worn his intentions on his sleeve from the start. And when you hear his Auto-Tuned warble, you know he means it.
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The paradox of the Yachty brand is that he really is a voice for the underrepresented, and you can tell because of all the people he pisses off. In this writer's opinion, Teenage Emotions may prove to be Man on the Moon: End of Day for a new generation. But like him or not, Yachty in his own unorthodox way has put hip-hop culture in a choke-hold. He doesn’t show any signs of relinquishing his grip.JAMIE HEASLIP PLAYED the full 80 minutes of all three of Ireland’s November Tests, captaining the side against Samoa.
The 29-year-old is vice-captain for the team and rated as one of the most important players within the set up. He has won Heineken Cups, a Grand Slam and gone on two Lions tours. Despite clearly being an excellent rugby player, there are still doubters.
Much of the criticism of Heaslip in recent years has quite probably been based on his off the pitch activities, which is hard to understand. Rugby players should be judged on what they do during games, and Heaslip rarely lets his teams down in that regard.
We’ve taken a detailed look at Heaslip’s performance for Ireland against the All Blacks on Sunday to see exactly what he contributes to this Ireland team.
Defence
This is an area where Heaslip nearly always excels. The No. 8 is exceptionally fit and very often ends games as Ireland’s leading tackler. The clash against New Zealand was one of those occasions, as Heaslip completed 24 tackles.
He did make a poor start in terms of tackling, missing Aaron Cruden with his first attempt in the sixth minute and allowing the out-half to break Ireland’s line. It was a case of not getting his feet close enough to the All Black before attempting the tackle and that meant he couldn’t use his shoulder (below).
Thereafter, Heaslip’s defensive input was superb. He didn’t make too many dominant tackles [knocking attackers backwards] but the sheer number of them was hugely impressive. The majority were tackles around the upper body of the All Blacks forwards, wrestling them to ground.
There were also a number of low tackles around the ankles of the stronger ball carriers. Heaslip was noticeable in those closing minutes as Ireland tried in vain to keep the All Blacks out, particularly in how he was one of the few players to remain aggressive in terms of line speed.
The 29-year-old’s fitness certainly helped in that regard, and is generally one of the reasons he is so prominent in defence.
Turnovers
Heaslip made one clean steal at the breakdown against the All Blacks and contributed greatly to two other turnovers. The first of those occasions came in the ninth minute, when he bounced back onto his feet after making a tackle on Israel Dagg.
The arrow in the screen grab above signifies where the ruck would normally take place in an instance like this. You can see Dagg trying to present the ball from the position he’s been tackled by Heaslip, but in the meantime, the No. 8 has bounced back off the ground and driven over the ball.
Heaslip, circled at the bottom of the new ruck, has gone off his feet, but Nigel Owens doesn’t see it as deliberate and Ireland make the turnover. Even when Heaslip doesn’t manage to help Ireland make turnovers, he is a real nuisance at the breakdown in defence. He’s always looking to drag attackers in, or use his feet to slow the ball down [as below].
This may seem like a meaningless action, but it frustrates the opposition and slows their possession down slightly. In the example above, Heaslip had had an effort at turning over the ball with his hands, got driven off it and then competed with his feet. It slowed down good All Blacks possession and Ireland were able to re-organise in defence.
Heaslip made a clean steal in defence in the 55th minute, with the away team looking threatening. It demonstrated his ability to bounce off the deck once again, as he assisted in a tackle then went back for the ball.
It’s quite rare to see a clean turnover at the breakdown nowadays, with most attackers choosing to hang on and concede the penalty, so credit to Heaslip for this one [below].
Heaslip contributed to another of Ireland’s turnovers earlier in the game, when Gordon D’Arcy wrapped up Aaron Smith and the No. 8 piled into to create the choke tackle. This example again demonstrates Heaslip’s intelligence as a player.
As you can see in the screen grab below, Heaslip is grabbing and holding up players who aren’t even on the ball. He’s preventing any chance the All Blacks players have of bringing the choke tackle to the ground. It’s a simple thing again, but it helps.
There were a couple of other examples of Heaslip getting close to turnovers and frustrating the All Blacks at the breakdown when they were defending. The No. 8 was something of a thorn in the side for Steve Hansen’s men in this area.
Attack
Heaslip made a total of nine carries over the course of the afternoon for Ireland. He didn’t make a huge amount of yardage in those carries, but all of them created forward momentum for his team. One of the batons used to beat Heaslip in recent seasons has been his failure to stand out in this area for Ireland, but it’s a nonsensical argument.
The majority of the ball carrying Heaslip does for Ireland is in positions like that above, close in to the rucks. It’s difficult to make line-breaks and bounce defenders off in here, simply due to the build up of bodies in front of him.
Some critics wonder why Heaslip is less visible than someone like Sean O’Brien in attack, but the No. 8 has a different role. One aspect of his duties is to maintain width for Ireland after set pieces. He is often off camera, keeping defenders occupied by holding wide positions.
It’s a thankless task and there is strong temptation to abandon it and head into the ruck area for a slice of the action. Kieran Read performs a similar role for New Zealand – holding width – but the difference is that the All Blacks move the ball out to him regularly, whereas Ireland haven’t played with width in recent years.
Against Samoa and Australia, Ireland used O’Brien to hit the ball up in midfield on first phase after line-outs, but it was Heaslip who stepped into that role twice against the All Blacks. It’s a promising development, particularly as it may eventually free up the flanker to carry the ball in later phases, when he excels.
Rucks
Heaslip is one of the top ruck specialists for Ireland, and many of the defensive strengths we highlighted above are useful in attack too. Against the All Blacks, the 29-year-old was involved in 16 attacking rucks.
Only one of those involvements was negative, coming after just 35 seconds when Heaslip was slow to the ruck and allowed Wyatt Crockett to make a turnover. That apart, the No. 8 was effective. Quite a few of his attacking rucks involved acting as guard, where he simply provided protection over the ball, but there were five excellent clear outs of opposition defenders too.
Heaslip is usually very quick to recognise any threats of a turnover against Ireland and remove the offending player. The example above highlights one of those occasions against the All Blacks. Ma’a Nonu is having an effort to steal the ball, but Heaslip is swift to remove him and Ireland retain possession.
Even when Heaslip is acting as a guard in the ruck, he is clever at involving defenders around the fringes. The screen grab below shows a typical example, where the No. 8 is dragging Cory Jane into the ruck. Again, it’s a simple thing, seemingly meaningless, but it means that Jane is slightly delayed at getting back into the defensive line.
Set piece
Heaslip was obviously involved in every single scrum in the game from his position at No. 8. He is skillful in controlling the ball at the base of the scrum and he made two pop passes to Conor Murray from that position against the All Blacks.
The Leinster man made only one catch at the line-out against New Zealand, popping the ball off the top after a clean take at the front of the line-out. He made a single lift in the entire game, on Paul O’Connell in defence, but it didn’t lead to a steal.
Overall
It may not have been spectacular from Heaslip against the All Blacks, but that is not his role for Ireland now. Instead, he was as doggedly effective as ever in contributing to one of Ireland’s best performances in recent times.The number of primary school-aged children, some as young as four, beginning to “transition” their gender is rising rapidly in the UK. The popularity of the fad appears to be clustered, with children copying others in the same schools.
Up to 80 primary school-aged children a year are now seeking help towards potentially changing their gender, the chair of Mermaids, a charity which lobbies for families who believe their children and teenagers are transgendered, has revealed.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Susie Green said that, in some cases, British children as young as four are already in the process of “transitioning” to another sex.
She also described how her organisation has observed a cluster effect across the country, with children following one and another in the same school; a school where there might be a teacher who promotes transgender ideology.
Her anecdotal evidence correlates with the results of a study by Mark Zucker at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, which found that transgenderism was more prominent and persistent among children when promoted by adults.
Researchers observed that children who saw therapists and others in authority who assume that they belong to the opposite sex can actually become more distressed, exacerbating their “gender dysphoric identity.”
Another recent study found that 70 to 80 per cent of children who report transgender feelings spontaneously lose them as they grow up.
Mrs. Green’s comments come as a primary school in the North West of England is feeling the heat over their decision to refuse to accept a request from an eight-year-old born as a girl to be treated as a boy.
“We are working with them, we are trying to resolve that but [the school] are very reluctant,” said the campaigner, who is pushing for the parents’ request to be recognised.
She said such stand-offs are now “very common” and added that a legal challenge over the issue could not be ruled out in the near future.
Despite evidence suggesting the exercise of caution might be wise, Mrs. Green is unlikely to change her stance on the matter as her own daughter has undergone a sex change, first being identified as transgendered as a four-year-old.
She argued that eight should no longer be considered a young age to begin the process of “transitioning”.
“We have got four-year-olds, five-year-olds, six-year-olds who are transitioning as parents know more about it and are more aware if they have a child who is struggling and suffering,” she said.
“You wouldn’t necessarily do anything unless it is causing distress [but] these kids are so much happier now they have been supported to live in the gender they identify with, it is a no-brainer.
“We have parents reporting back saying ‘my kid is so much happier now, they are attending school now, they are making friends now’.
“We have got families of five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds – eight isn’t particularly early.”
Mrs. Green suggested that the charity is now dealing with around 80 cases involving primary school-aged children per year, and was clear that she had seen evidence that children asking to live in another gender are themselves encouraging others to do so.
“In terms of families joining our parents’ group, this year alone we’ve had over 200 families,” she said.
“The majority of those – about 60 per cent – are teens but the rest are families of young children. It is a lot more than people realise.
“But one thing is that there is more information getting out there now and we are finding now about half the schools we are dealing with are actually accommodating and want to learn because there is more in the media and more out there.”
In August, Breitbart London revealed that police and local government in Cornwall, England are distributing a “Schools Transgender Guidance” document aimed at “empowering teachers to encourage and support” transgenderism in schools at the “earliest stages” after a four-year-old child identified as transgendered in the area.Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has reportedly reached an agreement to sell his franchise for $1.2 billion to the bidding group helmed by former New York Yankees star Derek Jeter and venture capitalist Bruce Sherman, a source told Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald.
The commissioner's office is expected to receive the purchase agreement, a product of months of negotiating, on Friday, and MLB officials will discuss the sale in owners meetings in Chicago next week.
When the sale is finalized, Sherman will serve as the "control person," effectively functioning as the managing general partner, while Jeter, the five-time World Series champion and 14-time All-Star who is believed to have contributed only $25 million of his own money toward the purchase, will handle the club's baseball and business operations. All told, their ownership group comprises about 16 investors, one of them being NBA legend Michael Jordan.
Incumbent team president David Samson and president of baseball operations Michael Hill are expected to stay with the club under the new ownership, according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today.
Loria, the much maligned former Montreal Expos owner who bought the Marlins for $158.5 million in 2002, reportedly received an offer of more than $1.3 billion in May from the bidding group fronted by Tagg Romney and Hall of Famer Tom Glavine. Jorge Mas, the Miami-born chairman of MasTec, was also interested in buying the team.The Rangers, who clinched their first division title in 11 years over the weekend, just might start making this an annual routine considering their giant financial windfall.
The Rangers, cash-strapped for years with owner Tom Hicks, have signed a 20-year extension with Fox Sports Southwest that will guarantee them $3 billion, according to three high-ranking baseball officials, two of whom have seen the contract. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the deal.
It is the highest TV package for a team that doesn't own its own channel. And yes, that's $150 million a year before even playing a game, plenty enough to re-sign ace Cliff Lee, bring in free-agent outfielder Carl Crawford, or whoever else they wish.
In comparison, the Dodgers make about $45 million a year off their TV deal with Fox.
The deal was completed just after the Rangers were sold to Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan's group in August, according to three officials. Greenberg smiled, but declined comment, when asked about the specifics of the deal.
"I think this franchise is in pretty good shape,'' says Michael Young, who's about to experience the first postseason of his career.
By Bob NightengaleWINNIPEG — The Manitoba government has released the results of an online survey showing a little more than half of respondents think marijuana shouldn’t be sold alongside alcohol.
The results were less split when it comes to the legal age to buy pot.
The poll says 60.1 per cent of respondents said 18 should be the legal age while 6.6 per cent said it should be 19 and 22.4 per cent think it should be 21.
As of Monday, 12,845 people filled out the sections of the voluntary online survey regarding marijuana legalization.
The province had begun encouraging Manitobans to fill out the survey, which also includes sections on a health care tax and balancing the budget, on Sept. 13.
When asked to agree or disagree with a recommendation that marijuana should not be sold alongside alcohol for safety reasons, 53.9 per cent agreed and 46.1 per cent disagreed.
The federal government is setting a minimum age of 18 for pot use, but many of the details are being left to the provinces, including how and where cannabis will be sold when the law takes effect next July.
Manitoba has yet to determine where pot will be available at the retail level and whether the liquor and gaming authority, or some other agency, will regulate it.
(CTV Winnipeg)Mookie Betts from Low A Greenville to High A Salem, The Red Sox have promoted second basemanfrom Low A Greenville to High A Salem, reports Salem Red Sox announcer Evan Lepler. Betts is in the Salem starting lineup for tonight's game against the Myrtle Beach Pelicans (TEX), batting sixth and playing second base.
It has been a breakout season for Betts, 20, a fifth round pick in the 2011 draft out of Overton (TN) High School. He has a solid.296/.418/.477 slash line, earning recognition as a South Atlantic League All-Star. Betts leads the league in walks with 58, and ranks in the top 10 with his.418 on-base percentage and 24 doubles. After an inconsistent April adjusting to Low A pitching, Betts had an outstanding May, hitting.356/.472/.663 and winning the SoxProspects.com Player of the Month“Explosive” Leaked Secret Israeli Cable Confirms Israeli-Saudi Coordination To Provoke War
by USJ Staff 815
Early this morning, Israeli Channel 10 news published a leaked diplomatic cable which had been sent to all Israeli ambassadors throughout the world concerning the chaotic events that unfolded over the weekend in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which began with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s unexpected resignation after he was summoned to Riyadh by his Saudi-backers, and led to the Saudis announcing that Lebanon had “declared war” against the kingdom.
The classified embassy cable, written in Hebrew, constitutes the first formal evidence proving that the Saudis and Israelis are deliberately coordinating to escalate the situation in the Middle East.
The explosive classified Israeli cable reveals the following:
On Sunday, just after Lebanese PM Hariri’s shocking resignation, Israel sent a cable to all of its embassies with the request that its diplomats do everything possible to ramp up diplomatic pressure against Hezbollah and Iran.
The cable urged support for Saudi Arabia’s war against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
The cable stressed that Iran was engaged in “regional subversion”.
Israeli diplomats were urged to appeal to the “highest officials” within their host countries to attempt to expel Hezbollah from Lebanese government and politics.
As is already well-known, the Saudi and Israeli common cause against perceived Iranian influence and expansion in places like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq of late has led the historic bitter enemies down a pragmatic path of unspoken cooperation as both seem to have placed the break up of the so-called “Shia crescent” as their primary policy goal in the region. For Israel, Hezbollah has long been its greatest foe, which Israeli leaders see as an extension of Iran’s territorial presence right up against the Jewish state’s northern border.
This is a EXPLOSIVE thread that proves how Saudi and Israel are deliberately coordinating to escalate the situation in the MidEast. https://t.co/dMe4PnkwTf — Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 6, 2017
The Israeli reporter who obtained the document is Barak Ravid, senior diplomatic correspondent for Channel 10 News. Ravid announced the following through Twitter yesterday:
I published on channel 10 a cable sent to Israeli diplomats asking to lobby for Saudis/Harir and against Hezbollah. The cable sent from the MFA in Jerusalem [Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs] to all Israeli embassies toes the Saudi line regarding the Hariri resignation.
toes the Saudi line regarding the Hariri resignation. The Israeli diplomats were instructed to demarch their host governments over the domestic political situation in Lebanon – a very rare move.
The cable said: “You need to stress that the Hariri resignation shows how dangerous Iran and Hezbollah are for Lebanon’s security.”
“Hariri’s resignation proves wrong the argument that Hezbollah participation in the government stabilizes Lebanon,” the cable added.
the cable added. The cable instructed Israeli diplomats to support Saudi Arabia over its war with the Houthis in Yemen. The cable also stressed: “The missile launch by the Houthis towards Riyadh calls for applying more pressure on Iran & Hezbollah.”
1 I published on channel 10 a cable sent to Israeli diplomats asking to lobby for SaudisHariri &against Hezbollah https://t.co/AbeLPC35GP — Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) November 6, 2017
Watch today’s Hebrew broadcast Channel 10 News report which features the Israeli diplomatic cable – the text of which is featured in Channel 10’s screenshot (below) – here.
Below is a rough translation of the classified Israeli embassy cable using Google Translate as released by Israel’s Channel 10 News:
“To the Director-General: you are requested to urgently contact the Foreign Ministry and other relevant government officials [of your host country] and emphasize that the resignation of Al-Hariri and his comments on the reasons that led him to resignillustrate once again the destructive nature of Iran and Hezbollah and their danger to the stability of Lebanon and the countries of the region. Al-Hariri’s resignation proves that the international argument that Hezbollah’s inclusion in the government is a recipe for stability is basically wrong. This artificial unity creates paralysis and the inability of local sovereign powers to make decisions that serve their national interest. It effectively turns them into hostages under physical threat and are forced to promote the interests of a foreign power – Iran – even if this may endanger the security of their country. The events in Lebanon and the launching of a ballistic missile by the signatories to the Riyadh agreement require increased pressure on Iran and Hezbollah on a range of issues from the production of ballistic missiles to regional subversion.”
Thus, as things increasingly heat up in the Middle East, it appears the anti-Iran and anti-Shia alliance of convenience between the Saudis and Israelis appears to have placed Lebanon in the cross hairs of yet another looming Israeli-Hezbollah war. And the war in Yemen will also continue to escalate – perhaps now with increasingly overt Israeli political support. According to Channel 10’s commentary (translation), “In the cable, Israeli ambassadors were also asked to convey an unusual message of support for Saudi Arabia in light of the war in which it is involved in Yemen against the Iranian-backed rebels.”
All of this this comes, perhaps not coincidentally, at the very moment ISIS is on the verge of complete annihilation (partly at the hands of Hezbollah), and as both Israel and Saudi Arabia have of late increasingly declared “red lines” concerning perceived Iranian influence across the region as well as broad Hezbollah acceptance and popularity within Lebanon.
What has both Israel and the Saudis worried is the fact that the Syrian war has strengthened Hezbollah, not weakened it. And now we have smoking gun internal evidence that Israel is quietly formalizing its unusual alliance with Saudi Arabia and its power-hungry and hawkish crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
This Article Was Originally Published In ZeroHedgeThe latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves.
What General Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain’s war service, though heroic, didn’t necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous — especially given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero.
Yet the Clark affair did reveal something important — not about General Clark, but about Mr. McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove.
It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: |
in New York — a win that would likely pave her way to the White House — some are concerned with how the fervor over Sanders would play out at the polls in November if Sanders is not the nominee. Hurley remains confident in a Democratic win.
“What people feel in the heat of April, before the primary, can change by Nov. 8," he said.
Iva Deutchman is professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva.
“I think Hillary will win, I think she will win big,” said Deutchman, adding that in 2016, speaking of Sanders, “Americans are not going to vote for a self-identified socialist.”
On the Republican side, billionaire businessman Donald Trump has caught most of the media attention as well as support from a slew of upstate GOP politicians. Those on the official Trump for President Campaign Inc. include several representing the Rochester/Finger Lakes region: U.S. Reps. Chris Collins of Clarence and Tom Reed of Corning, who both represent parts of Ontario County; and Assemblyman Bill Nojay, R-Pittsford and Yates County GOP Chairwoman Sandy King.
“Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated that he has both the guts and the fortitude to return our nation’s jobs stolen by China, take on our enemies like ISIS, Iran, North Korea and Russia, and most importantly, re-establish the opportunity for our children and grandchildren to attain the American Dream,” Collins stated in a release. Collins aligned himself with Trump in his endorsement by saying they share a common background of being successful businessmen and entrepreneurs.
In his endorsement, Reed urged support for Trump as “the candidate who I believe will be our nominee.”
“We must move beyond the bombastic rhetoric to positive discussion about creating jobs and improving the lives of all Americans. We all care about improving people's lives — that should always be our focus," Reed said. "I will use my voice to influence all Republican candidates at all levels to focus on issues and positive solutions for all Americans."
Ontario County Republican Committee chairman Doug Finch has not endorsed Trump, though he said he will support the candidate who ends up being the Republican nominee.
In a straw poll taken by the county GOP committee at last month, Trump received just under 45 percent, followed by candidate John Kasich and Ted Cruz.
“Because Trump did not receive the two-thirds we could not say that the Ontario County Republican Committee has endorsed him although he does lead the other candidates,” Finch said.
Meanwhile, Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb, R-Canandaigua, recently met with Kasich in Albany and promoted the meeting with photos and press release. Kolb and members of the Assembly Minority Conference talked with Kasich about issues such as job creation and education standards, and “dynamics of the presidential primaries and national election,” according to the release.
Last Sunday’s Trump rally at the Rochester International Airport drew thousands of people — both supporter and protesters. Though peaceful for the most part, things got heated as people exited the rally with the opposing groups often yelling at each other over four lanes of traffic.
Professor Deutchman teaches a course in American Conservatism. Her teaching and study of the Conservative Movement has involved attending with students the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., hearing from influential figures and befriending the movers and shakers of the movement.
“Watching what has happened with Republicans is just incredible,” Deutchman said. She said after the 2012 election “there was all this talk about a serious discussion about how they lost and why they lost.”
“Everything tells me they never had that discussion,” she said.
She talked specifically about young voters, the millennials who will be voting for decades to come.
“Millennials coming into their own are socially liberal,” said Deutchman. They are not for laws against gays, politicians squabbling over bathroom bills and laws that say, ‘No birth control for you,’" she said. Women, people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicity and so forth are making up much more of the voter base, Deutchman added, saying she doesn’t see the GOP appealing to them.
Deutchman said she tells her students: “I don’t care if you are the most passionate Democrat. Our society is better served by a real contest.”
But right now, she doesn’t see a real contest.
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Any voter who missed the October deadline to change their party in time for the primary, will have not have their new party take effect until after the November 2016 general election.Internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) combined with clinical care has been shown to benefit people with depression, anxiety and emotional distress from illness, according to an evidence-based review in CMAJ.
“In the age of Google, this psychological intervention is empowering, clinically efficient and consistent with the way that, increasingly, patients interact with health care,” write Dr. David Gratzer, attending psychiatrist, and Faiza Khalid-Khan, social worker and Director of Mental Health, The Scarborough Hospital, Toronto, Ontario.
The review looks at recent, high quality studies and the growing body of literature on smartphone and tablet applications for mental illness. Some studies showed that patients who used Internet-delivered CBT had better outcomes than placebo controls and equal or better outcomes than those with traditional in-person cognitive behaviour therapy. These outcomes were seen in patients with depression, as well as those with physical illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.
“There is as much evidence for cognitive behavioural therapy as there is for medications to treat mild and moderate depression, as well as evidence that they have a synergistic effect,” says Dr. Gratzer. “In other words, for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians struggling with depression, Internet-assisted cognitive behavioural therapy offers a cost-effective and empowering way of accessing an important treatment.”
Patients may participate in online therapy whenever and wherever they like, which provides the anonymity that may help depressed or shy patients who are reluctant to speak to a health care professional.
“[Internet-delivered] CBT has two principal advantages: patient empowerment and increased clinical efficiency,” write the authors. “It allows clinicians to treat more patients effectively in less time. Even with intermittent therapist support, it is less time-consuming and requires fewer resources overall than traditional CBT.”
However, this therapy is not recommended for people with severe mental illness.
Potential disadvantages to Internet-delivered CBT include the lack of a real human relationship, which prevents direct patient monitoring and the ability to tailor the therapy to the patient’s progress; low adherence by patients and lack of home access to the Internet.
“There are compelling data to support the integration of Internet-delivered CBT into clinical psychiatric care. These data indicate that this form of CBT offers numerous benefits to both the patient and the practitioner. It allows treatment of patients with many different psychiatric conditions, at lower cost than traditional CBT,” the authors conclude.
They note that more research is needed to determine the ideal demographic for this therapy and that there are challenges in integrating it into clinical practice.
About this psychology research
Source: Canadian Medical Association Journal
Image Source: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Abstract for “Internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy in the treatment of psychiatric illness” by David Gratzer and Faiza Khalid-Khan in Canadian Medical Association Journal. Published online November 2 2015 doi:10.1503/cmaj.150007
Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.He’s running for president — of Sweden.
Hillary Clinton’s only primary challenger is a self-described Democratic socialist who’s not afraid to say America should be more like Europe.
In his first interview on ABC’s “This Week” since declaring his candidacy, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the US should operate more like the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
“I can hear the Republican attack ad right now: ‘He wants America to look more like Scandinavia,’” countered ABC host George Stephanopoulos.
But Sanders said that’s exactly what he wants.
“That’s right. That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?” Sanders said.
It’s a far cry from 2012 when Mitt Romney and his GOP counterparts would try to paint President Obama as a socialist who wants to turn the US into Europe with bigger government and higher taxes.
The critique put Obama on defense, but Sanders’ embrace of the label makes him an unusual politician running a unique race.
Sanders wants health care for all, free college education, expanded retirement benefits and better child care — similar to what high-taxed Europeans enjoy.
“What’s wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a stronger middle class in many ways than we do, higher minimum wage than we do, and they are stronger on the environment?” he asked.
Sanders, a Brooklyn native, announced he’s running for president in a 10-minute news conference Thursday outside the Capitol before running to work.
“We don’t have an endless amount of time, I’ve got to get back,” the longest-serving independent in Congress said in kicking off the news conference.
Sanders said he’ll draw sharp contrasts with Clinton on climate change; the Keystone Pipeline, which he opposes; her vote in favor of the Iraq War; and trade agreements that he says cost US jobs. The questionable donations to the Clinton Foundation are also “fair game.”
“I think I’m the only candidate who’s prepared to take on the billionaire class, which now controls our economy, and increasingly controls the political life of this country,” Sanders said.
“We need a political revolution in this country involving millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say, enough is enough, and I want to help lead that effort.”
His entry into the race means Clinton can avoid the appearance of a coronation.
Clinton tweeted support for Sanders this week: “I agree with Bernie. Focus must be on helping America’s middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race.”SUMMARY: This notice of a registration decision is issued to inform the public that the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress has determined that claims to copyright in certain computer-colorized versions of black and white motion pictures may be registered. The notice gives guidance to the public about the standards and practices governing registration of computer-colorized motion pictures. The notice also confirms the validity of existisig regulation 37 CFR 201.1(a), prohibiting copyright registration for mere variations of coloring. * * * The Copyright Act also spells out that copyright protection in a derivative work “extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent, of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.” 17 U.S.C. 103(b) (emphasis added). * * * … Courts have held that while color per se is uncopyrightable and unregistrable, arrangements or combinations of colors may warrant copyright protection.1
Between 1985 and 1986, several parties submitted the colorized versions of ten motion pictures and one television program to the Copyright Office for registration of the colorized version as a derivative work. The Copyright Office did not register any of these works. Because of the unusual nature of the claimed authorship and to obtain information about the process of creating the colorized versions from persons other than the claimants, on September 15, 1986, the Copyright Office published a Notice of Inquiry in the Federal Register (51 FR 32665) asking for comments in four specific areas. * * * … the Copyright Office specified that aesthetic or moral arguments about the propriety of coloring black and white film did not, and could not, form any part of its inquiry.2 2. Summary of the Comments In all 46 comments (43 original and three reply) were filed with the Copyright Office. Despite the Copyright Office’s caveat against arguments regarding aesthetic considerations, many of the comments filed related simply to the question of whether or not the commentator found the colorized motion picture aesthetically pleasing. And most did not. * * * (b) Representing a modicum of creativity.
As to color selection the opponents claimed that an artist’s selection of palette is an idea that has not as yet produced any copyrightable expression. As to the “data base,” this party noted that copyright does not cover the factual content of a work and contended that it is the color facts in the data base which are integrated into a preexisting visual pattern of the black and white film that is being reprocessed. These patterns, it was argued, serve as the actual expression in the new video product, which merely organizes the facts previously compiled in a different order. Furthemore, the opponents argued that “the protectible forms in which the facts were once complied, that is, expressed and organized, say, as a computer-readable data base, will, in the final video product, be quite simply left behind….” Finally, the opponents asserted that copyright in a computer program cannot also support a claim in the product or output of the program--in this case the color-recoded film. * * * 4. Registration Decision After studying the comments responsive to the questions listed above, the Copyright Act, and the case law, the Copyright Office has concluded that certain colorized versions of black and white motion pictures are eligible for copyright registration as derivative works. The Office will register as derivative works those color versions that reveal a certain minimum amount of individual creative human authorship. This decision is restricted to the colorized films prepared through the computer-colorization process described above.
… The regulation also prohibits registration of multiple colored versions of the same basic design or work. Registration is not precluded, however, where the work consists of original selection, arrangement, or combinations of a large number of colors, or where the lines of an original design are fired by gradations of numerous colors. The Copyright Office finds that these registration practices are consistent with the standards of original authorship set by the Copyright Act, and we affirm the validity of the existing regulation.
The Office concludes that some computer-colorized films may contain sufficient original authorship to justify registration, but our decision is a close, narrow one based on the allegations that the typical colorized film is the result of the selection of as many as 4000 colors, drawn from a palette of 16 million colors. The Office does not consider registration would be justified based on a claimed “arrangement” or “combination” of the colors because the original black and white film predetermines the arrangement of colors. The Office is concerned about implications of registering a claim to copyright in public domain films based on colorizing, and we address that point below. …
… In determining whether the coloring of a particular black and white film is a modification that satisfies the above standard, the Office will apply the following criteria:
(1) Numerous color selections must be made by human beings from an extensive color inventory.
(2) The range and extent of colors added to the black and white work must represent more than a trivial variation.
(3) The overall appearance of the motion picture must be modified; registration will not be made for the coloring of a few frames or the enhancement of color in a previously colored film.
(4) Removal of color from a motion picture or other work will not justify registration.
(5) The existing regulatory prohibition on copyright registration based on mere variations of color is confirmed. When registration is warranted, the copyright will cover only the new material, that is, the numerous selections of color that are added to the original black and white film. The copyright status of the underlying work is unaffected. The black and white film version will remain in the public domain or enter the public domain as dictated by its own copyright term. When an underlying work is in the public domain, another party is free to use that work to make a different color version which may also be eligible for copyright protection. * * * 1. See also 1 Nimmer on Copyright 3 § 2.14 (1985).
2. Copyright registration determinations cannot be made on aesthetic grounds. Original works of authorship that meet the legal and formal requirements of the Copyright Act are entitled to registration. irrespective of their artistic worth. Moreover, the present federal copyright law does not extend protection to the so-called “moral right” of an author to prevent the distortion or mutilation of the work, after transfer of the copyright. Dated: June 11, 1987.
Ralph Oman,
Register of Copyrights.
Approved by:
Daniel I. Boorstin,
The Librarian of Congress.
[FR Doc. 87-14091 Filed 6-19-87: 8:45 am]An IPS officer of the 1981 batch, Rakesh Maria, 57, on Sunday took charge as Mumbai police commissioner. In a Q&A with dna, Maria, who is known to crack terrorism-related cases, said his priority is to have zero tolerance for street crimes and a public-friendly police force.
Q – Firstly, what is your reaction on becoming Mumbai police commissioner?
A- Journey of a boy wearing shorts and chappals and playing in the gullies of Bandra to becoming an IPS officer and taking charge as Mumbai's commissioner of police is a dream come true. Whilst climbing the grand staircase towards this office and remembering those commissioners, who had served the city, the thought is exhilarating and at the same time humbling. The responsibilities for me have also increased now.
Q – You have had a long experience in the city as a police officer, what is the biggest challenge you think will be ahead of you?
A - The challenges before the force today are many. There is urban terrorism, organised crime, security of women, children and elders. One thing we are going to stress on is zero tolerance for street crimes. I would be discussing these issues at length with my officers and would work on strategies to counter the problems.
Q – There is a perception that policemen are rude and impolite to citizens and people feel scared to approach police. How will you change this perception?
A – My aim would be to give the city a service-oriented, transparent, public-friendly force, which feels the problems of the public and works towards solving their issues. This is basically going to be our endeavour in the near future.
Q – Some senior officers have expressed their displeasure over the decision to make the police chief and feel injustice has been done to them
A – This is a uniformed service and a disciplinary force. Wherever we are told to go for posting we will go. I would not like to discuss this issue.
Q – How was your stint with the ATS? In past there have been instances of city police and ATS fighting for one-upmanship regarding handling terrorism cases. What are you going to do to bridge these differences?
A – I have had a discussion with the new ATS chief Himanshu Roy and I have told him that ATS is very important part of the Maharashtra police. ATS plays a vital role in controlling terrorism in city and state. If they need officers or any help from the city police, that will be provided to them. They too are part of the police.
Q – Do you think we need to strengthen our intelligence network?
A – Intelligence is the backbone of the police machinery. We are going to concentrate on the new anti-terror cells created at the police station levels and are going to strengthen them to augment the ATS. Crime Branch has good network of informants when it comes to organised crimes and conventional crimes.
Q – Earlier commissioners had started many initiatives for citizens, are you going to continue those initiatives or will they be closed down?
A – Many senior officers had been commissioners and every CP had started some or the other initiatives. Their initiatives and good practices such as mohalla committee, zopadpatti panchayat, cooperative societies meeting, Eagle brigade and grievance redressal day will be studied and we'll take a call of what should be done.
Q – Lastly, what are your plans for the welfare of lower rungs of the force who work under tremendous stress and coastal security?
A – Only if a policeman is happy at home, will he be able to perform his duties well. I will speak to the joint commissioner of police (administration) about their welfare issues. As far as coastal security is concerned, we have seen in 1993 and 26/11 about the coastal security issue. We will work towards ensuring a better coordination with different agencies and will do our best towards strengthening our coast.Over the next few weeks, we'll be examining the merits—and relative lack of merits—of all 36 players on this year's Hall of Fame ballot for the purposes of better informing the electorate, i.e., you. All entries in the series can be found here.
Right here, in the basement of a man named Harry Weber, sits an object. It's just a thing; it's just a hunk of bronze. We're hiding it for now. It represents our shame, our confusion, our total inability to decide what we glorify, what idols we worship, and why. It's just waiting for us. It can wait down there forever.
Do you remember what you were doing when Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's record? How about when any of the last 20 World Series that didn't directly involve your team ended? When Mike Trout made his debut in the majors? Anything? Baseball is a game of moments; nothing happens for long stretches of time, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere—everything that happens in baseball, on a probability scale, is statistically unlikely; every second is a surprise—we have a moment we'll never forget. Some moments we remember because they happened to our team. Some moments—no-hitters, dramatic come-from-behind victories—we remember because we were just lucky enough to be watching at the time. Some moments we remember just because they meant something specifically to us. But it's rare that a baseball moment is shared by everyone—fans, non-fans, casual viewers, die-hards, true believers, skeptics—at the same time, as one. Baseball is more personal than universal.
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Sept. 8, 1998, was the rare moment when everyone was watching. The Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run chase had dominated the conversation for six months, giving baseball the national spotlight it hadn't had since the 1994 strike and arguably hasn't had since, at least in a positive way. It's easy to forget how crazy the country got about the home run chase back in 1998. McGwire was a phenomenon all season, wherever he went. Jerry Seinfeld visited him in New York, Dan Marino in Florida, Duchess Sarah Ferguson at Wrigley Field. ("He's my favorite redhead," she said, carrying a bat that McGwire had autographed.) President Clinton, in the depths of Monicagate, referenced him, and the fact that he grew up a Cardinals fan, at every opportunity. David Letterman pitched to him on 57th Street. The craziest was batting practice: Not only would fans line up to fill the stadium two hours early just to watch McGwire take BP, in Colorado, a local affiliate actually aired his batting practice live on broadcast television. It was the highest-rated show of the week. People loved McGwire.
The circumstances built up perfectly for Sept. 8. On Aug. 30, Sosa—whose Cubs, unlike the Cardinals, were in the playoff chase—hit his 54th homer to tie McGwire, who took the lead again that night with a seventh-inning, three-run homer off Dennis Martinez. Two nights later, in Florida, McGwire went off, hitting four homers in two games, putting him at 59 and making it clearer than ever that Roger Maris's record was doomed. Then, on Monday, Sept. 7, in the first game of a two-game set with the Cubs, McGwire hit No. 61 to tie. This set up Tuesday night's game. It was the last Cardinals home game before a road trip to Houston and Cincinnati. Sosa would be in the outfield. The Maris family, which had embraced McGwire throughout his chase, would be in attendance. Fox, sensing ratings gold, pre-empted its regular programming to show the game live in prime-time. This had to be the night. Everyone was watching.
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In the first inning, an overeager McGwire swung at a 3-0 pitch for only the second time all season, grounding out. But in the fourth, Steve Trachsel threw a low fastball that McGwire reached for and pulled. The ball just barely edged over the left-field wall, McGwire's shortest of the season, 341 feet. Much talk in the weeks leading up to the homer had revolved around what the fan who caught the ball would do with it. It had become a bit of a moral riddle, whether a fan would sell it or return it to McGwire. As it turned out, it landed with a Cardinals employee, Tim Forneris, who handed it back to McGwire after the game. "I believe I have something that belongs to you," he said, as 57,000 people screamed. After the homer, time stopped. McGwire embraced his son, who had been the subject of a fawning Rick Reilly profile in Sports Illustrated that very week. (The story was largely about Reilly's amazement that McGwire was friendly with his ex-wife.) He ran into the stands to hug the Maris family, most of whom were in tears. He beckoned Sosa in from the outfield, where they embraced and did that bro-faux stomach punch thing that launched a hundred commercials. It was a moment. It was undeniably a moment.
If there were people skeptical in that moment, I didn't see them. This does not mean that people should have been skeptical watching that, or that there was something wrong with them if they were. It just means that if you say now that you were then, you are very likely lying.
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So how are we to feel about this now? Everyone assumes Sammy Sosa was on steroids. McGwire admitted he had taken them. Does that make that moment a fraud? Does it make the emotions we felt in that moment—real, palpable emotions—somehow fraudulent? That was a terrific shared sports experience; that was about more than baseball, more than Mark McGwire, more than some record that's already been broken anyway. It was about hope, and surprise, and the joy of a nation of sports fans following something together, as one, in a way that rarely happens anymore, especially when it comes to baseball. That was a real thing that happened. We all went through it together. It was great.
These are hard things to say today. It's sort of embarrassing to say that a night the world now considers a fraud was really lovely. But you weren't cynical that night. You might have been cynical about everything else, but you weren't about that.
What does this mean for Mark McGwire? Well, it means he's always going to be the one who takes the hit on this. If we cheered him that night—even if we were actually cheering for something else, if we were just cheering to cheer—he must be punished for it now. McGwire has admitted he took PEDs in a forthright way that we bring up whenever other offenders are less direct, but he earns no mercy for this. (It's often used against him in voting; his admission is the eliminating factor, with Barry Bonds's and Roger Clemens's intransigence somehow working in their favor.) He has attempted to move on, working as the quietest hitting coach any 583-home-run-hitter could possibly imagine being. The person he is now, in the game, is a phantom version of who he was. He appears haunted by his past; where Bonds and Clemens dig in, he says his PED usage was a "mistake I'll have to live with the rest of my life.... One of the hardest things I had to do this year was sit down and talk to my 9- and 10-year-old boys and tell them what dad did." He says he wouldn't even vote himself in the Hall of Fame. He is Big Mac, deflated.
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Is his punishment just? Does it matter? One senses we will change our minds on this, collectively, as the years go along anyway. (That was what was behind Clemens's brief flirtation with an MLB cameo last year: re-starting the clock as minds change.) It is the ultimate irony of McGwire's career that his Hall of Fame case—how the public will judge him, as if we have the right—rests on our getting further and further away from the signature night of his career rather than recalling it more vividly. Mark McGwire brought us as much joy as any baseball player of the last 25 years. He'll have to pay for that.
So, in Harry Weber's basement, 50 miles away from Busch Stadium, history sits, waiting for us release it. In 2002, the Cardinals, a year after McGwire's retirement, commissioned a McGwire statue from Weber, who also did the statues for the Cardinals' 10 Hall of Famers. He completed it, and then the Congressional testimony happened, and then McGwire's confession, and now it's clear McGwire's not going to be voted into the Hall of Fame by anyone but the Veterans Committee, and not for many years. Weber keeps the statue in his office, wondering if anyone will ever see it. We will see it when we are ready to. Which is probably never.
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Will Leitch is a senior writer at Sports On Earth as well as a contributing editor at New York magazine. He is the founder of Deadspin.
Art by Sam Woolley.Apple has released the first supplemental update to macOS High Sierra 10.13, complete with bug fixes, improvements, and security fixes.
General release notes accompanying the supplemental update suggests the release includes improvements to stability, reliability, and security. Specifically, the update is said to “improve installer robustness” (it is unclear if this addresses the issue where some users are unable to download a complete macOS High Sierra installer without third party utility assistance), includes a fix for cursor graphics bugs when using Adobe InDesign, and resolves and issue with Mail app was unable to delete email from Yahoo accounts. Additionally, the update includes a security fix to address a problem where Disk Utility could be used to reveal the password of an encrypted AFPS volume, and the update also resolves a security bug relating to Keychain passwords. Complete security update release notes are below for those interested. The supplemental update is recommended for all macOS High Sierra users to install.
Downloading macOS High Sierra Supplemental Update
Mac users running macOS 10.13 High Sierra can find the update available to download and install now in the Mac App Store Updates section. The update is labeled as “macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update”.
You can also choose to download the macOS High Sierra Supplemental Update as a DMG installer file from Apple by going here and choosing the blue Download button, as dmg file the download size is 920 MB.
Note the supplemental update is separate from the beta versions of 10.13.1 currently under the beta testing programs.
Always back up a Mac before installing any system software update, including smaller bug fix updates like this macOS High Sierra Supplemental Update.
macOS High Sierra Supplemntal Update Release Notes
The macOS High Sierra general release notes and security release notes are as follows, beginning with the former:
This supplemental update includes improvements to the the stability, reliability and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all macOS High Sierra users. This update: • Improves installer robustness • Fixes a cursor graphic bug when using Adobe InDesign • Resolves an issue where email messages couldn’t be deleted from Yahoo accounts in Mail
The complete security related supplemental update release notes are below:
macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update
Released October 5, 2017
StorageKit
Available for: macOS High Sierra 10.13
Impact: A local attacker may gain access to an encrypted APFS volume
Description: If a hint was set in Disk Utility when creating an APFS encrypted volume, the password was stored as the hint. This was addressed by clearing hint storage if the hint was the password, and by improving the logic for storing hints.
CVE-2017-7149: Matheus Mariano of Leet Tech Security
Available for: macOS High Sierra 10.13
Impact: A malicious application can extract keychain passwords
Description: A method existed for applications to bypass the keychain access prompt with a synthetic click. This was addressed by requiring the user password when prompting for keychain access. CVE-2017-7150: Patrick Wardle of Synack New downloads of macOS High Sierra 10.13 include the security content of the macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update.
Separately, iPhone and iPad users can find iOS 11.0.2 available as an update, which also includes various bug fixes for that system software release, and watchOS 4.0.1 for Apple Watch is out as well.There’s a burgeoning area of educational technology, one that has an Orwellian whiff about it. It’s "anti-radicalisation" software, designed to send warning flags to teachers when any youngsters look at certain material on the web, in particular anything to do with extremist Islam. It dovetails nicely with the US and UK governments’ Islamic-terrorist narrative, which seeks to justify increasing surveillance and control, even at grassroots level.
It’s supposed to prevent the terror threat from growing, but in a predictably ironic twist, it’s possible for anyone with malicious intent to hack one iteration of that technology from anywhere in the planet, infect school computers and hoover up all information on those systems, including personal data of pupils. The specific technology in question was created by UK firm Impero Software. Its headquarters are in Nottingham, UK, but it also has a base in Portland, Oregon to support its growing business in the US.
The anti-radicalisation module of Impero picks up on keywords like “jihobbyist” (a jihadi organisation sympathiser but not a participant) and “Message to America” (an Islamic State propaganda video series that has included footage of hostage beheadings), and thens warns teachers, according to a Guardian article from June. But that’s just one part of the Impero Education Pro solution, which is essentially a remote access system letting teachers control, monitor and update classroom PCs, whilst amassing “evidence” of misconduct in a “centralised log to support disciplinary action”. It covers kids’ mobile devices too, from iPhones to Chromebooks.
In a word, Impero has a lot of power over its clients' data, whether stored on PCs, servers or children’s personal technology. If compromised, it could expose reams of information on pupils, teachers and the school as a whole. And that’s certainly possible in light of the findings of researcher ‘raylee’, real name Zammis Clark, who discovered the Impero platform was using a default password of “password” to connect clients to its servers. “Basically, if you use Impero, please don't,” the researcher wrote in a Github post describing the flaw and releasing attack code to prove the problem existed.
The researcher told FORBES that if an attacker can gain access to the Impero server, all connected machines “are completely open to compromise”, due to the apparent lack of decent authentication. “Given that schools have been affected with malware like CryptoLocker in the past, exploit kits or spearphishing could be a way for an attacker to get into a school network. Also, there's the threat of someone inside such a school (a student perhaps) exploiting the vulnerability,” he added.
Clark says he initially became interested in the technology in January at the BETT education tech conference in London, when he asked the company about its security and received no information back. When Impero attracted media coverage for its anti-radicalisation services, he decided to probe the technology, uncovering and publicly reporting on the lack of quality authentication on 13 June. Clark says Impero issued a fix shortly after his original disclosure, but he updated his exploit code to show it didn’t work and emailed the company on 9 July to warn them.
Impero was not happy about the glaring vulnerability being publicised without prior warning, deciding to issue a legal threat. In a letter to Clark dated 13 July, delivered by legal firm Gately, he is accused of breaking the terms and conditions laid out by the firm, including a stipulation that the software not be tampered with; modification is only allowed to achieve “interoperability”, meaning hackers looking for security issues are not welcome. He is also accused of copyright infringement and has been asked to remove all links from Github, Twitter and other channels that point to the public vulnerability disclosure.
In an emailed statement to FORBES, Impero director of marketing Nikki Annison claimed the offending party had “maliciously and illegally hacked our product, subsequently making this hack public rather than bringing it to our attention privately and in confidence. No customers have been affected by this and no data has been leaked or compromised.”
“We immediately released a hot fix, as a short term measure to address the issue and since then we have been working closely with our customers and penetration testers to develop a solid long term solution. All schools will have the new version, including the long-term fix, installed in time for the new school term.
“While we actively encourage helpful feedback that contributes to the development of the product, through regular focus groups and security workshops, the methods used to identify and communicate this particular issue were not legal and we shall be taking a firm stance. Impero Education Pro is designed to protect and safeguard children in schools and any attempt to jeopardise this by illegally obtaining and publicising sensitive information will be dealt with appropriately.
"This hack could only be exploited if basic network security does not exist and if the attacker is physically present with local network access. We have been in communication with all our customers throughout."
Annison said that prior to the 13 June post on Github, the researcher made no attempt to contact them privately. This chimes with Clark’s version of events, as it appears to confirm he did reach out to Impero privately after the initial public disclosure.
Clark has been given until 17 July to act on the demands in the letter. He says he isn't sure how he'll respond. "Obviously, to researchers, a legal threat just says that 'we do not work with security researchers at all', causing a security researcher to either go straight to full disclosure, or worse, not look at the software at all, which would mean potentially security issues would not be found, or worse, be found by blackhats [malicious hackers]."
All of which leaves the two parties at an awkward impasse. Whilst he says he was unsure of where he would responsibly disclose the issue, should Clark have made private contact first |
!" exclaimed a communications technician. "We've just received word from the Kodai team!"
"And?" asked Roberts, muting his call with Graves.
"They've done it. The fleet's ours. They'll have the fleet here in 9 hours."
A smile formed at the corner of Roberts' mouth.
"Mr. Engineer? You still there?"
"Aye, Sahr. What chu needin?"
"I've changed my mind. I want to down this ship, and I want to hit the Retaliator along the way."
"But- but why? Sahr, we'd-"
"I know. Just tell me the valves I'd need to open to shove this ship into the atmosphere."
"Wehl… valves C1 through C4 an' D1 through D4 open up on that side o' us… Open em up no more than 23% or they could blow up bad."
"Thanks. Overwatch, I've changed my mind. Valves C1 to C4 and D1 to D4. Open them up on my mark, 45%."
"Macro defined and readied. Warning. Opening of valves C1, C2, C3, C4, D1, D2, D3 and D4 will drain reactors Charlie and Delta. Warning. Drain of reactor Charlie and Delta would result in permanent power loss. Warning. Thrust produced by reactor drain would result in atmospheric entry. Warning. Atmospheric entry would result in catastrophic structural failure. Captain Roberts, are you sure about this?"
"Absolutely. Open up the shipwide communications channel."
"Comms channel open."
"Everyone, this is Captain Roberts. We have hit the atmosphere as a result of Venice 3's railgun barrage destroying our fusion reactors. This starship is doomed.
With that, I've decided to make the most of what we've got. I'm going to vent the pressure inside our last two reactors and shunt us downwards. With any luck, we'll take the Retaliator with us. Here are your orders.
All Pilots will make their way to the Titan hanger. All engineers involved in launching Titans will also make their way to the Titan hangar and assist in the launching of Titans on my mark. All other personnel will make their way to their nearest lifeboat immediately and launch on my mark. We vent in two minutes and thirty seconds."
"Members of the bridge," he continued, "Get to the lifeboats and evacuate on my mark. This starship no longer needs a crew."
And finally,
"Overwatch. We'll survive an atmospheric re-entry, right?" he asked, as the other bridge members left the bridge in a hurry.
"The bridge, the Titan hangar and the lifeboats are made to survive re-entry. The hull will survive the heat of re-entry for a few minutes. Afterwards, all personnel not within a life boat, the bridge or the Titan hangar will be incinerated. Atmospheric entry will ensure impact with the planet's surface."
"I understand. Now, we wait. Two minutes and 10 seconds."
Zeta hauled the garage door open, heaving from the effort of lifting the nuclear iron panel. A moment later Bruce rolled past on the motorcycle. A relic of a bygone age, the cycle ran on oil, rumbled like an unbalanced electric generator and left a sooty gas in its wake.
The Kawasaki logo glinted in the sunlight as Bruce brought Snake's motorcycle to a halt.
"I'll take the buggy," Zeta declared. "I'm probably better at piloting it than you. No offence."
"None taken." The six were wearing hoodies over their armour, and Bruce pulled his hood over his pilot's helmet, dragged his scarf up to just underneath his visor.
"Plus, you there?" asked Zeta.
"Affirmative."
"Get me the buggy."
"It is on its way, Ma'am."
A moment later, the buggy drifted around a corner and came to a halt in front of her.
"Alright then. Everyone in."
She slid into the hoverbuggy's pilot seat, let the propellers underneath the buggy continue spinning.
The four IMC soldiers leapt aboard.
"Next stop," Zeta announced, "cloud square."
She slipped her arms into the control gauntlets, tilted them upwards. The thrusters on the back fired and the buggy leaned forward. A press of her pedals and the buggy shot off along Alpha's roads.
"What is it again... Hilt? Is Bruce behind us?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma'am." The soldier flipped his hood up over his head, pulled his own scarf up to cover as much of his helmet as possible. Beside him, Cornerstone was absent-mindedly tapping the side of the R-101C he'd selected from Snake's armory through the fabric of his hoodie.
"Good." She adjusted the speed of her buggy's blades to hover a little higher, before throwing her arms to the side to bank the buggy around a corner.
"Plus, time to Cloud Square?" she asked, eyes fixed on the road.
"Ten minutes, Ma'am."
"Alright. Hilt, how many IMC personnel are we expecting to be at Cloud Square?"
"Let me think… there's a team of 10 soldiers lead by the pilot Misha that should be floating around… another 25 soldiers that were supposed to be trying to resupply us, lead by the pilot George… and they've got two civilians with them, too... then there's some 10 civilians that we sent down after the first few squads that were supposed to find some way for us to evac… and a couple of soldiers babysitting them… overall, we're looking at around 51? Give or take a few, there may be some I've forgotten about."
"51? Fantastic," muttered Zeta, as buildings and roads and cars shot past out the window. "Of which 12 are civilians."
"Once again, there may be more."
"There better not be," she growled, throwing the buggy into another corner and pumping the afterburners. Another hoverbuggy honked at her in fright and shock. "ETA?"
"Six minutes, Ma'am."
"Good," she muttered.
A military truck rolled past.
A bad omen..? Or mere coincidence?
She snuck a glance behind her. Bruce was still there on the old Kawasaki motorcycle.
"ETA?" asked Zeta nervously, as as second and third military truck rolled past. "And try get me a comm to Bruce."
"Four minutes, Ma'am. Comms line open."
"Thanks. Bruce, those trucks-"
"I know, I know. It's worrying. And there's nothing we can do about it. Lets keep going."
She turned a corner. Saw the traffic backed up to a soldier waving vehicles by a detour sign.
"They've closed off Cloud Square," muttered Zeta, biting her lip under her helmet. "That's not good."
"We can take a left up here," suggested Bruce. "And sneak in on foot. Find out what's going on."
Zeta pulled her left trigger - indicating her intentions to turn left - before banking and slipping into an alley just wide enough for the hoverbuggy. Pulled her arms backwards, pulled the nose of the buggy upwards, slid to a halt. Unbuckled her seatbelt, stepped out.
"What's the plan?"
"You've got a cloak module in your overarmor?"
"Yeah. Made in New Tokyo. Why?"
"I reckon we leave these four here and go over the roofs. We go in past the blockade, snoop around a bit. Find out what's going on."
"Alright, then. Plus, switch to autopilot mode and take orders from the four men inside the hoverbuggy."
"Understood, Ma'am."
"Alright." She pulled her hoodie off, tossed it back into the hoverbuggy. It had kept her conspicuous for now. It wouldn't help her cloak.
"Ready?" asked Bruce.
She nodded, looked both ways down the alley to confirm that the coast was clear.
And then she jumped. Once with her feet, and once again with her jump kit. Her feet connected with the nuclear iron alley wall and she somersaulted backward to connect with the opposite wall. Another boost, another jet of flame, and she was flying upwards between the two alley walls, flipping off one and into the other. Her left boot caught on a foothold and she sprang upward. Her right heel connected with a wall mounted air conditioning unit with a clang. One roll, and she was atop the unit. Another leap, and she was clutching onto the edge of a roof.
She hauled herself up to emerge above the alley on the roof of a three-story building one block away from Cloud Square, a split second behind Bruce.
"This way to the Square," she called through their helmets' radio, before breaking into a run, then a leap, then a tumble onto the roof of the next building across.
No sign of any guards posted on the roofs yet. That's a little promising.
Her legs flew underneath her as her training from New Tokyo kicked in. She continued an effortless run across an art gallery's tile roof. Reached the edge and leapt across the gap to the next building's corrugated nuclear iron roof, soaring through the morning air, like a shadow darting across the skyline, across roof and building and gap and alley and - there was Cloud Square.
She stopped, crouched, Bruce beside her on the edge of a restaurant's roof. Peered into the square three stories below.
A small fountain in the middle of the Square spurted water high into the hot air, forming the centrepiece of one of Alpha city's most popular places for relaxation. The water that didn't evaporate splashed into the pool around the fountain and trickled along thin ducts in the ground to nourish the plants that grew in the Square. A line of red flowers bloomed in the dirt that lined the Square's edges; a bee - engineered specifically for Venice 3's climate - tended to the roses one at a time. The scene would have been romantically gorgeous if not for the men and women lying on the ground with their hands behind their heads. Or the Venice 3 armed defenders patrolling them.
"Shit," swore Bruce under his breath. "They found out. That Menelaus really hates the IMC, doesn't he?"
"Yeah," mused Zeta. She gazed downward, eyeing Venice 3's police. "I count 25 Soldiers. And… damn, there's a sniper in that corner over there."
"Well. It could be worse. They could have Titans." Zeta and Bruce backed away from the edge of the roof, and Bruce tapped the side of his helmet.
"Austraeus, this is the Pilot Bruce. The Venice 3 police seem to be out to capture IMC personnel. They've got everyone except my team rounded up at Cloud Square. We count 25 Soldiers. No Titans."
And then,
"Austraeus? Come in, Austraeus. Damn!"
He turned to Zeta. "The Austraeus isn't picking up. We're on our own."
"That's not all," groaned the New Tokyo ex-Pilot, eyeing the steel behemoth that had just strode into the square. "They've got Titans. And at least one Pilot."
"Overwatch, vent the pressure from Reactors Charlie and Delta through valves 10 to 20," ordered Captain Roberts, eyeing the MCOR Retaliator on the console in front of him. The Militia starship was dead in its orbit and awaiting evacuation from a friendly Logistics cruiser.
Not for long.
"Venting pressure. Brace for acceleration in three, two, one, mark."
Roberts closed his eyes, gripped his seat rests, took a deep breath, and prayed to every god he'd heard of.
Plumes of hydrogen and helium erupted from the Austraeus's railgun-marred side.
These gases were the life of the starship's last fusion reactors. Before, they'd provided electrical power to the entire ship. Now, they provided thrust.
Three valves melted instantly, the hull that housed them collapsing and crumbling into space.
The Austraeus lurched silently toward the Retaliator.
Struck.
The larger starship pushed down on the smaller, its life draining from its side.
And then, the two hit the atmosphere.
The Retaliator's shields crackled and died as a torrent of particles began to hit it all at once.
Her captain screamed obscenities in a, for him, unusual outburst of anger and rage at the enemy who had betrayed his trust and mercy.
Hulls glowed orange as the starships began to slow, friction decelerating them from orbital velocity to terminal velocity, Borium armour be damned.
The captain of the Austraeus gripped his armrests with white knuckles as his starship went where it was never designed to go.
The AI of the Austraeus thought its last as its last power supply was drained.
Metal buckled and scraped and screamed as it expanded in the heat of re-entry.
A collective scream arose from each of the three cities on Venice 3 as their inhabitants heard the sonic booms and saw the calamity unfolding.
For the Titans in heaven above were falling.Iron Savior frontman/founder Piet Sielck has checked in with the following announcement regarding the band’s 2007 album, Megatropolis:
“Big news! According to AFM all Megatropolis CDs are sold out. Therefore the album will be re-released with a new mix and a lot of re-recordings! Being unhappy with the album for a long time, I am absolutely happy to get a chance to correct my errors. The new mix will carry all Iron Savior trademarks such as big choir backings and lots of multi timbral vocals. I left all these goodies out at the time to make the album more distinguishable from my former second band Savage Circus… a fatal error which I finally can correct now. ‘Omega Man’ and ‘Megatropolis’ are done already sounding… fat! Folks, you have no idea how happy I am about this!”
Megatropolis was released in 2007 via Dockyard 1, a now defunct label co-owned by Sielck. The tracklist is as follows:
“Running Riot”
“The Omega Man”
“Flesh”
“Megatropolis”
“Cybernetic Queen”
“Cyber Hero”
“A Tale from Down Below”
“Still I Believe”
“Farewell and Good Bye”
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commentsBY jakewriter | Aug 01, 2014 12:30 AM EDT
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Nintendo 3DS XL Bundle Leak: Super Smash Bros. Wii U To Launch Nov.21, Nintendo 3DSL Consort Bundle Rumor, Release After 'Black Friday', Before 'Holiday 24' Launch Window
A game play report disclosed that a GamesStop manager released the date of launch for the Wii U version, without putting his name on the information.Not a Herculean task to do, but it's nonetheless done. The leak said the Super Smash Bros. version of Wii U would launch on Nov. 21. That date seems like 'common-sense.' since it is ahead of Black Friday, the traditional holiday season ahead of Christmas. It also falls before the 'Holiday 24" launch window.
According to rumors over what the GameStop manager heard the Super Smash Bros.version of Wii U will come with free Amiibo figures. These Amiibo figrures were introduced at the E3 presentation. These figurines are able to interact with certain Wii U games, and the concept has been takne from the 'Skylanders' series, the Latin Times reports.
Howevever, the real question will surround around what Amiibo will distributed to players. In the best case scenario, the best candidate in the franchise is Mario or Nintendo might plan to give away separate bundles with various figures. This might include Luigi,Link, Donkey Kong. It remains to be seen what Nintendo will add to its products in the form freebees.The ultimate question to ask is why don't Nintendo 3DSL Bundle be given away as a console bundle?
Other rumors surround the Nintendo bundling scenario is Smash Edition 3DS XL bundle, which are smaller bundled consoles catering to an economy that might have outgrown the Nintendo games of 2014. If the prices come down for the Nintendo,PS4 and Windows Xbox One, it is sending a message that young adults are moving on to seek more value from the competitive economy.Nintendo 3DS XL Bundle is now discounted at Amazon for players who just can't wait till costs run lower in December.Darius (ダライアス, Daraiasu) is a shoot 'em up arcade game released by Taito in February 1987, although its title screen indicates a 1986 copyright.[3] It is the first game in the Darius series, known for using a unique three-screen arcade cabinet setup, non-linear level design and multiple endings.[5]
A port by Softek and The Edge was released for the Amiga and Atari ST titled Darius+. An expanded port by Bits Laboratory and NEC was released for the PC Engine's Super CD-ROM² titled Super Darius (スーパーダライアス, Sūpā Daraiasu). Another expanded port was made for the PC Engine itself, titled Darius Plus (ダライアス・プラス, Daraiasu Purasu), which is similar to the Amiga and Atari ST title. A boss rush version of Darius Plus was released under the name Darius Alpha (ダライアス・アルファ, Daraiasu Arufa). In August 2016 the original arcade version was re-released for PlayStation 4 in Japan and other Asian PS-Store's, the port was made by Hamster Corporation and is part of the Arcade Archives on PlayStation 4.[6][7]
Gameplay [ edit ]
Darius is a two-dimensional horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up set in a fictional future. Uniquely among shoot 'em ups, the game's screen is three times wider than conventional size, and the arcade cabinet uses an arrangement of three screens to accommodate it. The player controls an ornate fighter spacecraft, named the Silver Hawk, and must navigate through scrolling terrain while battling a variety of fighter craft, ground vehicles, turrets, and other obstacles throughout the game's stages (referred to as zones in the game). The ship's arsenal consists of forward-firing missiles, aerial bombs and a protective force field, all of which can be upgraded by power-ups (in the form of large, colored orbs) that are dropped by specially-colored enemies throughout the game's zones. When the player reaches the end of a zone, a boss appears, which must be defeated to proceed. Once the boss of a zone is destroyed, the player is given a choice of which zone to play next via a branching path. While there are 28 zones in total, only seven can be played in a single run.[8][9][10][11]
Development and release [ edit ]
In order to seamlessly connect the three screens, the arcade cabinet uses a mirror to align the edges of the three monitors together
The arcade game features raster graphics on three CRT monitors and amplified stereophonic sound.[9] In order to seamlessly connect the three screens together, two of the monitors, which display the first and last thirds of the game's screen, respectively, are placed in the bottom of the cabinet facing upwards, with their visuals reflected into view via a one-way mirror. The third monitor, which displays the middle portion of the game's screen, is placed behind the mirror and is the only one actually facing the player. The reflection of the two bottom monitors partially overlaps the third monitor, giving the illusion of a seamless wide screen.[9]
The game's soundtrack was composed by Hisayoshi Ogura, the founding member of Taito's in-house music division Zuntata. Ogura composed the music with the concept of, "a large existence," that being the large bosses in the game and the expansiveness of the universe. The game's main theme, titled "Chaos", is notable for being one of the earliest examples of avant-garde in video game music.[1] Ogura recalled,
“...For its time it was extremely avant-garde music. I assigned this piece the role of Darius's main theme. I'll have them hear something no one's ever heard in a game before! With these kinds of thoughts in mind, I composed a piece with the expressive scale of the beginning of the universe. ” — Hisayoshi Ogura, on composing the game's main theme "Chaos."[1]
The first stage's theme, called "Captain Neo", is a reworked version of a song from an earlier arcade game by Taito, Metal Soldier Isaac II.[1] When a prototype of Darius was exhibited at a trade show, the song was used as a temporary placeholder. However, upon hearing the song at the trade show, Ogura liked it and decided to keep it: "I was surprised by its overwhelming power, so much that I could feel it in my bones."[1]
The musical score saw its first commercial release on CD,[12] vinyl[13] and cassette tape[14] on June 25, 1987 by Alfa Records through their video-game music-centric imprint G.M.O. Records.[15]
The Android, iOS, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 game Space Invaders Infinity Gene, also by Taito, includes an upgrade option to the same craft used in Darius, and has some of the same enemies. Darius R, a remake of the first Darius game with some different tunes and a fewer number of stages, was released for the Game Boy Advance in 2002.
Reception [ edit ]
List of sequels [ edit ]
Related games [ edit ]
Syvalion (1988): Originally presented as a sequel to Darius. Music from the game appears in Dariusburst.
(1988): Originally presented as a sequel to. Music from the game appears in. Metal Black (1991): Features a number of fish-based machines from Darius. It's a successor to Gun Frontier.
(1991): Features a number of fish-based machines from. It's a successor to. Border Down (2003): A successor to Metal Black developed by some members of the original team who started their own company, G.rev, to specifically make this game.By The Associated Press, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — The price of oil sank nearly 3 percent as a slowdown in China's growth added to doubts about the strength of the world economy and global demand for crude. It fell further after the close of trading when a bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed two people.
The Chinese government on Monday said growth in the world's second-largest economy slowed to 7.7 percent in the first quarter from 7.9 percent in the final quarter of last year. Growth was expected to accelerate slightly after several quarters of decline.
That slowdown, combined with weak economic reports from the U.S. and Europe's malaise, suggests that demand for crude and refined fuels won't be strong enough to absorb the ample supplies on the world market.
West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark crude in the U.S., dropped $2.58, or 2.8 percent, to finish at $88.71 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier in the session, it hit $87.86. Crude hasn't been that low since December, and it's dropped more than 8 percent in the past two weeks.
Brent crude, which is used to price oil used by many U.S. refiners to make gasoline, fell $2.41 to end at $100.63 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London. It briefly fell below $100 for the first time in nine months.
Just as regular trading closed, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line. Two were killed and dozens injured. Three hours after the bombing, President Barack Obama said the government was still not sure who was responsible.
By 6 p.m. EDT, WTI had dropped 1.4 percent to $87.48 while Brent was down 1.3 percent to $99.31 in electronic trading.
U.S. gasoline prices were lower Monday. The average price for a gallon of gasoline fell 3 cents over the weekend to $3.53. That's 26 cents lower than the high for the year, set on Feb. 27. And gas is now 38 cents cheaper than a year ago.
In other futures trading on the Nymex:
— Wholesale gasoline fell 4 cents to finish at $2.76 a gallon.
— Heating oil dropped 4 cents to end at $2.83 a gallon.
— Natural gas fell 9 cents to finish at $4.14 per 1,000 cubic feet.
__
Pablo Gorondi in Budapest contributed to this report.President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speak during the second presidential debate. Credit: Associated Press
In the debate between President Barack Obama and President Barack Obama - President Barack Obama won on Tuesday night.
The Obama of Debate 1 looked as if he didn't want to be there, raising questions about whether he really wanted to remain president. He was foggy and slow; he looked like he had taken a double dose of Benadryl.
But the Obama who showed up Tuesday night at Hofstra University was fully caffeinated. He was feisty, quick on his feet. He challenged Gov. Mitt Romney's assertions from the beginning. He scored points. The liberal base was thrilled.
How much does this matter? Quite a lot. If Obama hadn't done well, the story line that had played in the media for 13 agonizing days for the liberals would have continued. Poll after poll showed that Romney's well-received performance in the first debate helped him. But on Tuesday, Obama may have blunted Romney's rise by rising to the occasion in a way that clearly he did not on Oct. 3 in Denver.
Even so, Obama has yet to lay out a clear agenda for a second term. What does he want to do? What are his goals for the country? We wish we knew.
And yet Romney did himself no favors by fumbling a key GOP attack line - on the administration's handling of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya - which may blunt future efforts to raise the issue.
Here was the moment: Romney thought he had caught Obama in a fib when the president said, "I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror."
Said Romney: "I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."
Moderator Candy Crowley of CNN corrected the governor. The president did, in fact, use those words, she said.
Obama said that morning: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for."
But it's also true that the administration continued to indicate for days that the attack was spurred by a video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. And whatever Obama did or didn't say, his administration still hasn't explained how the consulate came to be so poorly protected, a tragic lapse that left four Americans dead, including one of this nation's finest diplomats.
Unfortunately for Romney, he muffed his chance and didn't pursue those lines of argument.
Earlier in the same exchange, Obama, with a look of utter contempt for Romney, looked the governor in the eye and said this:
"And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we've lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. That's not what we do. That's not what I do as president. That's not what I do as commander in chief."
If debates are about moments, that was the moment when the challenger lost his edge.
While Romney has no foreign policy experience, and at times has showed it, he has staked out positions in certain key theaters around the world that are tougher and more cognizant of real politick than has Obama.
Overall, we think Obama has successfully "reset" U.S. relations with the nation's friends around the world. But when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian question and U.S. policy toward Syria, a firmer hand is needed.
There will be another debate on Monday at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla. The topic: foreign policy. Romney will get another chance to make a stronger case. But he may never get a better chance than was handed to him Tuesday night.Sean Gallup/Getty Images Will TTIP be an ‘economic NATO’? Cooling ardor on both sides of the Atlantic threatens the very existence of trade deal.
Back in 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed a proposed transatlantic free trade pact as a job-creating, growth-boosting “economic NATO” that would forge new ties between old allies.
Three years later, hopeful presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appears less enthusiastic.
“Can you make it go away?” was the only-half-joking response of her campaign chairman, John Podesta, to a recent question on the trade deal now being negotiated between the United States and European Union.
Cooling ardor on both sides of the Atlantic threatens the very existence of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which was launched in a series of promising talks between Brussels and Washington in 2013.
Since then, TTIP has lost some of its shine, as the trade talks attracted unprecedented levels of public opposition.
Over 2.6 million people across Europe have signed a petition to stop TTIP and a smaller EU deal with Canada.
Concern over the impact of TTIP has united disparate groups — from French farmers to German constitutional lawyers and politicians on the left and right.
“TTIP represents a monumental power grab by corporations and it must be stopped in its tracks,” Keith Taylor, a British Green Party legislator told a recent European Parliament debate.
In the U.S., TTIP has been overshadowed by its Pacific counterpart, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Skeptics, who fear the impact of both deals on American jobs, include progressive Democrats, Tea Party protectionists and labor unions.
It’s perhaps unsurprising the world’s biggest trade negotiation should trigger such a king-sized reaction.
TTIP covers around a third of global trade. It would create an open market of 829 million consumers and expand a trade relationship that’s already worth €2 billion every day.
Supporters say an agreement would make a yearly €300 billion-plus contribution to the world economy, create hundreds of thousands of export-based jobs and make the average European family €500-a-year richer.
EU officials also promote the geo-political benefits, saying free trade could inject new life into the Atlantic alliance and set benchmarks that China and other emerging powers would find hard to ignore in future trade deals.
And the energy Russia’s international propaganda machine devotes to denouncing TTIP would suggest the Kremlin is worried by its potential to strengthen transatlantic ties.
Unlike traditional free trade treaties, TTIP is not primarily about cutting the tariffs and duties each side charges on imports from the other. They’re already low — averaging just 3 percent on goods traded across the Atlantic.
Instead, TTIP is focused on removing “non-tariff barriers” — harmonizing standards, cutting red tape and boosting safeguards for investors.
Supporters say that will make it easier and cheaper for exporters, who’ll no longer have to adapt to two sets of rules.
Not everybody’s convinced. Opponents’ long list of concerns range from the potential to erode public services and weaken environmental protection, to threats against cherished local food products.
American unions fear jobs could migrate to cheaper locations in eastern Europe. Consumer groups worry kids could be endangered by toys falling short of rigorous U.S. safety standards.
Many Europeans view with distaste the prospect of lower food quality controls forcing genetically modified grains, hormone-fed beef, chickens doused in chemicals and other American delicacies onto their dinner tables.
Campaigners on both sides of the pond fret that TTIP will empower multinational companies at the expense of parliaments and citizens, particularly through so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses that enable corporations to challenge national laws in secretive arbitration courts.
U.S. and EU negotiators insist the fears are unfounded and that both sides’ standards will be respected. The European Commission this week presented revised proposals for investor protection rules which it insisted would be “transparent, fair and based on democratic principles.”
In public at least, both sides are hopeful a deal can be clinched before the Obama administration ends in January 2017.
In private, U.S. and EU officials are more guarded about the outcome as the battle over TTIP rages on.
TTIP VOX POP
“I’m in favor of TTIP, but I’m not in favor of giving up European standards, European principles.”
— Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president
“The secrecy of the TTIP casts a shadow on the future of European democracy.”
— Julian Assange,WikiLeaks founder
“ISDS is now the most toxic acronym in Europe.”
— Cecilia Malmström, European commissioner for trade
“A clear signal of our resolve, to dismantle all trade barriers, and it would also provide important impetus for the development of the world economy,”
— Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor
“One of the greatest opportunities we have to turbocharge the global economy... a deal that could be worth up to £10 billion pounds a year for Britain alone. It would help to secure our long-term economic success and generate a better future for hardworking families back at home.”
— David Cameron, British prime minister
“This treaty is a bomb. Our high quality agriculture in Europe would disappear if our small farmers were exposed to competition with the American agro-industry... it would be another mortal [blow] for democracy.”
— Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front
“TTIP — Part of Grand U.S. Plan to Isolate Russia From Europe.”
— Headline in Russian news site Sputnik
“Can you make it go away?”
— John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman
“TTIP represents a land of opportunity for businesses.”
— David Caro, president of the European Small Business Alliance
“America and Europe have done extraordinary things together before. And I believe we can forge an economic alliance as strong as our diplomatic and security alliances.”
— Barack Obama, U.S. President
“TTIP represents a corporate power grab on a scale and depth never before imagined.”
— Vivienne Westwood, British fashion designer and member of Artists Against TTIP
“We can look at these trade bills over the years. Every one of them without exception causes American workers job losses. Millions of job losses. But yet they’re going to try the same thing again and hope for a different result. That’s insanity.”
— Harry Reid, Democratic Party leader in the U.S. Senate
“If both of us make up our minds that this will be a standard that the rest of the world has to meet, then we’ve done some good for everybody, including the workers.”
— Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)It's been tested, it's been debated, and it's now available to all: Valve announces the official launch of the Steam Linux client after nearly four months in beta. Expectedly, a sale is going on for all Linux-supported games in Steam's catalog, including Crusader Kings II and Counter-Strike: Source.
The sale lasts until February 21 and takes 50 to 75 percent off the 54 games Linux users can slot into their brand new platform. Team Fortress 2 joins the revelry by automatically awarding a free and tradeable in-game Tux accessory for all Linux mercs jumping into the free-to-play shooter before May 1. Prepare for an avalanche of crates, Ubuntuans.
Grab the Steam Linux client and browse the full list of discounted titles on the sale page. Welcome to Steam, Linux gamers.SO RECENTLY HULK'S BEEN TALKING ABOUT A FEW SHOWS THAT ARE WELL-INTENTIONED AND SAYING "THE RIGHT THING," BUT LACKING WHEN IT COMES TO CERTAIN STORYTELLING SKILLS OR EXECUTION. TODAY, HULK WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE OPPOSITE.
TO BE CLEAR, BLACK MIRROR IS A REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WELL-MADE SHOW. IT'S MOODY, DARK, CANTANKEROUS, AND A GREAT A SHOW-PIECE FOR A LOT OF TALENTED ACTORS AND DIRECTORS. AND LIKE THE BEST ANTHOLOGY SHOWS DEALING IN TOPICAL MORALITY: IT IS AWARE OF "WHAT IT'S TRYING TO SAY" AND OFTEN GOES ABOUT EXECUTING IT WITH RAZOR SHARP FOCUS AND REAL DRAMATIC CHOPS.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT HULK OFTEN THINKS "WHAT IT IS TRYING TO SAY" IS KINDA BULLSHIT.
LOOK, THIS PUTS US SQUARELY INTO THE LARGER CONVERSATION OF SOMETHING THAT IS ESSENTIALLY INARGUABLE. IF SOMEONE ELSE FINDS IT INSIGHTFUL, THAT'S COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY VALID. THIS IS LARGELY A CONVERSATION ABOUT VOICE, INTENT, AND MEANING. AND TO THAT, ALL HULK CAN DO IS MAKE A CASE ABOUT HOW HULK FEELS. AND SINCE IT'S AN ANTHOLOGY SHOW, HULK'S GOING TO HAVE TO GO THROUGH EACH EPISODE AND DIG INTO WHAT THOSE EPISODES ARE SAYING, BEFORE ADDING IT UP TO "THE OVERALL VIEWPOINT" OF THE SHOW ITSELF. AND, OF COURSE, HULK MORE MEANS ALL THIS AS A START OF DISCUSSION. IF YOU FEEL X OR Y IS VALID, HULK WOULD BE DELIGHTED IF YOU SPEAK UP. COOL? COOL.
SO HERE WE GO.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
FROM THE START, THIS EPISODE SHOWS HOW VERY EASY IT IS TO FALL INTO THE WORLD OF BLACK MIRROR. CHARACTERS COME TO LIFE WITH VIVID ARTICULATION. THE COMMITMENT TO A SENSE OF REALISM, DETAIL, AND NUANCED PERSONALITY MAKES IT ALL FEEL SO IMMEDIATE AND LIVED-IN. YOU CARE INSTANTLY AS THESE PEOPLE ARE SOON PRESENTED WITH THE HORRORS OF THE TECHNOLOGICALLY ABSURD. IN ESSENCE, IT IS STRONG WRITING AND POWERFUL IN ITS EFFECT OF DRAMATIZATION. YOU WILL NEVER FIND A MORE EMOTIONALLY GUT-WRENCHING EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING A PRIME MINISTER FUCK A PIG ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.
AND TO THIS DAY, HULK HAS NO IDEA WHAT BROOKER IS ACTUALLY CRITICIZING IN THIS EPISODE.
SERIOUSLY. BECAUSE THE ONLY THING IT SEEMS TO REALLY REFLECT IS THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE |
breath and played dead. He heard one of the gunmen yell "Anybody with a white hat stand up!". Pat had been wearing a cap at that time but couldn't remember what it looked like or if he took it off after the gunman said that. He next heard the other one say "This is for all the shit you put us through." He heard gunfire but didn't open his eyes till the sound of it was quite close and he heard his friend Makai groaning in pain.Looking over at Makai he saw blood flowing from the boy's right knee and more on Dan's foot. Pat moved between the two with the idea to provide first aid to Makai. He reached out to put his hand on Makai's wound to apply pressure and "blacked out": He had been shot twice in the head and again in the foot, though he had no memory of being shot.Pat passed in and out of consciousness for two hours on the floor of the library. The fire alarm finally woke him. His ears were ringing and he heard someone coughing, a sound that eventually stopped and didn't start again.Pat wasn't feeling any pain at the time but knew he could only use his left arm left leg and he kept blacking out on his way to the window that the shooters had broken when they fired out at police. He was eventually able to pull himself up onto the ledge. He heard someone outside yelling at him to "stay". He was confused at the time but waited and a few moments later heard another voice yell to him that it was okay to jump. He leaned out the window. He has no memory of being caught by the SWAT team members who were waiting below. His next recollection was that of being treated by emergency workers.If Pat had waited in the library for help he would likely have died. He was treated for two gunshot wounds to the head and one to the right foot as well as a laceration to his right inner elbow. He was later moved to Craig Hospital for spinal and cerebral rehabilitation. He returned to Columbine that fall, using a cane to help support his weight as he walked. On September 25, 1999 he was elected Columbine's homecoming king. He graduated from Columbine May 20, 2000 as a co-valedictorian. In 2004, Jefferson County reached a $117,500 settlement with Patrick Ireland. The sheriff's office assumed no liability in the settlement, successfully ending the last federal case against JeffCo.In 2009 Pat was doing well for himself: He was working as a financial rep and had married sweetheart Kacie. By 2012, he had 2 daughters and moved up to managing director for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network. That's when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. Still living with a bullet in his brain from the Columbine shooting, Pat gave an interview about his feelings on the shooting.
Michael Johnson, 15 in 1999.
Michael was outside the cafeteria with four friends: Denny Rowe,
At first Michael didn't know what was going on but he quickly realized bullets were hitting the ground near him and and his friends. He felt a sensation like someone had poured warm water on his left leg and he and his friends got up to run toward a shed that was about 120 yards away. As they ran he heard Mark cry out: "Oh my God! I've been shot!" as he fell to the ground.
Mike continued to run. He felt another "warm feeling" on the back of his jaw and realized he'd been shot too. He managed to make it as far as the shed. Denny, John, and Adam kept running and jumped the nearby fence. Michael lay down and propped himself against the shed where noticed the left leg of his blue jeans was covered in blood from mid-thigh down to his ankle.
Michael remained there next to the shed for a while. At one point a teacher, Mr Lowery, came by and told him that he was going to get him some help. Soon after Michael heard what he thought was a pipe bomb exploding then he lost consciousness for a bit. The next thing he knew, two students - Evan Todd and Ryan Barrett - were trying to help him. The next thing he remembered after that he was being removed from the shed area by law enforcement who then transported him to paramedics.
When asked by investigators, Mike Said he knew of
Michael was in intensive care for 8 days during which time doctors had to wire his jaw shut and repair a ruptured blood vessel in his leg. He was released April 28, 1999.
Though doctors thought he might lose his leg at one point, Mike can now run and has held a job at the Mann Theater. His parents Kathy and Gary felt that though they went through a lot, the ordeal made them closer as a family., 15 in 1999.Michael was outside the cafeteria with four friends: Denny Rowe, Mark Taylor, John Cook, and Adam Thomas. They were sitting on the grass near the east stairs when the shooting began.At first Michael didn't know what was going on but he quickly realized bullets were hitting the ground near him and and his friends. He felt a sensation like someone had poured warm water on his left leg and he and his friends got up to run toward a shed that was about 120 yards away. As they ran he heard Mark cry out: "Oh my God! I've been shot!" as he fell to the ground.Mike continued to run. He felt another "warm feeling" on the back of his jaw and realized he'd been shot too. He managed to make it as far as the shed. Denny, John, and Adam kept running and jumped the nearby fence. Michael lay down and propped himself against the shed where noticed the left leg of his blue jeans was covered in blood from mid-thigh down to his ankle.Michael remained there next to the shed for a while. At one point a teacher, Mr Lowery, came by and told him that he was going to get him some help. Soon after Michael heard what he thought was a pipe bomb exploding then he lost consciousness for a bit. The next thing he knew, two students - Evan Todd and Ryan Barrett - were trying to help him. The next thing he remembered after that he was being removed from the shed area by law enforcement who then transported him to paramedics.When asked by investigators, Mike Said he knew of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold but never actually dealt either one of them before. He told investigators that he thought they were members of the Trench Coat Mafia but didn't really know anything about the group.Michael was in intensive care for 8 days during which time doctors had to wire his jaw shut and repair a ruptured blood vessel in his leg. He was released April 28, 1999.Though doctors thought he might lose his leg at one point, Mike can now run and has held a job at the Mann Theater. His parents Kathy and Gary felt that though they went through a lot, the ordeal made them closer as a family.
Kacey Ruegsegger, 17 in 1999.
Kacey was in the library reading when the shooting began. When the call went out for everyone to get down, Kacey hid under one of the small tables in the southern bank of computer tables, and pulled a chair in front of herself. One of the gunmen stood in front of where she was hiding and told everyone with a white hat to get up so he could shoot them. They then shot an acquaintance of hers,
When they shot the boy who was hiding under the computer table next to her [later identified as
Kacey remained under the table after the person who shot her moved away and she continued to hear bangs, some of which she thought were bombs exploding. After the gunmen left the room, two students tried to help her get out: [Craig Scott], brother to victim [
Just months before the shootings Kacey had transferred to Columbine after two of her friends committed suicide and another had died of leukemia. Her parents wanted her to be in a more positive environment.
She suffered multiple injuries including a gunshot wound to the right shoulder, a through-and-through injury to her right hand that medical officials pulled a metal washer out of, and a gunshot graze on her neck. They pulled a shotgun wad out of her shoulder. At the hospital she was given at least two doses of morphine and was still in quite a bit of pain. A steel plate was put in her arm and she went through lengthy physical therapy. She was released from the hospital on May 1, 1999.
She went on to attend Colorado State University and had hopes of being an American Quarter Horse Association chapter champion in Denver once more, like she was before the shootings. As of April 2006, Kacey is fully recovered and, 17 in 1999.Kacey was in the library reading when the shooting began. When the call went out for everyone to get down, Kacey hid under one of the small tables in the southern bank of computer tables, and pulled a chair in front of herself. One of the gunmen stood in front of where she was hiding and told everyone with a white hat to get up so he could shoot them. They then shot an acquaintance of hers, Dan Steepleton. She also heard the gunmen make a racial slur to someone, something along the lines of: "Oh, a nigger. You're a dead black boy."When they shot the boy who was hiding under the computer table next to her [later identified as Steven Curnow ], she put her head down and covered her ears with her hands. She was then shot in the shoulder and when she cried out, the gunman who shot him told her to "stop your bitching". She lay down then and pretended to be dead.Kacey remained under the table after the person who shot her moved away and she continued to hear bangs, some of which she thought were bombs exploding. After the gunmen left the room, two students tried to help her get out: [Craig Scott], brother to victim [ Rachel ] who was killed outside, and a girl, [Sarah Houy]. Kacey was unable to move quickly and was trampled by other students who were in a rush to leave the area. She managed to make it out of the building and to the police waiting outside where she was rushed off to the triage area.Just months before the shootings Kacey had transferred to Columbine after two of her friends committed suicide and another had died of leukemia. Her parents wanted her to be in a more positive environment.She suffered multiple injuries including a gunshot wound to the right shoulder, a through-and-through injury to her right hand that medical officials pulled a metal washer out of, and a gunshot graze on her neck. They pulled a shotgun wad out of her shoulder. At the hospital she was given at least two doses of morphine and was still in quite a bit of pain. A steel plate was put in her arm and she went through lengthy physical therapy. She was released from the hospital on May 1, 1999.She went on to attend Colorado State University and had hopes of being an American Quarter Horse Association chapter champion in Denver once more, like she was before the shootings. As of April 2006, Kacey is fully recovered and happily married. She wrote a book that will hit Amazon on March 2019.
Names contained within brackets [ ] indicate the victim didn't know the person but subsequent investigation has provided the identity of the individual.Enzo Yaksic: Profiler 2.0
For decades, the FBI has relied on a flawed criminal profile to identify and catch serial killers. Now a Boston data geek thinks he’s found a better way.
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FBI agent Robert Ressler thought he’d seen it all. A member of the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, he had spent years tracking killers and trying to understand the nation’s most bizarre and chilling murders. But in 1978, a series of gruesome slayings put Ressler to the test. Over the course of a month, someone near Sacramento, California, had butchered six people and drunk their blood. His job was to determine what kind of person would be capable of such evil.
Ressler had never seen crimes quite like these, but his previous experience led him to believe that the murderer was likely a young white male with a history of mental illness; a loner who’d had trouble holding a job. Turned out, his hunch was right.
Ressler’s description and a well-timed tip led police to Richard Chase, who was living in an apartment teeming with rubbish and human body parts. An unmarried, unemployed white man who’d spent time in an institution, Chase fit Ressler’s sketch to a T. “When the murderer matched the profile,” Ressler later wrote, “that gave [the FBI] more information on how to… identify the characteristic signs that murderers leave behind.” The case, he added, helped refine the art of criminal profiling. “And I do mean the art,” he wrote, “because it had not yet approached the status of being a science.”
While the history of criminal profiling can be traced to Jack the Ripper in 1888, the idea of the serial-killer profile as we know it largely began with Ressler. To better understand these types of crimes, he and colleagues at the FBI spent several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s conducting jailhouse interviews with 36 serial and sexual murderers—including Chase—who had killed a combined total of 118 victims. Based on what these men—and they were all men, nearly all white—said about their childhoods, their modi operandi, and their motivations for killing, the FBI flagged patterns and similarities. Among them, the feds reported, were “major relationship deficiencies…in their interaction with men, perhaps stemming from the absent, cold, and unavailable father,” as well as “excessive involvement in solo sex,” fetishes, voyeurism, and pornography. The profilers concluded that the “low social attachment” and a “dominance of a violent, sexualized fantasy life sets into motion the attitudes and beliefs that trigger the deviant behavior of rape, mutilation, torture, and murder.”
That single study by Ressler and his colleagues carried enormous weight, spawning decades of widely consumed and highly embellished “facts” about serial murderers: They are white, male loners; they travel the country killing multiple victims for sexual gratification; their violence ratchets up over time; they attempt to engage the police in dialogue and learn about the investigation; once they start killing, they can never stop. For decades, investigators referred to that profile to help identify and capture the nation’s most prolific murderers. The study also created a cottage industry of serial-killer profiling that provided the basis for dozens of TV show and movie plots.
Lately, however, the legitimacy of the classic profile—and the methodology Ressler helped pioneer—have been viewed with increasing skepticism. In recent years, the FBI itself acknowledged that its original study was faulty: The sample size was too small, the information anecdotal. But elevating the art of profiling from gut instinct to hard science takes facts, stats, and replicable results. And that’s where the field has fallen short.
Data-driven research has evolved dramatically since serial killers first started capturing the public’s imagination, but academics and law enforcement officials continue to work in silos, hoarding their information. Meanwhile, criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders throughout the country have gone unsolved since the 1960s, with as many as 90,000 missing-persons cases active at any given time. No one knows how many killers have slipped through the cracks undetected because of the time-honored—yet flawed—practice of profiling.
In Boston, though, a 33-year-old Northeastern University graduate named Enzo Yaksic is determined to find out. Over the past several years, he has quietly helped create the largest existing nongovernmental database of serial-homicide offenders, and his work is poised to change everything we think we know about serial killers.
Yaksic is not an academic or a cop, but “an incredibly gifted amateur” criminologist, says Thomas Hargrove, director of the Murder Accountability Project, in the Washington, DC, area. In 2010, Yaksic founded the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative, which helped develop a database containing detailed information on 11,000 serial-murder cases—potentially more than the FBI. Yaksic hopes it will bring an end to the shortsighted practice of profiling and change criminology for good. So far, his obsession has yielded surprising results.
While Ressler’s model contained an extraordinarily limited amount of information from only a few dozen subjects, Yaksic’s shared database is enormous. And numerous cases within it point to a number of outliers: Gwendolyn Graham smothered elderly women; Mexican sisters Delfina and María de Jesús González recruited young women as prostitutes before dumping more than 90 bodies behind their brothel; African-American couple Alton Coleman and Deborah Brown raped and murdered numerous victims.
By looking at data instead of worn-out stereotypes, Yaksic says he was the first to assert that African-American serial killers are as prominent as their white counterparts—a conclusion that was later cited by famed California criminologist Eric Hickey and has since become more widely accepted among academics. What makes Yaksic’s collaborative groundbreaking is not simply the sheer volume of data it has amassed, but also the power it has to unite criminologists. A self-described “advocate for the open exchange of information,” Yaksic wants to coax the community of profilers out of their insular worlds and into a new era of statistical analysis. The collaborative is Yaksic’s attempt to synchronize and standardize serial-homicide data collection—and to make the information more widely available on the Internet for academic researchers and law enforcement. “Enzo,” Hargrove says, “is a national treasure.”
Until recently, though, extracting closely guarded information from homicide experts hasn’t been easy. “It has been an uphill battle trying to convince [everyone] that I belong,” says Yaksic, who makes his living as a project manager at a local hospital, while his efforts on the collaborative go entirely unpaid. “The way I frame these past few years is being a person working in the background trying to emerge into the foreground. Some folks respect that, while others would prefer if I remained in this background role forever.”Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenWoman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid Raising taxes on the wealthy is 'extremely popular,' says Dem pollster 64 percent say Democratic Party supports socialism, says poll MORE (D-Mass.) called on thousands of protesters at the Women’s March on Boston to "fight back" a day after President Trump took office.
“Now we can whimper, we can whine, or we can fight back. Me, I’m here to fight back,” Warren told the crowd at the Boston Common.
Warren appeared at the rally, a “sister march” of the Women’s March on Washington, on Saturday as protesters took to the streets in cities across America to demonstrate against Trump.
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Warren served as prominent critic of Trump during the presidential campaign, taking to Twitter multiple times to slam the then-GOP nominee.
“The fact is that the playing field has been tilted badly in favor of those at the top for a generation now,” Warren said.
“And now, President Trump and the Republican Congress are ready to ram through laws that will tilt it even harder.”The Myth of Authority
“Civilizations are not mandated by authorities, nor are they the products of systemic planning. People did not get together and say to one another “hey, let’s start a civilization!” Such cultures have been, rather, the unintended consequences arising from the interplay of creative forces that sustain and enhance life. The variability and cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques that can arise in pluralistic settings conducive to diversity and spontaneity, have been indispensable to the life of modern civilization. In much the same way that “brainstorming” sessions provide synergistic opportunities for individuals to come together to produce solutions to problems that none could have brought about on their own, a culture supportive of individuality can generate values and systems at exponential levels of creativity.”
– Butler Shaffer “The Wizards of Ozymandias”
What exactly is authority? According to Merriam Webster the definition is: power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior. For the purpose of this essay I will not address authority derived from voluntary interactions such as employer to employee relationships. Instead I will only address “authority” as perpetuated and assumed by government institutions.
Does the use of authority provide those which it is enacted on a benefit? Is there a value to authority? If societies did not grant authority to a group of individuals would this society collapse into chaos? If you were to ask the State the answer to these questions they would be answered with an undeniable Yes.
I’d like to challenge the paradigm of dependency on authority firstly by asking this question; from where is the State’s authority derived? Many people will refer to Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau in reference to something called the “Social Contract” which is a belief in the natural rights of citizens governed by an entity, be it Monarchy, Democracy, Republic, et al., and the authority granted to that government by the citizens to protect these natural rights. Recently people will have a tendency to also refer to the “Social Contract” as an agreement that all individuals in a society must abide by in order to have clean drinking water, roads, traffic lights, and all of the other amenities that government claims to provide. The reason I use the phrase, “claims to provide” is a simple one; does government actually build roads or water treatment facilities? No, government issues a government contract to a private company or group of individuals and those private entities build these things with the money that government gives them, your tax dollars.
The State only acts as a middle man in “providing” services. Additionally, because they are usually the sole purchaser of these services, an actual “market price” derived by supply and demand, does not exist. This leads to a multitude of inefficiencies, one of which is that government almost always over pays. The pentagon is infamous for paying thousands of dollars for a hammer, or toilet seat, or how about $998,798.00 for two, yes two.19 cent washers. For the purpose of keeping this essay under 500 pages, I will not go into great detail about the unrelenting torrent that is government spending. One only need look at the 16 trillion dollars of debt that Uncle Sam has racked up in your great grandchildren’s names to realize the horrid ineptitudes of government financial and economical knowledge.
So, we, as a people, who find ourselves subject to this “social contract” that none of us actually agreed upon, are coerced with the threat of violence and imprisonment, to hand over the fruits of our labor to an institution with a proven track record of corruption and incompetence, in order for this institution to “protect us” by invading other countries and “furnish basic amenities” by grossly overpaying for them, all the while using our labor as their interminable resource. Moreover, if we challenge this monolith of institutionalized cronyism we are met with disdain by the State and the masses alike. We are called things like “un-American” and told that if we don’t like it we can “move to Somalia.”
Unfortunately this conviction of a reliance on the State is hard to overcome. I believe in a very simple truth of self-ownership, you own you and I own me. There is no room in self-ownership for violent coercion. While self-ownership is a simple truth, on the other side is the convoluted misconception of the necessity of the State; decades of dependency have left us with the inability to contemplate life without the State; or if we do think of a Stateless society we imagine a world similar to the Mad Max movies, due to the negative connotation of words like, anarchy. Anarchy is not the absence of rule; it is the absence of rulers, its practice is quite the opposite of Mel Gibson fighting off gangs of sadist bikers. The founders, or at least the “anti-federalists,” knew the benefits of a Stateless society. Had it not been for men like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, who stood against the federalists, those in favor of a strong central government, we would not have even had the basic Bill of Rights.
Antifederalist papers Number 6, pontificates on the battle between those that wished to give power immediately to a small group of would-be tyrants for their “safety” and those that knew the detriments of such actions. Under the pseudonym, “CENTINEL,” the antifederalists penned this conundrum quite well, “The evils of anarchy have been portrayed with all the imagery of language in the growing colors of eloquence; the affrighted mind is thence led to clasp the new Constitution as the instrument of deliverance, as the only avenue to safety and happiness. To avoid the possible and transitory evils of one extreme, it is seduced into the certain and permanent misery necessarily attendant on the other.” We would have slipped back into despotism in a matter of decades had it not been for the antifederalists as they were the ones with the basic knowledge to not agree to a Constitution without trying to explicitly limit the power of government.
The antifederalists’ Bill of Rights acted as temporary shield against government coercion. This allowed for creativity, self-direction, and free exchange amongst the people; and over the course of the next century and a half we would see some of the most amazing innovations mankind has ever witnessed, all of it, in spite of a centrally planned economy, and because of voluntary interactions between free people, otherwise known as anarchy. Now the Bill of Rights is nothing more than a parchment speed bump for the despots in D.C. that serves to temporarily slow them down before they enforce their will upon the masses.
“But who would make the laws?” The dependency on the State for this perceived order also blinds people to the reality of law. Law is not a top down command that the State wields over the populace. With some basic research of the history of Common Law we can see that localized disputes between individuals and the steep costliness of violence to resolve those disputes have led to privatized arbitration instead of brute force in order to solve problems.
Eventually “Common” disputes on a local level happen so often that they are easily resolved by referencing outcomes of prior arbitration; this resolution based on a previous outcome can be referred to as a law. Over time these “laws” become common knowledge within localized areas and as most people know the outcome of disputes, they will tend to avoid being involved in the dispute as they know that the resolution will not favor them based on repetitive past rulings. Order is an organic and dynamic process and the natural evolution of any group of humans coming together in a communal way; we would never even have a community if this were false; for liberty is the mother of order, not the daughter. It is only in the last century and a half that we have allowed government to take control of arbitration and create Federal, State, and Local Courts. Even in spite of government control of the court system anarchy shines through as the Supreme Court even acknowledged in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). They proclaimed that the only reason the US laws can claim any superiority over other nations, is due to the “laboratory of the states,” and that localized interactions teach us the rules which most efficiently resolve disputes.
We are surrounded by anarchy/voluntaryism yet people are still unable to see it. Walk into a store and purchase a product that you choose and you have just participated in anarchy; the voluntary exchanges between different parties for a mutual benefit. The only factors that the State adds to this voluntary exchange are hurdles for those who wish to conduct these peaceful processes. Remove the State, and the peaceful process stays the same, the only thing eliminated is the ability for these businesses to use the force of the State to mandate that you purchase their products and or make illegal the products that compete with theirs.
Government also adds one more crucial benefit for itself and the monopolies that it represents and that is the ability to privatize their gains while collectivizing their losses amongst the populace via taxation. Imagine the incentive that is created by this process of being able to partake in enormous risk and pass the failure of that venture on to the citizens of the State. The Orwellian nature of the State will convince the masses that the abhorrent looting of their grandchildren is a necessity as these pillars of our order have become so crucial to the survival of mankind that they have been deemed, “Too Big to Fail.”
We have reached a critical apex in which all empires eventually find themselves. We have forgotten the benefits and enlightenment that stem from a dynamic society and instead rely on a solipsistic institution that forces assimilation through coercion and violence. We have created in our own imaginations this utopian vision of a father like figure that will dole out justice and equality with its infallible, virtuous, and omnipresent hand of enlightenment; all the while we remain oblivious to the sheer antithesis of the aforementioned setting.
We now worship the institutions that purport their grandiose provisions. Instead of using the rule of law and dynamically interacting on an individual basis we have created an ends out of the very institutions that arose from this dynamic interaction. We no longer rely on the outcome of interactions but instead rely on the institutions themselves. These institutions that we have created now act in the interest of solely preserving themselves regardless of ethical or moral decree. We have let truth become a commodity to be negotiated as long as it serves the collective interest of institution.
We are witnessing a decline of empire. Rest assured that the Empire will not fall without a fight however. Those of us that will refuse to participate in this inexorable collective collapse will be deemed enemies of the State as the institution grasps the tassels of the self-created iron curtains and draws them shut as a last attempt to keep the masses ignorant and docile.
I will welcome this collapse, as chaos, while unpredictable, has given us the essence of ingenuity and enlightenment. Humanity will once again be thrust into the dynamic interactions that produce great minds and innovations. The only question is that will we be able to resist societal entropy this time around? Will we recognize the myth of authority? Will we not be so complacent and apathetic as to hand over our wellbeing to an inescapably venal group of snake oil salesman that promise us security for our servitude?
My outlook remains optimistic. With the massive exchange of information and ideas that we are witnessing via the internet and the rate at which people are realizing the irrelevance of assimilation into an inept monopoly of violence, I remain heartened. It is up to us. It is up to the ones who can see the State for what it is, a succubus of intellect and accountability, to incite this paradigm shift.
We are wrapped in an archetype of consumption and subservience holding this false belief of the unattainable “greater good.” We, as humans, tend to be self-interested in nature. It is this self-interest of the individual that allows for free expression, the creation of personal boundaries that define peace and the inviolability of private property that lead to cooperation of individuals for a mutual ends. We are already surrounded by this voluntary interaction and we need only to realize the futility of violent institutions and their tendencies to organize towards despotism. Civilizations are not the product of a central authority or directives handed down from the enlightened overlords. They happen from the spontaneous, peaceful, and voluntary exchanges of creativity and inventive and life sustaining processes. I owe nobody that which I have not voluntarily agreed to give, I owe you only non-aggression.Fallout 4 preloads on Steam have been available since Friday last week, and with the game just a day away, this is a friendly reminder that now would also be a good time for Nvidia owners to upgrade their drivers.
Nvidia released a new Game Ready Driver today—version 358.91, if that sort of thing interests you—which promises an "optimal experience" for Fallout 4, as well as Star Wars Battlefront and StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. The new driver makes a number of small tweaks and fixes, updates SLI and 3D Vision profiles for a handful of other games, and probably does a few other things that you don't really care about.
What you care about is Fallout 4, and if you're going to play it on an Nvidia GPU, you'll want to snag this driver. It's available through the GeForce Experience app (if you have it running, you may have already received notification that this driver is available) or directly from the Nvidia website.
Thanks, Gameranx.AARON KILEY From the March 2010 Issue of Car and Driver
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For the past few years, various carmakers have been offering blind-spot detection systems for their cars’ side mirrors. Often complex, these systems employ cameras or radar to scan the adjoining lanes for vehicles that may have disappeared from view.
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) published a paper in 1995 suggesting how outside mirrors could be adjusted to eliminate blind spots. The paper advocates adjusting the mirrors so far outward that the viewing angle of the side mirrors just overlaps that of the cabin’s rearview mirror. This can be disorienting for drivers used to seeing the flanks of their own car in the side mirrors. But when correctly positioned, the mirrors negate a car’s blind spots. This obviates the need to glance over your shoulder to safely change lanes as well as the need for an expensive blind-spot warning system.
The only problem is getting used to the SAE-recommended mirror positions. The cabin’s rearview mirror is used to keep an eye on what is coming up from behind, while the outside mirrors reflect the area outside the view of the inside rearview mirror.
Those who have switched to the SAE’s approach swear by it, however, some drivers can’t adjust to not using the outside mirrors to see directly behind the car and miss being able to see their own car in the side mirrors. To them we say, “Have fun filling out those accident reports.”Image copyright Laurence Cawley Image caption Det Ch Insp Andy Guy revisited the scene near Cockley Cley where the body of a headless woman was found 41 years ago
A police inquiry attempting to identify a headless body found more than 40 years ago has located 263 missing women safe and well around the country.
The body was found in August 1974 at Cockley Cley, near Swaffham, Norfolk.
Det Ch Insp Andy Guy said as part of the inquiry it gathered together more than 500 missing women cases to eliminate possible matches.
Looking at these cases, police have found a number alive and have informed them if relatives want to contact them.
Image copyright Norfolk Police Image caption Police were still continuing their investigation to identify the woman, who was found in a pink nightdress tied and wrapped up, and her killer
Police also traced a further 52 women, listed as missing, who they found to have died.
Det Ch Insp Guy, who took on the case in 2007, said police were still continuing their investigation to identify the woman, who was found in a pink nightdress tied and wrapped up in a National Cash Registers' plastic sheet, and her killer.
One line of inquiry is that she may be a woman known as The Duchess, who lived in Great Yarmouth and may have worked as an escort.
The woman, who disappeared in the mid-1970s, is thought to have come from Denmark, which fits in with a DNA profile of the body suggesting the woman came from and had lived in that part of Europe.
Unusual rope
Image copyright Norfolk Police Image caption Unusual rope from Dundee was found with the body
Police are also keen to find out more information about an unusual piece of rope found with the body.
Det Ch Insp Guy said officers investigated the rope and found that it was made of four strands, rather than the more usual three or five strands.
He talked to a rope expert who told him the rope composition "suggests it was made for use with agricultural machinery".
The rope was traced to Dundee, where that type of rope was made, but there the trail runs cold as the firms have long since gone out of business.
Det Ch Insp Guy said: "The Duchess lived in the Great Yarmouth docks and was well-known and a bit of a character.
"We know she spent some time in custody (but the records have long since been destroyed) and we know people who knew her and spent time with her, but nobody knows her name."
He called on anyone with information about this woman or The Duchess herself to contact Norfolk Police in confidence.
Image copyright Norfolk Police Image caption The woman was found wrapped up in a National Cash Registers embossed plastic sheetThis review could’ve opened two ways. A warning to those who hype shit up beyond reason and end up disappointed, or reveling in the fact that my unrealistic levels of excitement were justified. This is about a kung fu space cat fighting an interstellar blob and it was directed by the dude who did Riki-Oh; how do you THINK this is gonna go down?
THE CAT
original title: 衛斯理之老貓 (Lao mao)
aka: The Thousand Years Cat
Hong Kong, 1992, Ngai Choi Lam
The Cat is an early nineties scifi/horror/action film from director Ngai Choi Lam or one of his two thousand pseudonyms. You may know him under his more famous title “that guy who directed Riki-Oh.” Until I saw trailers for The Cat I had never even really thought about delving into his films, but now, slowly but surely, I’m building a collection. This particular release is so pulpy it gives Riki-Oh‘s manga-come-to-life image a run for its money. It tells the story of a trio of aliens aiming to get back to their home planet after being marooned on Earth by an amorphous blob of betentacled evil. Also one of them is a cat. I don’t know why.
In simplest terms, it’s a man versus monster story with visual themes that make it feel like a Hong Kong action take on John Carpenter’s The Thing. This beast from the waking nightmares of an anime schoolgirl even absorbs and possesses humans left and right with its girthy tentacles to use as fleshy meat puppets just like its arctic cousin. Its first victim is a dead or dying hobo in a drainage ditch and boy is his bug eyed, slowly melting form wasted. I wanted to see a zombie hobo fight a space cat and I didn’t get that. What a tease. On the plus side, we do get to see a dog and a cat (at least a puppet of one) have an extended martial arts battle in a junkyard. Eventually the aliens team up with a famed adventurer and |
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This is a statement of a procedure that we intend to use in the event of a local church wishing to withdraw from the Yearly Meeting. It is consistent with relevant sections of Faith and Practice, and with other actions taken by the Yearly Meeting in previous similar situations. NWYM Faith and Practice states: “As an affiliate of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church, each local church acknowledges that the Yearly Meeting has complete authority in all matters affecting the Yearly Meeting and its affiliated churches.” Therefore, there must be YM involvement when a church intends to leave the YM for any reason. This is because such an act has wide reverberations across the YM and because there are legal requirements to be clarified and met. The process of leaving will be initiated when a congregational business meeting provides the YM with a formal minute that the congregational business meeting approved stating the decision to leave. The first group to respond will be the Elders. Their authority derives from F&P 7.01.06: “Whenever necessary, investigate problems in a local church or ministry point, endeavoring to help the church maintain its active relationship with the Yearly Meeting and with the community. If the Board judges that this cannot be achieved, it may take action it deems necessary including, but not limited to, discontinuing the church, effecting a union with another Friends Church, or changing its status to a ministry point.” Because when a church decides to leave the YM, the entire YM will experience the loss, which may indeed meet the criterion of “shattering,” the NWYM elders are authorized to intervene in accordance the F & P guidelines about “Under the Care of Elders”: “While the decision to come under the care of the Elders is usually initiated by the local church, there are times when the BoE may choose to propose such an arrangement first. Exceptional cases where the church is in severe decline, is experiencing unresolved conflict, or is out of compliance with Faith and Practice in a way that is shattering to the local church or Yearly Meeting community, may prompt the BoE to intervene and place the local church under their care.…In situations in which a ministry point or local church continues to deteriorate, remains ineffective or out of unity with NWYM Faith and Practice, the BoE, acting for the Yearly Meeting, may discontinue the church or the association of the church with Northwest Yearly Meeting, or it may effect a union with another Friends church.” The NWYM elders will follow the process outlined in F & P for such an intervention. They will initiate an interview process with congregants about the desire and decision to leave. They will meet with the congregation to review findings and correct misinformation. The information will come to the NWYM elders for their discernment. If Elders discern differently from the local congregation, they may encourage the church to reconsider, to temporarily come under the care of NWYM Elders for counsel and support. If the Elders discern that the local congregation has followed appropriate process in arriving at their decision, and that their leaving will not shatter the YM, a committee made up of representatives of the AC, Trustees, and Elders will meet with the congregation’s leadership
This group will work with the local congregational leaders to make A plan for the church property
A plan for leaving the NWYM 501(c)3 and finding another 501(c)3 Removing membership (and recording) or transferring to another denomination The NWYM must be involved as well in any decision to form a new yearly meeting from churches presently a part of NWYM. As F & P states: Areas whose members wish to be set off and established as a new yearly meeting should inform the Yearly Meeting of that desire and of the concurrence of the constituent churches in the proposal. The Yearly Meeting then considers the proposal and makes a decision. If action is favorable and a new yearly meeting is to be established, the Yearly Meeting appoints a committee, not to exceed ten in number, to attend the opening of the new yearly meeting and to present the authorizing minute and inaugurate sessions in accordance with Friends form of government. ANTHEM CHURCH
Exit Proposal to NWYM In October of 2015, the body at Anthem Friends Church made the difficult, yet unanimous decision to withdraw from the Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends. Despite our withdrawal from the Yearly Meeting, we at Anthem remain grateful for the past and continued investment of the Yearly Meeting into the Kingdom of God in North Idaho. We also acknowledge that our withdrawal has resulted in the loss ofresources to the Yearly Meeting that hinders its mission and future church-planting activities in North Idaho and adjoining regions such as Eastern Washington. Like the Yearly Meeting, we at Anthem sincerely desire to continue to support the work of the Holy Spirit by planting new churches in Kootenai County, North Idaho and adjoining regions. In response to our withdrawal the Yearly Meeting has requested an exit fee equal to ten percent (10%) of the value of all Anthem Church properties. Based on current assessed values, the exit fee would be $296,000. In addition, the Yearly Meeting has requested that the Twin Lakes camp property be surrendered to the Yearly Meeting. It is our position that the NWYM has no legal or equitable claim to any of the assets of Anthem Church.
Nevertheless, in the interest of our shared goal to see the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed in North Idaho and beyond, Anthem Church has agreed to voluntarily pay an exit fee to the NWYM equal to ten percent (10%) of the assessed value of all Anthem Church properties ($296,000). In return, the Yearly Meeting has agreed to waive and forgive the exit fee in full if Anthem Church uses the exit fee amount for church planting activities in North Idaho and beyond over the next five (5) years. Church planting activities include, without limitation: purchasing and/or leasing real property, supporting new pastors in full or part time ministry, supporting Christian education through schools, camps and other programs, supporting local missionaries in Kootenai County, North Idaho and beyond.
The Yearly Meeting also acknowledges and agrees that Anthem is fully released from the NWYM with all of its assets free and clear of any claim or demand by the Yearly Meeting, and with the Yearly Meeting’s blessing to continue the work that God has called Anthem to perform in Kootenai County and wherever the Holy Spirit leads. We, the pastors and elders of Anthem Church, solemnly commit to pray for God’s blessing on our brothers and sisters in Christ at the Yearly Meeting. Signed by Chris Lauri, Lead Pastor, and Jackson Hits, executive Pastor Date 7-6-2016 NWYM Representative Date NWYM Representative Date 251 W. MILES AVE // THISISOURANTHEM.COM // 208.772.7544 November 3, 2016 Anthem Letter to NWYM Dear Leadership of the Northwest Yearly Meeting,
ANTHEM CHURCH
Meeting Request Response The Elders of Anthem Church met yesterday to discuss your request for a face-to-face meeting in Hayden. While we appreciate your desire to engage in direct communication, we believe that such a meeting would be premature at this time. You will recall that we traveled to Newberg in June of this year and met with several representatives from the Yearly Meeting. Following that gathering, Anthem presented a detailed written proposal for your consideration. To date we have not received a substantive response to our proposal. Our proposal was offered in good faith as a comprehensive resolution of all issues related to Anthem Church assets and our withdrawal from NWYM. We would appreciate the courtesy of a detailed written response to that proposal, and we will consider your response to be made by persons with the authority to legally bind the NWYM if the terms are accepted. Upon receipt of your substantive written response, we will give careful consideration to your proposed terms and we will reply in a timely manner. We sincerely hope you receive this request in the spirit of mutual respect and love with which it is made. Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to your reply. Best regards, Anthem Church Elders Letter from Northwest YM Leadership to Anthem December 9, 2016 Anthem Church Chris Lauri, Pastor
251 W. Miies Avenue
Hayden Lake, ID 83835-9622 Dear Chris,
I am happy to be able to get back to you and Anthem Church on the matters we have been discussing, as to the future of Twin Lakes Camp and the Anthem church property itself. The Administrative Council of Northwest Yearly Meeting appointed a subcommittee to consider the Anthem proposal submitted in June of this year. This group was made up of members of the Trustees, Administrative Council and yearly meeting Elders, all of which had been present at the June meeting. This group made recommendations to the Administrative Council which then issued a decision. In regard to Twin Lakes Camp, the Administrative Council proposes that the camp be retained by Anthem Church. This recognizes the significant financial investment which Hayden Lake Friends and now Anthem has made in the camp. This proposal is made on the following conditions: –The parties will sign and record a memorandum of agreement that Anthem Church owns Twin Lakes Camp. If the camp is sold within a l 0-year period, Anthem Church will return 25% of the proceeds to Northwest Yearly Meeting (which will be used for benefit of the In land Area Friends churches).
–Anthem will allow use of the camp by In land Area Friends churches at a reduced rate. It is suggested that the 20% discount offered by Twin Rocks Friends Camp be used as a model.
–That Inland Area Friends churches will continue to have a presence on the camp board of directors to work in partnership with Anthem Church.
–That a way be found by Anthem Church to permanently honor those churches and individuals which gave of time, expertise and financial support to establish the camp. In regard to the Anthem church property itself, the subcommittee and Administrative Council were not satisfied with the proposal made by Anthem. While we applaud your desire to plant churches, it was felt strongly that this did not honor the desire of the Hayden Lake Friends Church and its members to remain a Friends Church, and the proposal was not adequate or acceptable. With that in mind, Northwest Yearly Meeting proposes that Anthem Church return/pay the Yearly Meeting for the Anthem church property an amount equal to 7% of the value of the church property and improvements based on an independent appraisal by a qualified third party that is mutually acceptable to the parties. The cost of would be divided equally between the Church and Northwest Yearly Meeting. We believe this to be a generous offer by Northwest Yearly Meeting based on its Faith and Practice and would allow Anthem to continue with its vision. In consideration for the 7% payment, Northwest Yearly Meeting will relinquish its legal right to retain the entirety of the property and improvements and cooperate on providing any necessary documentation that the Anthem church property is fully yours. While we grieve the loss of the Anthem Church from Northwest Yearly Meeting it is our desire that your separation might be a peaceable one. In that spirit, we hope that you will agree to meet with Retha McCutchen, General Superintendent, Debbie Harrison, Assistant Clerk and Roger Watson, Director of Finance and Development to discuss any disagreements in a face to face meeting. Please let us know when you can as to whether the above offer is acceptable. If so, please sign and return a copy of this letter. This offer is made on behalf of the Northwest Yearly Meeting and, if accepted, we will prepare and send you the legal documentation necessary to accomplish the transactions. Sincerely yours, Roger Watson,
Director of Finance & Development,
For and on behalf of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends Church, by its authority The foregoing offer is accepted and approved. ANTHEM CHURCH, INC.
By
Name (printed):Snapchat is attempting to raise fresh funds that would value the less than four-year-old company at up to $19bn, according to Bloomberg. The Los Angeles-based company, which makes mobile apps that allow users to send photos and videos which self-delete after a few seconds, is reportedly trying to raise $500m of venture capital investment that would value the firm at $16-$19bn.
Snapchat, which was created in founder Evan Spiegel’s Stanford University fraternity house in September 2011, was valued at $10bn when it raised $486m from investors, including Yahoo, last year according to Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.
Spiegel, 24, who reportedly briefly dated Taylor Swift, turned down a $3bn takeover offer from Facebook in 2013. He is estimated, by Forbes, to retain a 15% in Snapchat, which would be worth $2.85bn if the company achieves a $19bn valuation.
The company says its users, who are mostly teenagers, send more than 700m “snaps” every day. Snapchat did not respond to requests for comment.By the time readers will have read these few paragraphs, you may be left with the breathlessness of an airline pilot who’s just realised he landed his plane slipping yards below the belly of another one taking off in the opposite direction. They call it a near miss, don’t they? To make you grasp what British people spared themselves in what I call 'the historic UK near miss with Europe' – I ask you to consider the following. Please don’t quit halfway through - because the shocking bit comes at the end. Picture this - the UK Treasury Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie is sitting at an ordinary meeting to discuss finance.
Midway through, some foreign technocrats enter the scene and demand immediate attention. Well, as it happened these men are from the EU Commission and the ECB and have the power to question the chairman at will.
The UK always maintained a safe distance from this abomination of democracy, and finally voted out it altogether Paolo Barnard
Here’s the conversation as it unfolds: “Mr Tyrie, will you and your party back ‘our man’ as next British Prime Minister? We mean, now.” The question, in its absurdity, takes the chairman aback, and he replies: “Gentlemen, we do have a Prime Minister in power, we’ll vote at the next General Election”. “No, Sir,” impatiently replies the foreign technocrat. “Let us be straight here: either you back ‘our man’ as next British PM now or we will bankrupt your county in no time, is that clear?”. The foreign technocrats leave, and it becomes apparent to the UK Treasury Committee that this coup d’etat has already been presented as an “offer they can’t refuse” to top British politicians and MPs. In fact four days later the incumbent Prime Minister suddenly resigns and the technocrats’ man enters Downing Street. These events didn't happen in the UK. However, if you think this fictional scenario sounds like an absurd B movie script - then look at what happened on November 9 2011, in my home country Italy. Instead of Mr Tyrie, it's Italian Senate Budget Committee Chair Massimo Garavaglia, a government coalition partner. The EU technocrats remain who they were, and ‘their man’ is EU hawk Mario Monti, who in fact became unelected Italian Prime Minister just seven days later on November 16.
GETTY • YOUTUBE In an Express.co.uk article Italian journalist Paolo Barnard explained how Brexit SAVED the UKThe Cricket Board today rubbished former England great Ian Botham's criticism of the highly lucrative Indian Premier League, saying he had no locus standi, and advised him to first get his facts right before commenting on the Twenty20 League. "Let him get his facts correct first. He has asked how the other boards have allowed IPL to happen. The BCCI has distributed over ten million US dollars as compensation to the other cricket boards for allowing their players to play in the IPL," fumed BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel, when asked for his reaction to Botham's statement made at the annual MCC Spirit of Cricket Cowdrey Lecture at Lord's in London on September 3.
"How on earth did the IPL own the best players in the world for two months a year and not pay a penny to the boards who brought these players into the game?" Botham had queried about the League that has revolutionised world cricket by offering players amounts of money undreamt of previously. Botham also wanted the IPL to be scrapped as he felt it was "too powerful for the long-term good of the game and also claimed that the franchise-based league provides the "perfect opportunity for betting and therefore fixing" and "players are slaves to it".
"I'm worried about the IPL. In fact, I fear it shouldn't be there at all. It is changing the priorities of world cricket," the 58-year-old former England captain and all rounder said in his lecture.Talking to PTI, Patel wondered about the 'locus standi' of Botham to comment on IPL and gently reminded the former England player of his dalliance with disgraced Texas financier Allen Stanford who promised to set up an IPL-type T20 League, but then was put behind bars in USA for defrauding investors through a Ponzi scheme, putting an end to his T20 dream."I can still visualise the photo of Botham sitting in the front when Stanford went to England. And he has the temerity to talk about IPL. We don't want his advice. We have enough top players like Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Kapil Dev and Rahul Dravid to advice us," he remarked.
Meanwhile, Patel also said that it was premature to talk about former Test all rounder Shastri's services being requisitioned as the Indian team director during the World Cup in early 2015, following his successful stint in the same post in the ongoing ODI series in England which India have wrapped up after losing the Test series 1-3 to the same opponents.Things are happening, and we are getting mighty close to releasing Killer Instinct on Steam. This is where you come in.
We need YOUR help to test cross-network functionality in Killer Instinct on Steam and Xbox One, so naturally, we need some helpful volunteers who want to play KI a ton over the next week or so, helping us to determine if there are any issues in the “wild.” Oh, I should mention, this thread will be for users looking to play on Steam. There are plenty of Xbox One users out there.
What I need from you, first, is a verbal yes that you would like to participate. That’s it. I will be selecting names from a hat, if you will, for participants. Not everyone will be able to get in, but don’t take that as anything other than random chance. Still, want to present you, our most active forum users, with the opportunity.
Please only reply if you have an interest in participating, and playing…this weekend! Any questions feel free to ask, but again, operating at the speed of light here, so won’t have a ton of answers for you until we get rolling. Keep in mind, you will be signing an NDA. This is a test. There will be bugs. Currently, internal tests have been going too smoothly for comfort, thus the expansion. We will also ask that you share your experiences with us, helping us create the best game for everyone when it launches.
Thanks much!
-RukariFew countries have tighter restrictions on women's freedoms than Saudi Arabia: Saudi women are barred from traveling, working or attending school without permission from a father, husband or other male guardian. They're also unable to vote, though they've been promised that will change in 2015 for local elections.
While women's rights activists in Saudi Arabia have made some small progress in the past few years, the Saudi government has recently expanded its oversight of women's activities: Saudi men have since last week been receiving unsolicited text messages alerting them when their wives or daughters are leaving the country, according to CNN.
Saudi men are reportedly getting these texts even if they're traveling alongside their wives, daughters or other female relatives.
The Saudi government has had an electronic notification system like this in place since 2010, but it would previously only notify men who opted-in to the service. Now it's apparently texting all men, regardless of whether they have signed up for the notifications.
Showing that technology's nature lies in the hands of its users, news of and uproar against the text notifications first spread after Manal al-Sherif, a prominent Saudi women's rights activist, tweeted about them.
Al-Sherif first rose to prominence in 2011 after uploading a YouTube video of herself defying the driving ban on women. She was then arrested, jailed and later released on bail.
Photo via Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty ImagesAustralia Has Already Hit 1 Gigawatt Of Solar Installed In 2017, Breaking Multiple Records
December 12th, 2017 by Joshua S Hill
Australia has already reached 1 gigawatt (GW) worth of solar installed in 2017 according to new figures from SunWiz, the quickest it has taken and only the second time that Australia has installed at least 1 GW.
Australian solar consultants SunWiz published new data this week outlining 10 solar records that have already been broken this year, including its lead highlight revealing that Australia has already installed 1 GW worth of solar (as of the end of November) — the quickest the country has reached the milestone. This is made up of 893 megawatts (MW) of sub-100 kW PV and another 114 MW of systems over 100 kW, totaling just over 1 GW worth of solar.
Further, SunWiz expects the total of sub-100kW solar installations to reach between 1.05 GW and 1.10 GW once the year comes to a close, which means total solar commissioned in 2017 will reach at least 1.16 GW.
The only other time Australia has reached 1 GW worth of installed solar was back in 2012 when 1,058 GW was installed, and SunWiz’ figures predict that Australia will eclipse that by the end of the year.
A record volume of commercial rooftop solar PV has already been commissioned, with 285 MW already installed in the 10 kW to 100 kW range, beating the previous best of 228 MW installed in 2016. November was also a record for sub-100 kW solar with 122 MW worth of small-scale technology certificates (STCs, also known as Renewable Energy Certificates, or RECs) registrations beating the previous record held back in 2011.
STC Registrations
Other milestones include record solar PV registered in New South Wales in any month, record average system size in the sub-100 kW market (6.7 kW/system), and record volume in every commercial system size sub-range.
Capacity By Size Sub-RangeIN AN ironic technology twist, Australia's best-known cult video collector will join forces with an emerging video-on-demand portal to showcase his extensive collection.
Andrew Leavold, who closed the doors of the iconic Trash Video store in West End last year, has struck a deal to supply a series of cult video reviews and establish a virtual shop under his former brand name.
He said his mission was still to turn people on to the weird and wonderful in film and TV.
"The content to be provided for VideoZoo will be a combination between an online magazine and a TV show," he said.
"I'll play the role of circus master and showcase the best of cult film and TV."
Confidential reported in September that the old Trash Video shopfront had been converted into boutique bar The End.
The watering hole has become a firm favourite on the local scene, a fitting end to the Trash Video store's physical incarnation.
Originally published as Virtual rerun for cult video iconRichard Yong Stands Tall After Winning the 2015 Aussie Millions $100,000 Challenge
January 31, 2015 Chad Holloway Donnie Peters
"Where's the party at?" shouted Phil Ivey from the rail, looking on after his friend Richard Yong was busy basking in the bright lights after his big win.
That's certainly a question worth asking, as Yong topped the field of 70 entries in the 2015 Aussie Millions $100,000 Challenge to win a massive AU$1.87 million.
$100,000 Challenge Final Table Results
Place Player Prize (AU$) 1 Richard Yong $1,870,000 2 Ole Schemion $1,350,000 3 Scott Seiver $1,000,000 4 Justin Bonomo $800,000 5 Jason Mo $630,000 6 Erik Seidel $500,000 7 Dani Stern $400,000 8 Alex Trevallion $310,000
After a few days off, the final eight players returned to the Exhibition Hall at Crown Melbourne to play down to a winner. The tournament recommenced with German wunderkind Ole Schemion as chip leader, and it was a spectacular day of high-stakes poker from start to finish.
Not surprisingly, the first elimination of the day was the short stack. Alex Trevallion was having a stellar Aussie Millions that included winning the AU$25,000 Challenge and finishing 33rd in the Main Event. In what would be his final hand, Trevallion shoved his short stack all in from middle position with the and received a call from Yong, who was in the big blind with the. The board ran out a clean, and Trevallion had to settle for eighth place and AU$310,000. That brought his 2015 Aussie Millions winnings up to just shy of AU$1 million.
Dani Stern was the next to go when he got his short stack all in holding the and was up against the of Yong. The board ran out, and Yong's rivered pair scored him his second final table knockout.
From there, Erik Seidel lost a big pot to Scott Seiver in Level 19 (20,000/40,000/5,000) and was finished off by Schemion one hand later. One hand after that, Schemion shoved all in from the small blind to put the pressure on Jason Mo, who was in the big blind with a shorter stack. Mo called off with the and was ahead of Schemion's, but he got straightened out after the board came down.
Then, Justin Bonomo raised the button only to have Seiver three-bet all in from the big blind. Bonomo called off his shorter stack with the and was looking to double against the of Seiver. That didn't happen, though, as the board ran out to give Seiver a full house.
Seiver would then fall in third place after he ran his into the of Yong. With that, the heads-up match was set with Yong holding 4.915 million in chips to Schemion's 2.085 million. Despite boasting a tournament record that has nearly $4.5 million in earnings, Yong has never won a live event. On the other hand, Schemion has won 11 of the 52 tournaments he's cashed in, for a rate of 21.15 percent. Furthermore, when Schemion has reached heads-up play, he has an impressive record of 11 wins and five losses, winning the event over two-thirds of the time.
This would be one of those times Schemion didn't win.
The two battled back and forth in spectacular fashion, with five double up occurring between the two. Then, deep into Level 23 with the blinds at 50,000/100,000 and no antes due to heads-up play, the final hand took place.
Yong limped in from the button, and Schemion checked his option from the big blind before the dealer ran out the flop. After Schemion checked, Yong bet 150,000. Schemion check-raised all in for around 1.5 million, and Yong snapped it off. Schemion tabled the for an up-and-down straight draw, and Yong had the. The turn was the, and the river was the. That gave Yong the title and eliminated Schemion in second place for AU$1.35 million.
After the win, Yong was joined on stage by Ivey, Sam Trickett, Winfred Yu, and others. This win marked the first live tournament victory for Yong, and his largest score ever. He's had some big results in the past, but surely nothing as important as this victory in Australia. Congratulations to him and all the other winners from this event.
As for the Aussie Millions itself, things aren't over just yet. Sunday marks the final table of the Main Event and the kickoff of the big, bad $250,000 Challenge. You can follow the coverage live on PokerNews starting at 12:15 p.m. local time, so be sure to tune in.
Get all the latest PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!Bumblebees exposed to controversial pesticides collect just half the pollen they would otherwise harvest, according to new research, depriving their growing young of their only source of protein.
The work has been hailed as important by independent scientists because it sheds light on how the neonicotinoid pesticides can harm bees.
"Pollen is the only source of protein that bees have, and it is vital for rearing their young," said Professor Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex and who led the study. "Collecting it is fiddly, slow work for the bees and intoxicated bees become much worse at it. Without much pollen, nests will inevitably struggle."
A two-year EU ban of three neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticides in the world, began in December, following research that showed harm to honey and bumblebees. The neonicotinoids are "systemic" pesticides, being applied to seeds so that the chemical spreads within the plants. Over three-quarters of the world's food crops require insect pollination, but bees have declined in recent decades due to loss of flower-rich habitat, disease and pesticide use.
Goulson's team tested one of the three, called imidacloprid, at low doses aimed at replicating those encountered by bees in fields. They attached tiny electronic tags to bees so their movements could be tracked and each bee was weighed on its way in or out of the nest.
Bees exposed to the neonicotinoid brought back pollen from only 40% of trips, while unexposed bees carried pollen back from to 63% of trips. Furthermore, exposed bees that did return with pollen carried 31% less than unexposed bees. Overall, the nests exposed to the pesticide received 57% less pollen. The ability of bees to collect sugary nectar did not differ significantly between the bees. The work is published in the peer-reviewed journal Ecotoxicology.
Hannah Feltham, at the University of Stirling and another member of the research team, said: "This work adds another piece to the jigsaw. Even near-infinitesimal doses of these neurotoxins seem to be enough to mess up the ability of bees to gather food. Given the vital importance of bumblebees as pollinators, this is surely a cause for concern."
Earlier work by Goulson's group showed exposure to neonicotinoids led to 85% fewer queens being produced. The new work suggests a reason why: because there is less food in the nest. Other work showed neonicotinoids seriously harmed bees by damaging their renowned ability to navigate home.
Goulson added: "It is unclear what will happen when the [EU ban] expires, as the agrochemical companies that produce them are in a legal dispute with the EU over their decision. Our new study adds to the weight of evidence for making the ban permanent."
Lynn Dicks, an ecologist at the University of Cambridge, said: "This is a very important study, because it provides further detail on how bumblebee foraging is made less efficient by exposure to imidacloprid at these levels."
But she added: "The important questions over what is a 'field-realistic' dose are not settled and they remain open. The [levels in this study], particularly the pollen level, are at the upper end of what is found in the field, and likely to be higher than what bumblebee colonies are actually exposed to, because they don't feed exclusively on oilseed rape."
Pesticide manufacturers argue that controlled studies do not replicate actual field conditions. Julian Little, a spokesman for Bayer, which makes imidacloprid, said: "It would appear the bumble bees are essentially force-fed relatively high levels of the pesticide in sugar solutions, rather than allowing them to forage on plants treated with a seed treatment. Real field studies, such as those being initiated this autumn in the UK will give more realistic data on this subject."
Researchers have argued that conducting properly controlled field trials is difficult, because neonicotinoids are very widely used and bees range over wide areas in search of food.UPDATE: Game Cave Kickstarter is now live! - tinyurl.com/mjkp77k GameCave: Fighting Junkies Bombkatt PrintALL DONE!PSCS5Starting work on my next Kickstarter, gonna combine my gaming magazine design work on Play/GameFan with comic book/art book style stuffs.It's more like if the Penny Arcade characters did actual mag style reviews, like a Gaming Comic Book if that makes sense. Been a dream of mine to do this since 2010, glad to take the first step forward since canceling GameCave last year.The main KS will feature 6 11x17 prints. 5 will be my orig characters in cosplay with accessories, each featuring a classic fighting game. The 6th print will be backer voted, could be anything, with the original art to be raffled off to those who backed the physical tiers. The tier will also include a 94 page digital PDF, covering the best in retro and modern fighting games, written by all 8 of our fictional editors, the Game Cave Crew. There will be an add on option for a physical copy of the book, avail to those who backed the physical tiers. Lastly there will be 100 random sketchy and suave commsih each. The stretchgoals will be a total of 6 extra prints, all backer voted, and three 11x17 custom commish slots which will be raffled off among the physical tier backers. I'm hard at work on this now and moving quickly to get it up this month. Here we go again._________________________________________________Americans’ renewed appreciation for coffee, spurred by Starbucks, which now markets its own coffee liqueur, may have also contributed to the White Russian’s comeback.
To see the White Russian renaissance in full bloom, it is instructive to attend a Lebowski Fest, the semiannual gatherings where fans of the movie revel in the Dude’s deeply casual approach to life. There, the White Russian is consumed in oil-tanker quantities.
This was much in evidence at a fest held last month in New York, where 1,000 or so “achievers,” as the movie’s buffs call themselves, took over Lucky Strike Lanes, a bowling alley in Manhattan. The White Russian demand was such that, in addition to two bars, a White Russian satellite station had been set up and bartenders were in back mixing vats of reinforcements.
It turned out that management was following a directive from the event’s organizers. “When we line up a venue, we always have the White Russian talk,” said Will Russell, a founder of the Lebowski Fest.
Mr. Russell has learned from experience to lay in provisions. He recalled an incident at an early festival in his hometown of Louisville, Ky.
“Milk sold out within a one-mile radius of the bowling alley” where the event was held, he said. “We had to go to every local mini-market and gas station to satisfy the requirements of the achievers.”
At Lucky Strike Lanes, the line at the White Russian station was often 10 deep, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to sidle up to the counter and say, “I’ll take four.” The bartender would lift a 12-quart plastic tub, straining to hold it steady as the mud-colored liquid sloshed.
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Several people were dressed in character, including four men who showed up as white Russians: white painter pants, white T-shirts, brown fuzzy hats. Each drank their namesake, except one guy, who nursed a bottle of Miller Lite. “I’m lactose intolerant,” he said.
The White Russian is not for the faint of stomach. “The cream is going to build up,” said Ted Haigh, the author of “Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails.” “If you’re drinking these all night, the sugar will build, too, and you’ll have a hell of a hangover.”
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If not an expanded waistline. A popular deviation is the Slim Russian, made with either soy or low-fat milk.
Still, some prefer the drink precisely because it is so rich. “I’m one of those fat guys that guzzle milk by the gallon,” said Steve Barber, 28, an antique motorcycle restorer from Saugerties, N.Y., who was attending his first Lebowski Fest and came dressed in a flak vest like the Dude’s Vietnam veteran buddy, Walter. Unlike a lot of Lebowski fans, Mr. Barber has a taste for the drink that predates his viewing of the movie. Several years ago, he said, he used to mix himself a White Russian every day for breakfast: “I called it the ‘Big Boy Milkshake.’ “
Lebowski viewers often develop a taste for White Russians that carries beyond the film or the festivals.
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“I’d had them before, but not regularly,” said Don Plehn, 39, a district court clerk from Baltimore. “I drink a lot more of them now.” Mr. Plehn took a sip of his third White Russian of the night and said, “It’s a slow-sippin’ drink.”
Lebowski adherents may have vaulted the White Russian to icon status, but serious cocktail enthusiasts still deride it for being simplistic and overly sweet — a confection designed to appeal to unserious drinkers.
“It’s hard to think of a more boring drink, except, perhaps, when it’s spraying from the Dude’s mouth,” said Martin Doudoroff, a historian for CocktailDB.com.
Skeptics like Mr. Doudoroff would probably blanch at a variation called the White Trash Russian. “You take a bottle of Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Russell said, “drink half, then fill it with vodka and enjoy.”
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Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular |
-year deal for $38 million (it says something about the sports marketplace that a guy who's lost more games than he's won, and may be little known to even diehards, can command $38 million). The problem is tying so-called escalator clauses in the contract to whether he receives a single vote for the annual Cy Young Award for best pitcher.
A base salary of $13 million could have jumped to either $15 million or $17 million in 2020 if he received votes for the award in either of the two previous seasons. But, be informed, the award is voted on by the baseball writers, the people who'd be covering Chatwood, some of whom realized it would put them in total conflict of interest.
So the Baseball Writers Association of America--many of whose members are hobnobbing with the managements and players they cover at a big annual confab in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.----told the Cubs that if the provision stuck, it would unilaterally make Chatwood ineligible for the award. It sounds a bit like Trump tying his salary to votes for Time Person of the Year (or, actually, akin to Time saying it wouldn't even consider him if such were the case).
The Cubs altered the provision, and ironically so. The Cubs' justly heralded baseball chief, Theo Epstein, incurred the displeasure of the same association when, as World Series-winning Boston Red Sox general manager, he included a similar provision in a 2007 contract for pitcher Curt Schilling.
As Chicago Tribune baseball writer Paul Sullivan underscores, the association stepped in this time when word spread about the clause. But, come to think of it, the White House analogy doesn't hold since Trump would argue that it's he who's made some of the press who cover him rich, or at least inspired greater revenues for their employers. And he would be correct.
Breaking: The Murdoch empire is split
It was unfathomable not long ago but, of late, predicted: "Walt Disney Co. agreed (Thursday) to a $52.4 billion deal to acquire much of the global empire that media baron Rupert Murdoch assembled over three decades, from a fabled Hollywood studio to Europe’s largest satellite-TV provider to one of India’s most-watched channels," reports Bloomberg.
There are tons of reasons it seems smart for Disney, including building up content with franchises like Avatar and Planet of the Apes, and cutting out various middlemen. But what about Murdoch hawking a giant chunk of an empire that he's built, often in the face of conventional wisdom that he was overreaching (some thought he was nuts in creating a new TV network to begin with, then "overpaying" for NFL rights and aggressively getting into sports)?
As Bloomberg wrote earlier, "The billionaire has been frustrated with the market undervaluing his assets, and is willing to reshape his empire if he can get what he thinks the holdings are worth." In his 80s, he remains the gambler even as he gives over the operation (slowly) to his sons.
Tavis Smiley suspended
If it's Thursday, the latest journalist suspended for alleged sexual harassment must be...Well, it's a tough time for public broadcasting. A top NPR executive, then a Boston-based NPR host and now it's Tavis Smiley, whose show is suspended by PBS, disclosed Variety's Daniel Holloway.
"Effective today, PBS has indefinitely suspended distribution of Tavis Smiley, produced by TS Media, an independent production company,” It says it commented an investigation immediately after learning of troubling allegations regarding Mr. Smiley. This investigation included interviews with witnesses as well as with Mr. Smiley. The inquiry uncovered multiple, credible allegations of conduct that is inconsistent with the values and standards of PBS, and the totality of this information led to today’s decision.”
A demand for a reporter's sources falls short
Jamie Kalven, a journalist-acitivist who's broken key stories about the cop-related Chicago shooting death of Laquan McDonald, won't have to testify about his sources, a judge ruled. Judge Vincent Gaughan rejected arguments that Kalven’s sources leaked legally protected statements made to police investigators from by police officer Jason Van Dyke, who is awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges for the October 2014 fatal shooting of the 17-year-old McDonald.
Fake public comments
Millions of public comments are posted on federal agency websites on this issue or that, presumably to suggest real sentiment about a topic. Alas, The Wall Street Journal documents, lots of them are bogus, including during the campaign to lobby the Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality. With the help of a private firm, Mercury Analytics, it spins a great tale about the manipulation of public opinion and how advocacy groups get away with it, with the paper tracking down lots of people whose identities were essentially stolen.
So I read this and remembered a great Chicago Tribune series, The Fog Merchants, by Christopher Drew and Michael Tackett. In part, it was about lobbying and ginning up purported grassroots public sentiment. It won the Edgar A. Poe Award at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
The series was in 1992 and it won the award the next year. Some things don't change in Washington, even as technology does. Tackett's now at The New York Times, while Drew took a buyout from The Times and is teaching journalism at Louisiana State University
Fact-checking on the rise, correct? Well.....
Poynter notes a study from the Duke Reporters' Lab: "The number of active fact-checking organizations in the United States has decreased from the start of the year, despite covering a prolifically inaccurate president. Duke estimates there are now 44 American fact-checking outlets, of which 28 are local and 16 are primarily national, compared to the beginning of 2017, when there were 51, 35 and 16, respectively."
What's up?
"This count includes some political fact-checkers that are mainly seasonal players. These news organizations have consistently fact-checked politicians’ statements through political campaigns, but then do little if any work verifying during the electoral 'offseason.' And not all the U.S. fact-checkers in our database focus exclusively — or even at all — on politics. Sites such as Gossip Cop, Snopes.com and Climate Feedback are in the mix, too."
On the pop music beat
Ed Sheeran's 2017 "Shape of You" is the most streamed song ever on Spotify and, writes The Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber, typifies the hot pop music genre of a "sudden boom of white male solo singers with hits."
But Sheeran "is this era’s head boy in pop not only because of his conversational croon and facility with an acoustic guitar; he’s also a sponge, absorbing all the elements in the pop sea."
A blockbuster Roy Moore-New York Times co-production
The paper's live results page for the Senate race generated more than 13 million page views.
Really fake news
Axios informs, "Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he was the victim of a fake news hit on Tuesday, and has turned over to Capitol Police a document that purports to detail lurid sexual harassment accusations by a former staffer."
"Why it matters: This was an apparent effort to dupe reporters and smear a senator — both symptoms of an amped-up news environment where harassment charges are proliferating and reporters have become targets for fraud."
A strong Alabama election follow-up
The New York Times' Nate Cohn notes How "Over the last eight years, political analysts had come to think that Democrats were at a distinct disadvantage in midterm elections, since their younger and nonwhite coalition was less likely to turn out than older and white voters."
"It is time to retire that notion. Tuesday in Alabama, Democrats benefited from strong turnout that plainly exceeded midterm levels, while white working-class Republicans voted in weaker numbers. It was enough to send Doug Jones to the Senate instead of Roy Moore, in one of the reddest states in the country."
"This has been a pattern in all of this year’s major special elections, as well as in the Virginia general election. It is consistent with a long-term trend toward stronger turnout by the party out of power in off-year elections. It also suggests that President Trump’s less educated and affluent version of the Republican coalition has eroded the party’s traditional turnout advantage."
If you missed the Bismarck Tribune...
It reports: "Appearing for his preliminary hearing, accused arsonist Spencer Norton said he has video evidence that former President Barack Obama started the fire in his fiancee's garage last month. 'That will be an interesting video to show at trial,' District Judge John Grinsteiner said."
"Norton pleaded not guilty to felony arson for the Nov. 7 fire at 1448 S. Third St. in
The morning Babel
As Trump & Friends took us down to the southern border, taxes were a big topic on all the morning shows, as were Republican charges of political bias against the Robert Mueller investigation and some calling for his head.
Morning Joe gave congressional grilling of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ample air time as Rosenstein defended keeping Mueller right where he is, doing his job. Co-host Joe Scarborough was in a lather with the arguable myopia of Republicans calling for canning Mueller so soon after the fall of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and others.
On CNN's New Day Washington Post reporter Greg Miller surfaced to detail an excellent new Post effort that underscores, "Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House." Take a look here if you want to see the paper's tale of Trump dogmatism and, at best, wishful thinking about Vladimir Putin.
The members of that House committee that queried Rosenstein should take a look, too.
Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.Instruments in museums can enrich our understanding of music history argues our editor: and suggests ten important musical instrument collections
It is, perhaps, a paradox: that a thing designed specifically to make a beautiful sound should be suspended in silence, housed in humidity-controlled, sealed glass cabinets. Look but don't touch. See but don't hear.
Last week South East London’s marvellous Horniman Museum announced details of its new keyboard display - called 'At Home With Music', and opening in January – which will focus on domestic keyboard instruments from the past five centuries.
The Horniman, a fascinating cabinet of curiosities writ large, demonstrates exactly why instrument collections are vital, offering a well-contextualised home to, among others, the Dolmetsch Collection of early instruments, and the Boosey and Hawkes collection of wind instruments. There is an obligation - and challenge - for curators of collections of instruments to bring them to life, a test the Horniman passes well; it aims to collect sound and video recordings for each new instrument it acquires, and ‘sound benches’ in front of the displays help illuminate what you're looking at.
The Horniman is also about to introduce live musical performances as a regular feature in its instrument gallery, using a newly restored 1772 Jacob Kirckman harpsichord. Not a new idea, but very much to be welcomed. Both the recent (and very shortly to close - so hurry!) exhibition at the National Gallery exploring Vermeer and 17th century Dutch musical life, and the Ashmolean's Stradivarius summer exhibition, rightly incorporated performances as part of the exhibitions. Visitors to Hampstead's Fenton House can hear, and watch, the Benton Fletcher collection of early keyboard instruments being played. Instruments should, where possible, be heard.
But sometimes however, they can't, and perhaps even shouldn't, be played. Sometimes we need objects from the past to reach posterity pristine – as the alternative is often that they don't reach anyone all. Each generation is merely the custodian of artefacts, with a duty of responsibility to our descendants which must override our own desires to touch, handle and hear.
Yet even then we can still admire them as items of exquisite (or, for that matter, functional) craftsmanship, or as ingenious items of engineering. Properly contexualised they can cast characterful light on the lives, leisure and social mores of ancestors far and near. The genteel banter of a domestic drawing room rarely feels closer than when a virginal is standing in the corner, as if about to fill the room with music at any moment.
From the grand to the quirky, here are ten musical instrument collections to explore.
Horniman Museum, London
Home to more than 8000 instruments, from a pair of ancient Egyptian bone clappers to modern synthesizers, as well of some of the V&A’s instruments.
Ashmolean, Oxford
Home to the Stradivarius (and not to be heard) 'Messiah', among many important instruments.
Bate Collection Oxford
A fascinating contrast to the Ashmolean – 2000 items trace the development of instruments from Renaissance and Baroque times until today (including Theremins), some of which you can even bang and bow.
Musical Museum, Brentford
A delightful – and quite possibly unique – collection of pianolas, player pianos and other self-playing musical instruments.
Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments
View this important collection of instruments – and hear 18th-century instruments played in the 18th century concert hall.
Cité de la Musique, Paris
The Conservatoire de Paris’s 4000-strong instrument collection, ranging from the 17th century to the present day.
Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien
An important collection of renaissance and baroque instruments.
Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix
From Chinese Opera to big band jazz – instruments from around the world.
Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, Belgium
Four floors of instruments, including – as is only appropriate for Belgium – those by Adolphe Sax.
Museum of Musical Instruments, Leipzig
Almost 5000 instruments from Europe and beyond, as well as 3500 piano rolls.Summer is the season for harmful algae blooms in many U.S. lakes and bays. They occur when water bodies become overloaded with nitrogen and phosphorus from farms, water treatment plants and other sources. Warm water and lots of nutrients promote rapid growth of algae that can be toxic and potentially fatal to aquatic life and people.
Eventually algae settle to the bottom and decay, depleting dissolved oxygen in the water, creating hypoxia – “dead zones” where oxygen levels are low enough to kill fish.
As a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration between 1975 and 2003, I developed annual hypoxia forecasts for the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico – two of our nation’s water bodies most harmed by these blooms. At the University of Michigan, I helped develop harmful algae bloom forecasts for Lake Erie and continue to work with public and private organizations on these issues.
States around Lake Erie and in the Mississippi River basin, which drains to the Gulf of Mexico, have been trying to reduce nutrient pollution for years. They rely primarily on voluntary steps, such as offering grants to farmers to take steps to prevent fertilizer from washing off their fields.
In contrast, states around the Chesapeake have had more success with a federally enforced plan that can impose mandatory actions across the bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed. From my perspective, when we compare these two approaches it is clear that voluntary measures are not even making modest dents in nutrient pollution.
This year’s forecasts
This year’s Lake Erie harmful algae bloom forecast has a severity index of 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. This is comparable to the three largest blooms since 2011, including one that made the city of Toledo’s tap water unusable for three days in 2014. The algae produced microcystin – a toxin that can produce effects from mild skin rashes to serious illness or death.
The Gulf of Mexico forecast predicts an 8,185-square-mile dead zone – more than four times the goal set by an intergovernmental task force. This will be the third-largest Gulf of Mexico dead zone since measurements began 32 years ago.
The Chesapeake forecast predicts a 1.9-cubic-mile hypoxic region – nearly the volume of 3.2 million Olympic-size swimming pools. This is much larger than goals reflected in recent policies.
Nonetheless, at least the Chesapeake is moving in the right direction. The amount of nutrients flowing into the bay is starting to decline.
The long quest to clean up Lake Erie
Lake Erie first suffered from heavy nutrient pollution in the 1960s. The Clean Water Act of 1972 triggered a remarkable cleanup. Nutrients, primarily from point (discreet) sources like sewage treatment plants, were cut in half, and the lake responded quickly.
But harmful algae blooms and hypoxia resurfaced in the mid-1990s, probably because flows into the lake of a form of phosphorus that is readily used by algae tripled. The dead zone set a new record in 2012, and harmful algae blooms set records in 2011 and 2015. Even if blooms do not become toxic, they can have devastating effects. For example, the 2011 harmful algae blooms on Lake Erie cost the region nearly US$71 million in diminished property values, water treatment, and lost tourism revenues and recreational opportunities.
In response, the United States and Canada negotiated new phosphorus loading targets that call for a 40 percent reduction from 2008 levels. Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New York are developing domestic action plans to meet those targets.
Now however, 71 percent of nutrients entering Lake Erie are from non-point sources – mainly from agriculture. Non-point source pollution comes from diffuse sources, such as fertilizer washing off of farms and lawns, so it is harder to control.
The United States contributes over 80 percent of Lake Erie’s total phosphorus load. In sum, major load reductions will have to come from agriculture, mostly from U.S. farms.
[Maccoux et al. Journal of Great Lakes Research 42 (2016) 1151–1165](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jglr.2016.08.005)
How effective are voluntary measures?
Governments generally are averse to imposing environmental regulations on farmland. As a result, most action plans for Lake Erie rely on voluntary, incentive-based programs to address nutrient loss from agricultural lands.
But in the Mississippi River basin this approach has failed. In spite of more than 30 years of research and monitoring, over 15 years of assessments and goal-setting, and over US$30 billion in federal conservation funding since 1995, average nitrogen levels in the Mississippi have not declined since the 1980s.
The task force leading this effort recently extended the deadline for its goal of a 1,930-square-mile dead zone from 2015 to 2035. Today the dead zone is more than triple that size. Our newly published modeling shows that it would take a 59 percent reduction in the amount of nitrogen entering the Gulf of Mexico to reach the task force’s goal.
The Chesapeake Bay’s pollution diet
States around the Chesapeake Bay also struggled for decades to make voluntary, incentive-based approaches work. Their efforts were overwhelmed by the impacts of population growth and agricultural production.
Frustrated by worsening conditions, the states asked EPA in 2010 to establish a total maximum daily load – a “pollution diet” within a regulatory framework under the Clean Water Act that limits the amount of nutrients and sediment that can enter the bay. Bay states and the District of Columbia then developed implementation plans and management strategies detailing how and when each jurisdiction would meet its individual goals.
Unlike voluntary strategies, this approach has teeth. If states miss interim milestones for reducing pollutants, EPA can impose “backstop measures,” such as requiring additional reductions from point sources and withholding federal grant money.
Agricultural groups, supported by 21 states outside the Chesapeake watershed, challenged the total maximum daily load in court but lost. Between 2009 and 2015, loads of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment in the bay dropped by 8 percent, 20 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Underwater grasses and the bay’s iconic blue crabs are starting to recover.
No diet for Lake Erie
Environmental groups recently sued EPA to force stronger action on nutrient pollution in Lake Erie’s western basin, with support from several members of Congress and the International Joint Commission, which coordinates efforts by the United States and Canada. But EPA will apparently write a total maximum daily load only if both Michigan and Ohio, the two key states in the western basin watershed, agree. (EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt endorsed the Chesapeake Bay total maximum daily load only because all six states in the bay’s watershed supported it.)
Michigan recently declared its portion of Lake Erie “impaired,” which is required to trigger a total maximum daily load. But Ohio declared only some of its shorelines impaired, and EPA concurred. So prospects for a recovery are slim.
EPA’s web page calls nutrient pollution one of America’s “most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems.” But voluntary action is not solving it. And President Trump’s EPA budget request would cut $165 million in grants to states to deal with non-point source pollution.
As I have detailed before, taming nutrient pollution will require a broad national approach that includes steps such as modifying the American diet, changing agricultural supply chains and reducing production of corn-based ethanol. We also need to find the will to set legally binding limits when voluntary steps aren’t enough.Facebook, which today has three times as many employees as when it moved to Menlo Park in 2011, is poised to buy 59 acres next to the office building the company is constructing kitty-corner from its main headquarters.
The social media giant recently reached an agreement with TE Connectivity to purchase the 10-building site at 300 Constitution Ave., Facebook spokeswoman Genevieve Grdina confirmed Monday. She would not disclose the purchase price or the company’s specific plans for the property.
“The adjacent property we’ve agreed to purchase is an investment in our future. We have no immediate plans to develop the property,” states a company statement that Grdina provided.
When Facebook first announced in February 2011 that it planned to relocate to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, the company had about 2,000 employees worldwide. Now it has 6,800, Facebook’s website says. About 4,000 of them work in Menlo Park, according to the city’s transportation office. The 57-acre former Sun campus, located at the eastern end of the Willow Road/Bayfront Expressway intersection, can accommodate up to 6,600 employees.
The “West Campus” that Facebook is building on 22 acres across from Bayfront Expressway will be able to handle up to 2,800 employees. Designed by famed architect Frank Gehry, the 435,000-square-foot office building will be crowned with a rooftop park and is expected to be completed by spring 2015.
Facebook’s expansion into Menlo Park’s eastern side also involves residential development. The company collaborated with developer St. Anton Partners to help design a 394-unit apartment complex that’s about a mile away at 3665 Haven Ave. Another developer, Greystar, has applied to build a 146-unit apartment complex next door at 3645 Haven Ave. Those residential projects, plus a seven-building apartment complex with 195 units at 721-881 Hamilton Ave. in the adjacent Belle Haven neighborhood, are expected to be attractive living options for Facebook’s young and growing workforce.
Email Bonnie Eslinger at beslinger @dailynewsgroup.com; follow her at twitter.com/bonnieeslinger.PORTLAND (AP) — Planned Parenthood of Northern New England is applauding approval by a Portland City Council committee to create a buffer zone around a Maine clinic to separate anti-abortion protesters from patients.
The council’s Public Safety, Health and Human Services Committee unanimously approved establishing a buffer zone on Tuesday after hearing from about 40 people who backed the measure, including some who said they’d been harassed and threatened by protesters.
No one at the meeting spoke against the proposal.
Protesters have said in the past that they are simply exercising their First Amendment free speech rights and would bring legal action if a buffer zone is established.
The proposal will go to the council for a final vote, tentatively on Nov. 18.
Planned Parenthood officials said the zone would safeguard patients.
filed under:On Wednesday, Victorian Auditor-General Peter Frost will table his report on how effectively the government and road authorities responded.
It is expected the report will say that many of the commission's recommendations have not been implemented, including introducing variable time-of-day charging on toll roads, looking at tolling existing roads, increasing clearways, cutting the cost of off-peak public transport fares and removing incentives for state government employees to drive to work. The Napthine government is strongly pushing the multibillion-dollar east-west link as a congestion silver bullet. But many argue, including the former government, that it is impossible to build enough roads to end congestion. Even the former government's response to the 2006 report by VCEC conceded this, noting: ''Experience from around the world demonstrates that is not possible to 'build' our way out of congestion and that the benefits of new, high-cost infrastructure projects may be transitory.''
In other words, build a road and vehicles will come in even greater numbers than before. The improved traffic flow generated by the $1.39 billion upgrade of the M1 Monash/West Gate freeway is already evaporating less than three years after major works were completed; and the M80 Ring Road is already undergoing a $2.25 billion upgrade just a decade after completion. New roads cost billions and their benefits are short-lived, which is why governments attempt to get maximum use out of existing transport infrastructure - by better connections and getting people to travel to work outside peak hours. The most obvious technique for achieving this on roads is tolling, whether it is a cordon around the central business district, such as in London, or some other form of road charging using GPS technology. Some transport experts believe congestion charging is inevitable. Infrastructure Australia boss Sir Rod Eddington has been calling for a ''mature'' discussion on road pricing in Australia since 2008, and Transurban chief executive Scott Charlton told an infrastructure conference in Melbourne recently the public's attitude to road charging was changing. But adding tolls to existing roads is something neither major party has been prepared to even flirt with for fear of a voter backlash.
The Napthine government is strongly pushing the multibillion-dollar east-west link as a congestion silver bullet. But many argue, including the former government, that it is impossible to build enough roads to end congestion. When ConnectEast boss Dennis Cliche said recently the EastLink toll road operator wanted to buy the Eastern Freeway and toll it, Roads Minister Terry Mulder responded with ''Tell him he's dreaming.'' Labor's former roads minister Tim Pallas says congestion charges are inequitable. ''The transport-rich areas actually don't have to pay to use the facilities they have got and the transport-poor areas have to pay when they use their motor vehicles and enter those transport rich areas and it really just perpetuates disadvantage.'' The RACV, Victoria's peak motoring body, is willing to countenance road pricing provided other charges, including fuel taxes, are overhauled. Melbourne does have a congestion levy - a tax on car parking spaces in the CBD that will net the state government $47 million this year - but it is more a revenue stream than a traffic management tool.
Charlton argues a wider tolling system on Melbourne roads should be introduced to fund infrastructure, manage demand and promote public transport alternatives. He says roads are the last utility that does not charge according to how much you use it. He also says up to 40 per cent of travel in the afternoon peak is discretionary. But Transurban has shown little appetite for one congestion-busting policy that could shift some of that discretionary afternoon travel - reduced off-peak tolls, recommended in VCEC's 2006 report. Transurban could set variable tolls on CityLink. It does so in the United States. A network of 76 information signs inform drivers of real-time toll rates so they can make informed decisions on whether to enter tolled lanes. But VicRoads says there is no provision for off-peak tolls for CityLink in the current concession agreements with toll road operators, and any change ''would likely require compensation from the state''.
Statistics back Pallas' assertion that those in the outer suburbs are forced to drive, and to drive further, for employment. The 2011 census found people living in the outer eastern municipality of Cardinia, for example, commute a median distance of 25 kilometres to get to work, the longest in Melbourne. Selina Gilmour lives in Balnarring and works in Balwyn, where she runs a small business with her husband. She spends at least 2½ hours a day driving to and from work, - a trip of more than 80 kilometres each way. It's a commute she hates but is willing to accept to live by the sea on the Mornington Peninsula. The Mornington Peninsula has the highest percentage of residents that drive to work of all municipalities in Melbourne - 89 per cent, according to recent analysis of the 2011 census by the Department of Transport. The proportion of car commuters even increased marginally between 2006 and 2011, a period in which public transport use increased significantly. But Gilmour says that public transport is not a viable alternative for her. It would mean a drive to Bittern railway station on the Stony Point line - an irregular diesel service - then another train into the city and finally a bus out to Balwyn. ''There's no way I'd catch the train. It's so not worth it, it would take me hours to get to work,'' she says.
So she drives along Peninsula Link, the city's newest arterial road, along the length of EastLink and halfway down the Eastern Freeway to Bulleen Road. Peninsula Link has shaved 10 to 15 minutes off her commute, Gilmour says, although she is shocked at how busy it is just weeks after opening. ''It's like they need an extra third lane.'' Gilmour's 80-kilometre cross-city commute costs her some 15 hours in time and $200 in petrol each week, as well as the cost of servicing her car three or four times a year. But many Melburnians do not endure a commute as arduous and expensive as hers. About one in four live and work in the same local area, according to a 2011 report by the federal Department of Infrastructure and Transport. Transport planners view living and working in the same neighbourhood as a good thing because it cuts travel times and means job opportunities are not concentrated in the city centre.
However, in a sprawling city such as Melbourne, living and working in the same municipality does not always mean drivers won't be stuck in traffic. In the booming city of Whittlesea on Melbourne's northern outskirts, 52 per cent of residents work in the municipality or a neighbouring one. Primary school teacher Darren Peters lives in Doreen and works in Mill Park, a journey of about 13 kilometres that takes him 40 minutes. Just 2½ years ago the drive took him 20 minutes, Peters says, but in that time Whittlesea's population has grown by about 15,000. ''It's a lot of stolen time and it's very frustrating,'' says Peters, who is also a spokesman for South Morang Mernda Rail Alliance, a community group pushing for the South Morang railway line to be extended to Mernda. Yet, despite his public transport advocacy, Peters admits he gave up on Whittlesea's buses a long time ago. They are even slower and less reliable than driving, he says. Whittlesea's main north-south arterial, Plenty Road, has recently been duplicated at a cost of almost $22 million, giving residents of Doreen and Mernda two lanes in each direction where before there was one.
But Peters says the project's main effect has been to push the traffic bottleneck further south. VicRoads is already investigating building a third lane along part of Plenty Road. Navigation company TomTom released a congestion report this week that placed Melbourne fourth on the list of Australian and New Zealand cities, behind Sydney, Perth and Auckland. In the study, cities were indexed using travel times during non-congested periods, compared with travel in peak times, and the difference was expressed as a percentage increase in travel time. Melbourne scored 28 per cent. But this simple method for measuring congestion was rejected by VCEC in its 2006 report.
''One problem with defining congestion in terms of free-flowing traffic is that it does not guide policymakers towards an appropriate policy response to address congestion,'' it said. ''Expanding the road network to the point where all traffic moves at 'free flow' speeds, for example, would incur costs far in excess of the benefits.'' Graham Currie, professor of public transport at Monash University, says some congestion is good - it signals a healthy economy. But spending too much time stuck in traffic can be bad for people's mental wellbeing, as well as costing the economy, he says. However, the old method of fixing congestion - building a new road - is finished in big cities such as Melbourne, he says. ''The conventional way forward in the past has always been what we call 'predict and provide'. You predict future congestion, therefore you provide more road space. And that's been the way we've always gone.'' But Currie says there is a growing international consensus among transport experts that you can't keep on doing that.
VicRoads has begun or completed at least a dozen major road upgrades since the release of VCEC's congestion report in 2006. But as traffic continues to grow - and it has by 16 per cent in the past decade - the authority has also begun to give priority to trams, buses and even bicycles on some roads as a way of moving more people without widening roads to fit more vehicles. Meanwhile, traffic volumes continue to rise at a rapid rate on Melbourne's freeways and tollways. VicRoads traffic data shows average speeds on Melbourne's busiest road, the M1, vary from 20km/h to 60km/h in the morning peak - a modest speed for a major arterial that has just been widened at a cost of $1.39 billion. The upgrade improved flows by between 5 per cent and 20 per cent, VicRoads says. Loading But Graham Currie says all the upgrades to Melbourne's main road have ultimately generated more traffic, creating congestion that has eventually wiped out the initial time savings.
''Whenever we increase road space we increase traffic. We are not fundamentally solving the problem of congestion,'' he says.Australian pseudo-left group hails Syriza’s victory in Greece
By James Cogan
29 January 2015
The Australian organisation Socialist Alternative (SA) is among the pseudo-left tendencies internationally rushing to laud the outcome of the Greek election. As in Europe and elsewhere, SA is seeking to cover up the profound dangers to the working class contained in Syriza’s victory, and its formation of a coalition government with the extreme right-wing nationalist Independent Greeks.
As the WSWS Perspective warned on January 27: “Syriza’s election victory does not express a political development, a step forward, progress or anything of the kind by or for the working class. In its origin, social composition and politics, Syriza is a bourgeois party—one of many, including the Democrats under US President Barack Obama—that come to power making promises of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and then impose policies of austerity and war. It will inevitably betray, sooner rather than later, the aspirations for an end to social hardship and suffering that it has cynically exploited.”
The response of SA is diametrically opposed. On January 26, SA’s publication RedFlag hailed the election as a “stunning victory of the left in Greece.” It declared Syriza was committed to “a series of decisive reforms” that represented a “direct challenge to the neoliberal agenda that has dominated Western capitalism over the last 30 years.”
SA asserted: “If Syriza does not back down and pushes ahead with its anti-austerity program, that will raise hopes and aspirations throughout Europe and could trigger a sharp swing to the left.”
SA’s enthusiasm stems from its years of lies and falsifications to promote illusions in Syriza and present it as a model for new “left” formations internationally, including in Australia. SA’s Greek co-thinker, the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), is part of Syriza and its Left Platform faction. Some of the DEA’s leading members sit on Syriza’s Central Committee.
SA has done everything it can to support the DEA’s assertions that Syriza, headed by Alexis Tsipras, could be pressured to the left by self-styled socialists and “revolutionaries” working within this bourgeois formation. SA conferences featured DEA speakers, while RedFlag published glowing endorsements of their activities in Syriza.
The real political role of the DEA and Left Platform has to been to assist the Syriza leadership confine resistance to austerity to impotent general strikes and rallies. The revolutionary potential of the opposition of Greek workers has been blocked and the working class channelled behind the delusion that the assault on its living standards can be reversed by electing a Syriza-led capitalist government.
Syriza’s decision to ally with the anti-immigrant, pro-church, oligarch-linked and ultra-nationalist Independent Greeks is a damning indictment of the DEA and Left Platform, as well as SA and the entire international pseudo-left milieu. Syriza is committed to the defence of the Greek capitalist state and capitalist property. The choice of the far-right as its partner signals that it will not hesitate to use state violence against opposition from the very workers who voted for Syriza. That is underscored by the fact that the Independent Greeks leader Panos Kammenos has been installed as defence minister. He has close links with the military—that is, the same military that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974 with an iron fist.
On January 27, DEA leader and Syriza Central Committee member Stathis Kouvelakis asserted that the participation of “even one minister” from the Independent Greeks in a Syriza government would “symbolise the end of the idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the left’.” He noted that the Independent Greeks were primarily concerned with protecting the “hard core” of the state apparatus, meaning the military and police. He concluded that, for Syriza, “there is no middle course between confrontation and capitulation” and “the moment of truth is at hand.”
The moment did not even last 24 hours. Yesterday, January 28, the DEA spelt out its own capitulation to Syriza’s coalition with the Independent Greeks. Making clear it will remain in Syriza and serve its reactionary leadership and program, the DEA stated: “In these new circumstances, the role of Syriza as a political party is irreplaceable. The functioning of its organisational bodies and membership, with collective participation and democracy throughout the party, |
, the talkative administrators of Silk Road and its sequel, Verto has kept a low profile as Evolution has grown to amass more than 22,000 listings of mostly illegal products. And unlike Silk Road, which confined itself to the sale of drugs and counterfeit documents, Evolution also offers weapons and stolen bank account credentials, a sign that the Dark Web could become far darker under Verto’s reign.
Preet Bharara
Get caught committing a high profile crime anywhere on the internet, and there’s a good chancePreet Bharara will be the face that haunts your nightmares. Bharara has made the Southern District of New York a top jurisdiction for computer crime cases, and prosecuted some of the most high-profile felony cases of the last several years, from Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond to alleged Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht. He’s still pursuing the extradition of Megaupload creatorKim Dotcom. And this year he oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice’s role in Operation Onymous, which took down dozens of Dark Web markets, including Silk Road 2 and two of the other top six online drug markets. With the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder, Bharara’s name has been floated as one of the top candidates for the nation’s top justice job. Hackers beware.Manny Pacquiao is OK with a congressional proposal to bring back the death penalty because he said even Scripture approves of it.
"The Bible says, 'Do not kill.' That means if you wrong me, I can't kill you. Let authorities handle that," he said on Tuesday.
Pacquiao went as far as referencing Jesus Christ and comparing the Roman empire's rule of law to contemporary public affairs.
"God gave the government the right to use capital punishment," Pacquiao said. "Jesus Christ was even sentenced to death because the government called for it."
Pacquiao, who is also a pastor, has been a vocal proponent of capital punishment.
In May, before being proclaimed a senator, Pacquiao said the death penalty was in line with biblical teachings.
In August, Pacquiao said the death penalty was "moral and lawful."
In December, Pacquiao said he was open to capital punishment but would like reforms instituted in the judiciary.It’s tough being a custom bike builder. Aside from having to make a living, you’re at the mercy of public opinion—which can be a whole stadium’s worth of armchair quarterbacks. In short, you need a tough skin.
They don’t come much tougher than John Ryland of Classified Moto. He’s developed not only a signature style, but also a solid business. And there’s more demand for his work than ever before.
It’s a gutsy approach that has made Ryland’s Richmond, Virginia shop world famous. But this latest commission was from just 500 miles up the road: the headquarters of Rebel Yell Bourbon in Louisville, Kentucky.
The brief was pretty open—but that’s a double-edged sword. “Parameters can be bad or good,” says John. “Too many, and you can’t let your creative juices flow enough. Too few, and you can’t blame your ideas on anyone but yourself.”
In the case of this 2007 Triumph Speed Triple 1050, the ideas obviously flowed freely. ‘Frank’ is obviously mad, bad, and dangerous to know, a product of the twisted imaginations of John and his lead tech Danik Herashchanka.
“Part of the enjoyment came from using what we had around the shop. And the Triumph is what we had,” says John. “We also didn’t have anything specific the bike needed to do, except look cool (to us), be reasonably comfortable for a 1,200-mile trip to Sturgis, and be capable of some antics along the way.”
Despite the radical looks, much of the bike remains stock: the hardest part was building a swing arm to accommodate the massive rear tire. “Danik has gotten so good at welding and fabrication, we felt like we could tackle the swing arm in-house,” says John. “Even a couple of years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
The original idea was to build the swing arm out of chromoly, even though it ended up being a huge hassle. “Just finding the material in the sizes we needed was super complicated. People don’t want to sell you that stuff unless you’re buying enough to build a bridge or something.”
“We knew we wanted to use a big ATV tire in the rear, and we wanted to retain the single-sided look—so we had to make the swing arm from scratch. There was no way to mod a Street Triple swing arm and get everything centered.”
The Classified crew ended up using parts from a Honda VFR800 item: “For several reasons, the key one being that it uses a 4×4 bolt pattern, common on ATV wheels. This gave us access to wheels with a range of offsets and the 14-inch diameter we wanted.”
The swing arm is now hooked up to a Progressive Suspension 465 Series shock and the wheel is a tough aluminum alloy ITP Hurricane. It’s shod with an STI Black Diamond tire—a six-ply ATV radial designed to work on both hardpack and sand or mud. Up front is Kenda Big Block rubber, an ADV tire with a 60% street/40% off-road mix. Perfect for a Californian beach, if not the Laguna Seca corkscrew…
The tank has a finish we’ve never seen before, and a delicacy that contrasts with the brutish stance of the Triumph. “We had never stripped a Speed Triple tank, and to my dismay, this one was plastic. So we doctored it up with layers of fine ladies’ dress fabric and West System epoxy. Looks much better now!”
The marine grade epoxy is covered with tiny script on the knee cutouts. “We ended up writing out the whole parts list (and the owner’s manual) on the tank for whoever wins the bike,” says John. “It’ll save me a lot of phone calls and emails!”
The seat unit and tail section is new, exposing the elegant (and only slightly modified) standard subframe. It’s now topped off with an equally elegant, gently curved seat—upholstered by Ryland’s regular leather guy, fellow Richmonder Roy Baird.
The engine internals are stock—and with just over 130 horses at the crank, that’s probably a good thing. But there’s new exhaust pipework, hugging the back of the engine and exiting right under the seat unit.
In a scene where the whole point of most builds is to catch the eye, this is one of the most eye-catching we’ve ever seen. And it needed to be: “This bike is a promotional centerpiece and a prize in a contest,” John points out. “Its real job is to cause a stir for Rebel Yell.”
“It has to look cool up close at events, and from a distance when it’s on stage. It has to do flashy stuff for the camera, and work well for whoever wins it. It’s a pretty tall order for a bike, actually.”
You’ll be able to meet Frank at this year’s Sturgis rally, which opens on August 3, along with four other killer customs—including the Revival Cycles ‘Odioso.’ And we get the impression that John and Danik will be sorry to say goodbye.
“We’ve had a great spring and summer with him. He’s become like a pet—a big dog or bobcat. We took him to the beach, and to a play date with other customs at The Handbuilt Show.”
If you’ve got space for Frank in your life, head over to the Rebels Uncaged competition site. It’s time for this mongrel to find its forever home.
Classified Moto website | Facebook | Instagram | Images by Adam EwingA few months ago, Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich pulled their albums from Spotify, claiming the service was bad for new music and did not fairly compensate artists. Radiohead’s co-manager Brian Message then entered the debate, siding with Spotify. At the time, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan noted, “This one is not over yet…” And now the fight picks up again, with Yorke expanding on his statements in a new interview and Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart sharing his two cents as well.
Stewart’s comments appeared in The Guardian late last week:
Thom Yorke made a mistake there, him and Nigel Godrich. They were misinformed. I think they just suddenly got a bee in their bonnet, because Spotify is one of the few companies that is transparent and actually pays properly — as a songwriter you should worship Spotify, because they’ve come along with a solution. … It’s a volume business. If [Spotify] had 100 million subscribers, which is possible, the payment [for the Eurythmics catalogue] would be equal to the band’s income back at the peak of selling.
As Consequence Of Sound points out, Mexico’s Sopitas.com coincidentally interviewed Yorke the next day and got some further thoughts on the matter. Here’s Yorke’s response to a question about mainstream music:
I feel like the way people are listening to music is going through this big transition. I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what’s happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen. But it’s all about how we change the way we listen to music, it’s all about what happens next in terms of technology, in terms of how people talk to each other about music, and a lot of it could be really fucking bad. I don’t subscribe to the whole thing that a lot of people do within the music industry that’s ‘well this is all we’ve got left. we’ll just have to do this.’ I just don’t agree. When we did the In Rainbows thing what was most exciting was the idea you could have a direct connection between you as a musician and your audience. You cut all of it out, it’s just that and that. And then all these fuckers get in a way, like Spotify suddenly trying to become the gatekeepers to the whole process. We don’t need you to do it. No artists needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off. But because they’re using old music, because they’re using the majors… the majors are all over it because they see a way of re-selling all their old stuff for free, make a fortune, and not die. That’s why to me, Spotify the whole thing, is such a massive battle, because it’s about the future of all music. It’s about whether we believe there’s a future in music, same with the film industry, same with books. To me this isn’t the mainstream, this is is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse. What happens next is the important part.
You can listen to the full Atoms For Peace interview below.
Atoms For Peace play the Austin City Limits Music Festival this weekend.Haunted by a lack of young voter support, Hillary advertises on the AOL login screen
The Clinton campaign has struggled to win support among young voters of every description, including traditional Democratic Party voters: women, African-Americans, people of Latinamerican or Hispanic origin, etc.
Meanwhile, her septuagenarian opponent Bernie Sanders has enjoyed remarkable support from voters young enough to be his grandchildren.
The AOL Email login-screen ad bought by her campaign is either an act of monumental cluelessness about how to reach those young voters, or (more likely), it's an indication that the campaign feels the need to double-down on the older voters who constitute the bulk of Hillary Clinton supporters.
Does no one at the Clinton campaign know that AOL's mail users are predominantly people who signed up back in the days of telephone modems and software on CDs? There are probably more people who voted for Clinton in New Hampshire than there are millennials using AOL for their email in the entire country.
Hillary Reaches Base With AOL Login Page Ad
[Eric Felten/Weekly Standard]They definitely change their branding guidelines with it. Whereas a lot of Google’s products have pretty straightforward names (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, etc.), Primer doesn’t have the Google branding in front of it. In fact, there is no Google branding anywhere in the Primer app.
But side projects go deeper than that. Side projects breathe fresh air into the company. They’re not wrapped up and driven by direct bottom line implications. That’s why even though they’re a strategic fit, they’re still a breeding ground for innovation and creativity.
So it definitely has the potential to increase their sales pipeline. Primer could also serve as a feedback source for Google to improve their service offering.
The Primer team also designed it very differently from Google’s standard apps. They noticeably atomize content into bite-sized, swipeable, cards. This is interesting when you consider how people now commonly consume and parse information (think Twitter and Tinder). The branding and aesthetic of the Primer app also looks very different from the rest of Google’s products. While key features of Material Design are still evident throughout the app, Primer pushes the envelope with stronger use of colors and UI transitions. The layout of the app also stands out in contrast to the rest of Google’s apps. The app doesn’t even use Google’s traditional Roboto font that is usually seen across their brand. Overall Primer feels more fun and delightful, whereas the rest of Google’s suite of apps feel more serious and professional.
A beta version of Primer also soft launched on iOS first, prior to launching on Google Play. The official version of Primer launched on both platforms simultaneously just a month ago. Could that have been some sort of market experiment for the company?
High level strategy experimentation
Primer figures out a fundamentally new way for Google to deliver content on mobile.
Although this sounds redundant, it’s actually an important priority for Google. Consumer behavior on mobile is extremely different from that on desktop. People are spending a lot more time on mobile devices. Search usage seems to be decreasing, in large part because people don’t need to search on mobile — they spend a lot more time in apps.
So not only is Primer a fun experiment in gathering data from marketers, it also serves as an exercise in how Google can deliver content in new compelling ways on an extremely competitive medium that they haven’t quite fully captured yet.
Primer might also be a playground for Google to keep its product employees engaged with new, unconventional challenges. This is highly speculative, but I (Jason) will try to explain from a designer’s perspective.
Being at a large corporation like Google means there is an unlimited stream of design challenges to solve, which is great. However, the building blocks (UI patterns and components) to solve these challenges mostly don’t change.The Frenchman has regularly been captured complaining about the Haas VF-16 during practice sessions and races, and in Singapore – where a disastrous weekend saw him fail to make the start – he said it was the worst car he had ever driven.
However, Steiner insists that he’s happy to let Grosjean continue to speak his mind in public rather than save his comments for the garage or debrief.
“You know me, I let people speak,” Steiner told Motorsport.com. “He’s got an opinion. It’s his personality. It’s easy for me to say, ‘Romain, don’t say these things any more.’ But then you guys have no fun! So why should I kill everybody’s fun?
“I’m not too critical about that. If he decides to be like this, it’s OK. After the race we spoke, he was frustrated, he was pissed off. I would be, and I am.
"He got over it, and he’s ready now for the next race. That’s the only thing you can do.
"We need to analyse what went wrong, but he didn’t do anything wrong, so he doesn’t have a lot to analyse. He has to get ready and get prepared for Malaysia.”
Grosjean logged very few practice laps in Singapore, before crashing in Q2, and would not even get to start the grand prix, his car suffering a failure on a reconnaissance lap.
“His weekend started tough, and it ended worse,” said Steiner. “It started with going out in FP1, after one lap we didn’t have any turbo pressure, so we lost we lost the first session. We had a leak in the system, and we couldn’t fix it.
"We went out in FP2, overambitious, and we got it wrong, because we tried to do too much in too short a time. Then in FP3 we couldn’t get it together, and in qualifying he tried hard, maybe too hard, and put it in the wall.
“Before the race the brake-by-wire system was lost. I think he did four or five brakes and it was perfect, and then the pedal just went to the floor. At first we thought it was maybe in the electronics, but we re-set everything, checked everything that we could.
"But we would have had to take the gearbox off and we didn’t know if a valve was broken or a cable was broken. Changing the engine twice, that didn’t help, so it was all an adding up of things.
“Sometimes it happens. It shouldn’t happen, I know that, we should be better than that. But when it goes wrong, it goes wrong.”There’s always that one limitless person we know that seems to have endless motivation and positive energy. Trust me when I tell you this person runs into doubt and defeat on a regular basis, but the difference is that they don’t stay there. They have a method. Yes, there is a method to having endless motivation.
(For a closer look at this article, click here to listen to the podcast with Sean Fagan and I – Stay Motivated When Driving!)
After years of training I have gone through being over-stimulated, under-stimulated, motivated, defeated, inspired, exhausted, and even having a mental break down. In the recent year I told myself I never want that break down to happen again. That’s where I begin to stack everything in my favor.
Here are the 10 tactics to endless motivation – grouped into three categories. Preparation, Action, and Re-Action
Motivation’s Battle is Preparation
Energy is motivation. What do I mean by that? When we have the mental and physical capacity (energy) to attempt a task it’s rather simple. It’s when the stress of everyday life, relationships, and physical exhaustion catches up with us when we begin to lose energy & motivation. Prepare for the worst – grind to become the best.
1. Finding Your True Why
The most important tactic when it comes to anything in life.
Your WHY is your driving force, but only when it is intrinsic. What does that entail?… Asking yourself that question at least twice.
1. Why do I want to train Muay Thai?
So I can become a champion, so I can get in shape.
2. Why do I want to become a champion? Why do I want to get in shape?
Because it would make me feel successful at something, I would feel more confident in myself and be able to set an example for others.
3. Why do I seek confidence? Why do I want to set an example for others?
So I can have the will to fulfill my true potential, I want to set an example for others because life is more fulfilling when you are inspiring others. When you are a part of something outside of yourself.
Do you see how the first answer doesn’t provide much in terms of emotion? It is a surface answer and we rarely dig deep inside, however, we MUST look deep inside to find true motivation. I could have ended on the second question, but we went a bit further to ask WHY a third time.
A golden belt loses its shine when you are laying breathless on the floor, or stuck burnt out on the couch. The third WHY, is what will get your ass up again. It goes deep inside yourself, it becomes a voice that whispers, “you are cheating yourself and what you are capable of, WHY DID YOU BEGIN!? There is more to this then just you, you are supposed to be an inspiration to others, to your friends, your family!”.
2. Creating YOUR Environment
You are the sum of your five closest peers. A number of studies suggest that we think we surround ourselves with those who’s personality we admire the most. But, in reality it is the people who conveniently share a common activity or location with us.
It’s simple. Energy is motivation, lack-there-of or negative energy leads to doubt and fatigue. Surrounding yourself with peers who are highly motivated is one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself in life. It’s difficult changing your life and looking at every individual you surround yourself with.
But, I challenge you. Look at your gym, look at your friends and even family and ask the hard questions. Are they supporting your goals? Are they draining your energy or are they inspiring you? Are you learning from them? If you answered no to more than one of these questions, it’s time to cut people out, followed by watching yourself thrive.
3. Accountability and Goal Setting
This goes hand in hand with the point I made above. Accountability with the right people will lead you to great success and new levels of motivation. Those who truly support you care for you, this means they will be on your ass to make sure you are putting the work in.
Write down your goals. There is something about putting pen to paper that makes it official, it creates a contract with yourself. DO NOT skip this step. People often have a “do as you go” mentality. This is because they fear failing before reaching their goal, fear defeats motivation. When you create this goal, when you sign that contract, you don’t stop grinding, you don’t quit, you keep going until that bitch is checked off. Then it’s on to the next one.
4. Preparing for Action
By now you know your purpose, you know your WHY, you have a team of killers, educators, and supporters behind you and you know exactly what you want. It’s time to get it.
This part is quite simple if you are prepared. How do you become prepared to take action? By preparing for inaction and settlement. Huh?
You received a call that you have to go to work early, you got stuck in traffic and didn’t have time to cook your next meal that normally energizes you for the next session from hell. This all leads to inaction. Well that sucks… I have no energy, I’ll just skip today (inaction), or maybe I’ll grab something through the drive thru (settling for less than your body deserves). Always act and never settle.
Prepare for action by laying out your clothes for the next morning, creating a schedule (to-do list) for the week, preparing your meals ahead of time, staying consistent and routine based with everything you do, and most importantly.. by being dedicated.
Conclusion
This is only the beginning, you are prepared to move into Part 2 – Staying Endlessly Motivated. Motivation is energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so that means we have to find ways of tapping into it. We begin this process by preparing our body, mind, and environment.
Prepare -> Act -> Re-Act
Paul Banasiak is a Muay Thai fighter/addict, 6 x champion, trainer, and fitness professional. After leaving medical school without looking back, he decided to fully follow his passion of helping others become the best version of themselves, creating MuayThaiAthlete.com. A website for those who are already passionate individuals who want to take their life&training to the next level.
Today we begin forging our bodies and
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Facebook Fighter Fan Page.Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway (brk-a), has taken another big bite of Apple.
On Monday, Buffett told CNBC his insurance and investing conglomerate had bought 72 million of Apple’s shares in the first month of January alone. He also owned up to the fact that Apple (aapl) is one of the legendary investor’s own stock picks, and not one chosen by his lieutenants.
“Because I like it,” Buffett said on CNBC in response to why Berkshire had bought so much of iPhone maker’s stock. “Apple strikes me as having quite a sticky product.”
Over the weekend, Buffett released his annual letter to shareholders in which he berated Wall Street money managers for charging high fees and producing lousy investment results. He also offered a rebuke to Donald Trump, saying immigrants are what has made America great.
Berkshire started buying shares of Apple in mid-2016, and had 61 million shares by the end of the year. Buffett said Berkshire’s Apple stake is now more than double that, and worth about $17 billion and amounts to 133 million shares. Buffett bought his most recent stake between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31—the day Apple reported that its sales rose $2.5 billion, or 3%, in the last three months of 2016, which was higher than expected.
Buffett says he hasn’t bought any shares in Apple since the earnings announcement, but he didn’t give any indication that his enthusiasm for the company or its stock had waned. What’s more, Buffett said Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has done a “terrific job.” Buffett’s investment in Apple now amounts to about 2.5% of the company. That makes Buffett, who for most of his career has shunned tech stocks, Apple’s fifth largest outside investor, and probably its most active. Vanguard and Blackrock, for instance, Apple’s No. 1 and No. 2 largest outside investors, mostly own the stock because of their index funds.
Overall, Buffett told the television network, Berkshire has spent about $20 billion on stocks since just before the U.S. election in November, adding that he thinks the U.S. market is cheap with interest rates at current levels. “I’ve bought a lot of stock in the last four months,” Buffett said. Nonetheless, he said it was extremely hard to time the market and that stocks could plunge tomorrow. “[The market] could go down 20% tomorrow, but I’ll still be happy because I have been buying good businesses.”
Buffett said that Berkshire’s positions in airlines remains unchanged. He said pricing shares of airlines has historically been a “very tough game” and that he has not met the chief executives of any of the four airlines in which Berkshire holds stakes.
Investors in Apple seemed to react with caution to Buffett’s announcement that he bought a massive new quantity of shares. Perhaps because Buffett’s buying was even bigger than expected, shares of Apple are up 22% in the past three months. Some observers had seen that movement as a sign that investors in general were regaining their optimism about Apple’s prospects, after rising skepticism that the iPhone maker would be able to continue its past success. Indeed, my colleague Shawn Tully has argued that the company’s lack of diversity—more than 70% of its sales come from the iPhone—and the fact that Apple is already dominant in the smart-phone market make it nearly impossible for Apple to live up to investors’ expectations.
The recent movement in the stock suggests otherwise. Still, Buffett’s hefty purchases might indicate that the recent rise in Apple’s shares was caused not by the market’s optimism, but by Buffett’s. There were 19 trading days in the month of Jan. before Apple reported its earnings on the last day of the month. That works out to Berkshire buying an average of nearly 3.8 million shares a day. During that period, just over 27 million shares of Apple’s stock traded per day, meaning Buffett accounted for 14% of daily purchases on average.
That may not be enough to fully explain Apple’s recent stock market rise—particularly given the fact that its shares have jumped another $15, to $137, since Buffett stopped buying.
But add to that the purchases of the loyal investors who saw Buffett’s Apple purchases last year and followed him in the investment as well, and there is a case to be made that a good portion of the optimism around Apple these days could just be because of Oracle of Omaha’s eye.The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of 1936 is the last and most important book by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. It created a profound shift in economic thought, giving macroeconomics a central place in economic theory and contributing much of its terminology[1] – the "Keynesian Revolution". It had equally powerful consequences in economic policy, being interpreted as providing theoretical support for government spending in general, and for budgetary deficits, monetary intervention and counter-cyclical policies in particular. It is pervaded with an air of mistrust for the rationality of free-market decision making.
Keynes denied that an economy would automatically adapt to provide full employment even in equilibrium, and believed that the volatile and ungovernable psychology of markets would lead to periodic booms and crises. The General Theory is a sustained attack on the 'classical' orthodoxy of its time. It introduced the concepts of the consumption function, the principle of effective demand and liquidity preference, and gave new prominence to the multiplier and the marginal efficiency of capital.
Keynes's aims in the General Theory [ edit ]
The central argument of The General Theory is that the level of employment is determined not by the price of labour, as in classical economics, but by the level of aggregate demand. If the total demand for goods at full employment is less than the total output, then the economy has to contract until equality is achieved. Keynes thus denied that full employment was the natural result of competitive markets in equilibrium.
In this he challenged the conventional ('classical') economic wisdom of his day. In a letter to his friend George Bernard Shaw on New Year's Day, 1935, he wrote:
I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize — not I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years — the way the world thinks about its economic problems. I can't expect you, or anyone else, to believe this at the present stage. But for myself I don't merely hope what I say,— in my own mind, I'm quite sure.[2]
The first chapter of the General theory (only half a page long) has a similarly radical tone:
I have called this book the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, placing the emphasis on the prefix general. The object of such a title is to contrast the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation, as it has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the postulates of the classical theory are applicable to a special case only and not to the general case, the situation which it assumes being a limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium. Moreover, the characteristics of the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.
Summary of the General Theory [ edit ]
Keynes's main theory (including its dynamic elements) is presented in Chapters 2-15, 18, and 22, which are summarised here. A shorter account will be found in the article on Keynesian economics. The remaining chapters of Keynes's book contain amplifications of various sorts and are described later in this article.
Book I: Introduction [ edit ]
The first Book of the General Theory is a repudiation of Say's Law. The classical view for which Keynes made Say a mouthpiece held that the value of wages was equal to the value of the goods produced, and that the wages were inevitably put back into the economy sustaining demand at the level of current production. Hence, starting from full employment, there cannot be a glut of industrial output leading to a loss of jobs. As Keynes put it on p18, "supply creates its own demand".
Stickiness of wages in money terms [ edit ]
Say's Law depends on the operation of a market economy. If there is unemployment (and if there are no distortions preventing the employment market from adjusting to it) then there will be workers willing to offer their labour at less than the current wage levels, leading to downward pressure on wages and increased offers of jobs.
The classics held that full employment was the equilibrium condition of an undistorted labour market, but they and Keynes agreed in the existence of distortions impeding transition to equilibrium. The classical position had generally been to view the distortions as the culprit[3] and to argue that their removal was the main tool for eliminating unemployment. Keynes on the other hand viewed the market distortions as part of the economic fabric and advocated different policy measures which (as a separate consideration) had social consequences which he personally found congenial and which he expected his readers to see in the same light.
The distortions which have prevented wage levels from adapting downwards have lain in employment contracts being expressed in monetary terms; in various forms of legislation such as the minimum wage and in state-supplied benefits; in the unwillingness of workers to accept reductions in their income; and in their ability through unionisation to resist the market forces exerting downward pressure on them.
Keynes accepted the classical relation between wages and the marginal productivity of labour, referring to it on p5[4] as the 'first postulate of classical economics' and summarising it as saying that 'The wage is equal to the marginal product of labour'.
The first postulate can be expressed in the equation y' (N ) = W / p, where y (N ) is the real output when employment is N, and W and p are the wage rate and price rate in money terms (and hence W / p is the wage rate in real terms). A system can be analysed on the assumption that W is fixed (i.e. that wages are fixed in money terms) or that W / p is fixed (i.e. that they are fixed in real terms) or that N is fixed (e.g. if wages adapt to ensure full employment). All three assumptions had at times been made by classical economists, but under the assumption of wages fixed in money terms the 'first postulate' becomes an equation in two variables (N and p ), and the consequences of this had not been taken into account by the classical school.
Keynes proposed a'second postulate of classical economics' asserting that the wage is equal to the marginal disutility of labour. This is an instance of wages being fixed in real terms. He attributes the second postulate to the classics subject to the qualification that unemployment may result from wages being fixed by legislation, collective bargaining, or'mere human obstinacy' (p6), none of which can be identified with the marginal disutility of labour and all of which are likely to fix wages in money terms.
Outline of Keynes's theory [ edit ]
Keynes's economic theory is based on the interaction between demands for saving, investment, and liquidity (i.e. money). Saving and investment are necessarily equal, but different factors influence decisions concerning them. The desire to save, in Keynes's analysis, is mostly a function of income: the richer people are, the more wealth they will seek to put aside. The profitability of investment, on the other hand, is determined by the relation between the return available to capital and the interest rate. The economy needs to find its way to an equilibrium in which no more money is being saved than will be invested, and this can be accomplished by contraction of income and a consequent reduction in the level of employment.
In the classical scheme it is the interest rate rather than income which adjusts to maintain equilibrium between saving and investment; but Keynes asserts that the rate of interest already performs another function in the economy, that of equating demand and supply of money, and that it cannot adjust to maintain two separate equilibria. In his view it is the monetary role which wins out. This is why Keynes's theory is a theory of money as much as of employment: the monetary economy of interest and liquidity interacts with the real economy of production, investment and consumption.
Book II: Definitions and ideas [ edit ]
The choice of units [ edit ]
Keynes sought to allow for the lack of downwards flexibility of wages by constructing an economic model in which the money supply and wage rates were externally determined (the latter in money terms), and in which the main variables were fixed by the equilibrium conditions of various markets in the presence of these facts.
Many of the quantities of interest, such as income and consumption, are monetary. Keynes often expresses such quantities in wage units (Chapter 4): to be precise, a value in wage units is equal to its price in money terms divided by W, the wage (in money units) per man-hour of labour. Keynes generally writes a subscript w on quantities expressed in wage units, but in this account we omit the w. When, occasionally, we use real terms for a value which Keynes expresses in wage units we write it in lower case (e.g. y rather than Y ).
As a result of Keynes's choice of units, the assumption of sticky wages, though important to the argument, is largely invisible in the reasoning. If we want to know how a change in the wage rate would influence the economy, Keynes tells us on p266 that the effect is the same as that of an opposite change in the money supply.
The identity of saving and investment [ edit ]
The relationship between saving and investment, and the factors influencing their demands, play an important role in Keynes's model. Saving and investment are considered to be necessarily equal for reasons set out in Chapter 6 which looks at economic aggregates from the viewpoint of manufacturers. The discussion is intricate, considering matters such as the depreciation of machinery, but is summarised on p63:
Provided it is agreed that income is equal to the value of current output, that current investment is equal to the value of that part of current output which is not consumed, and that saving is equal to the excess of income over consumption... the equality of saving and investment necessarily follows.
This statement incorporates Keynes's definition of saving, which is the normal one.
Book III: The propensity to consume [ edit ]
Y. Keynes's propensities to consume and to save as functions of income
Book III of the General Theory is given over to the propensity to consume, which is introduced in Chapter 8 as the desired level of expenditure on consumption (for an individual or aggregated over an economy). The demand for consumer goods depends chiefly on the income Y and may be written functionally as C (Y ). Saving is that part of income which is not consumed, so the propensity to save S (Y ) is equal to Y – C (Y ). Keynes discusses the possible influence of the interest rate r on the relative attractiveness of saving and consumption, but regards it as 'complex and uncertain' and leaves it out as a parameter.
His seemingly innocent definitions embody an assumption whose consequences will be considered later. Since Y is measured in wage |
magnets that could ultimately lead to new types of electronic devices, with greater processing capacity than is currently feasible, in a study published recently in the journal Science.
Many modern data storage devices, like hard disk drives, rely on the ability to manipulate the properties of tiny individual magnetic sections, but their overall design is limited by the way these magnetic 'domains' interact when they are close together.
Now, researchers from Imperial College London have demonstrated that a honeycomb pattern of nano-sized magnets, in a material known as spin ice, introduces competition between neighbouring magnets, and reduces the problems caused by these interactions by two-thirds. They have shown that large arrays of these nano-magnets can be used to store computable information. The arrays can then be read by measuring their electrical resistance.
The scientists have so far been able to'read' and 'write' patterns in the magnetic fields, and a key challenge now is to develop a way to utilise these patterns to perform calculations, and to do so at room temperature. At the moment, they are working with the magnets at temperatures below minus 223°C.
Research author Dr Will Branford and his team have been investigating how to manipulate the magnetic state of nano-structured spin ices using a magnetic field and how to read their state by measuring their electrical resistance. They found that at low temperatures (below minus 223oC) the magnetic bits act in a collective manner and arrange themselves into patterns. This changes their resistance to an electrical current so that if one is passed through the material, this produces a characteristic measurement that the scientists can identify.
The scientists have so far been able to'read' and 'write' patterns at room temperature. However, at the moment the collective behaviour is only seen at temperatures below minus 223oC. A key challenge now is to develop a way to utilise these patterns to perform calculations, and to do so at room temperature.
Current technology uses one magnetic domain to store a single bit of information. The new finding suggests that a cluster of many domains could be used to solve a complex computational problem in a single calculation. Computation of this type is known as a neural network, and is more similar to how our brains work than to the way in which traditional computers process information.
Dr Branford, who is an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said: "Electronics manufacturers are trying all the time to squeeze more data into the same devices, or the same data into a tinier space for handheld devices like smart phones and mobile computers. However, the innate interaction between magnets has so far limited what they can do. In some new types of memory, manufacturers try to avoid the limitations of magnetism by avoiding using magnets altogether, using things like ferroelectric (flash) memory, memristors or antiferromagnets instead. However, these solutions are slow, expensive or hard to read out. Our philosophy is to harness the magnetic interactions, making them work in our favour."
Although this new research represents a key step forward, the researchers say there are many hurdles to overcome before scientists will be able to create prototype devices based on this technique such as developing an algorithm to control the computation. The nature of this algorithm will determine whether the room temperature state can be used or if the low temperature collective behaviour is required. However, they are optimistic that if these challenges can be tackled successfully, new technology using magnetic honeycombs might be available in ten to fifteen years.
In experiments, Dr Branford applied an electrical current across a continuous honeycomb mesh, made from cobalt magnetic bars each 1 micrometer long and 100 nanometres wide, and covering an area 100 square micrometers (as pictured). A single unit of the honeycomb mesh is like three bar magnets meeting in the centre of a triangle. There is no way to arrange them without having either two north poles or two south poles touching and repelling each other, this is called a 'frustrated' magnetic system. In a single triangular unit there are six ways to arrange the magnets such that they have exactly the same level of frustration, and as you increase the number of triangular units in the honeycomb, the number of possible arrangements of magnets increases exponentially, increasing the complexity of possible patterns.
Previous studies have shown that external magnetic fields can cause the magnetic domain of each bar to change state. This in turn affects the interaction between that bar and its two neighbouring bars in the honeycomb, and it is this pattern of magnetic states that Dr Branford says could be computer data.
Dr Branford said: "The strong interaction between neighbouring magnets allows us to subtly affect how the patterns form across the honeycomb. This is something we can take advantage of to compute complex problems because many different outcomes are possible, and we can differentiate between them electronically. Our next big challenge is to make an array of nano-magnets that can be 'programmed' without using external magnetic fields."Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Source images from Reuters and Wikimedia Commons
The world is in a confused and dangerous state. Russia, a nuclear power, invades Ukraine and threatens the Baltic states, all the while spouting casual nuclear threats. ISIS recruits by posting videos of its brutal murders. Portions of both the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa degrade into failed and weak states. They exhibit what some have called neomedievalism, which is characterized by violence, polycentric governance, and warring ideologies. Camps within the American and European right and left reject science as an authoritative source of truth, accepting only that which accords with their belief systems. It seems chaotic—what American military author and historian Sean McFate calls “durable disorder”—but it has at least one unifying underlying theme: the rejection of the modern, technologically sophisticated, complex, multicultural, and multipolar world.
What ISIS and such groups are responding to is not simply military and sectarian opportunities but a broad cultural malaise. Accelerating technological, social, and cultural change undermines many strong beliefs and practices, which can be particularly damaging to individuals and weak institutions. Those who are unable to keep pace with, or accept the changes inherent in, such a world sometimes retreat to faith, which is an understandable response. Similarly, the ever-greater social and cultural complexity of an increasingly multicultural world may have the same effect, reinforcing the value of mythic cultural stereotypes and “golden ages” of the past as refuges. While the immediate military threat of ISIS and similar organizations can be managed through traditional military responses, the reasons ISIS is there in the first place—the civilizational conflict dimension of ISIS—cannot.
Skepticism about or even violent opposition to modernity is not new, of course. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Luddites violently fought the new technology; less active types dreamt of a far more preferable, albeit imaginary, distant golden age, as they had since Roman times. Romantics such as William Blake fretted over the human costs of technological modernity, the “dark Satanic mills” that polluted England’s landscapes. Marx, Engels, and other socialist revolutionaries, often drawing from the Christian utopian tradition, decried the brutality of unrestricted factory capitalism and built their own mythic golden age in the future to come. Modernity—taken as encompassing the high-technology, market-oriented, progressive, secular state model that has dominated the international stage for the past century—is having a particularly hard time of it these days, though. Fundamentalist movements of all stripes, from religious to environmentalist to cultural to political, reject the compromises, tolerance, and belief in progress that characterize modernity. Significant minorities in the United States reject climate change science and the theory of evolution, while in Europe environmentalists stifle genetic engineering and similar technologies.
It is not that these communities reject useful technologies: ISIS, for instance, is extraordinarily good at using social media to recruit. But technological change such as we are experiencing is unpredictable, accelerating, and occurring across the entire technological frontier, and it involves not just one but virtually all critical foundational technologies—nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technology, robotics, and applied cognitive science. And we know from history that any technology significant enough to be interesting will also inevitably destabilize existing communities, institutions, power relationships, social structures, worldviews, and cultural assumptions. Because these psychological, social, and cultural verities are sources of comfort and identity for many people in virtually all cultures, technological change will only encourage a continuing retreat to fundamentalism. What will the response in conservative religious cultures be if scientists do achieve radical extensions of human life? If they create telepathic, brain-to-computer-to-brain, communication? If they wire humans directly into mechanical systems—now a prosthetic, but in the future perhaps a major military system, or perhaps a Martian robot? If genetic redesign of individuals becomes routine, initially to avoid genetic diseases, but then to enhance performance?
This rise of anti-modernity fundamentalism across many societies and within many traditions does, however, raise new and compelling challenges for those responsible for the military and security of Western societies, and opportunities for adversaries of the West. Partially because of American dominance of conventional military capabilities, the current evolution of war toward new kinds of civilizational conflict will accelerate. While conventional war will not disappear—as the plethora of engagements that the U.S. and Europe have participated in recently clearly demonstrate—serious, major conflicts involving large states will increasingly be fought across many domains. These might include not just traditional military activities, but also initiatives in nonconventional spaces such as finance, media and entertainment, infrastructure, and consumer products and services. They will also involve both new players, such as environmentalist groups, and the return of old actors, such as state religions in Russia or absolutist theologies in jihadist organizations. Traditional war, with military technologies and kinetic weapons, and defined geographic battle spaces, will likely become the exception, not the rule.
Once you understand the broader canvas of modern conflict, and the continued rise of reactionary, anti-modernist movements, you’ll see new and interesting patterns. ISIS and others have learned to be powerfully attractive to those who are left behind as modernity impacts traditional Middle Eastern and Asian societies. That’s especially true for younger males whose traditional identities have been torn asunder, but who have been unable to adapt to, or have not been welcomed into, the modern society in which they find themselves adrift. In the short term, of course, violent terrorism must be met with policing and counterterrorism programs; in the longer run, however, the question is more complex: How, exactly, can a soft power response be crafted for such a loss of identity? Russia’s suborning of anti-modernism in Europe is interesting and challenging, as well as sophisticated and powerful, and is not limited to just far-right and far-left political organizations. Indeed, NATO fears that Russia has effectively weaponized some environmentalist groups in Europe, because their opposition to fracking constitutes a powerful mechanism to ensure continued European reliance on Russian energy supplies, which in turn supports Russian influence over European responses to Russian hybrid warfare in Eastern and Central Europe.
Conversely, perhaps the most effective medium-term strategic weapon the U.S. has used in recent memory is domestic fracking. Not only does it support American economic growth, but it negatively impacts a number of adversaries including, of course, Russia (also Iran and Venezuela). More speculatively, it would be worthwhile from the perspective of America’s adversaries to figure out how to support the anti-modernity media and political forces, on the far right and left, that help paralyze American politics and lead to own goals such as shutting down the American government for partisan political reasons. Indeed, all the states in today’s great game of becoming one of a few superpowers in the future world understand that technological and scientific competence are critical to doing so. Thus, anything that supports the growth of anti-modernity forces in one’s adversaries, especially in democratic societies, is over the long term an important strategic investment.
Here is where history raises an evil specter indeed. Few conditions are completely new under the sun, and it wasn’t but a little more than a century ago, from the 1890s to the 1910s, that the West was undergoing somewhat analogous chaos, growing complexity, and cultural angst. Social mores and cultural patterns were being undermined by new technologies; countries that had long dominated the world, such as Britain, were falling in comparison with brash newcomers such as Germany. Railroads and communication technologies in a world increasingly globalized by European imperialism were mashing cultures up against each other in ways that were highly destabilizing to old verities. Military budgets were high. Religious and social conservatives loathed changes such as female suffrage and the perceived loss of moral constraint in a modern society. These factors led to one of the saddest ironies in history: When war was declared on the eve of World War I, a war that would destroy the naive optimism of the Enlightenment as well as much of European civilization, crowds celebrated wildly in the streets in every capital in Europe. A world sunk in adulation of a golden past that never was, and enthralled with the romance of anti-modernity, is quite likely to discount the benefits of the world that actually is. In a world of conflict, where nuclear powers clash by night, that dynamic substantially increases the risk of losing both.
This piece was adapted from a longer article appearing in the April Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate that explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.The plant "is the best way to free ourselves from energy dependency," Morales said, underscoring that Bolivia's nuclear program is for "peaceful purposes."
Morales said the facility would be located in the capital region, and would be built with assistance from Argentina and France.
Bolivia's President Evo Morales on Thursday announced plans to spend two billion dollars to build a nuclear energy plant, with construction set to get underway later this year.
He said construction on the plant was due to be completed in 2025.
Morales had previously indicated that his South American nation had plans to go nuclear with help from both Buenos Aires and Paris, but until now had not revealed the cost or timeline for the project.
In the past, Morales has said that energy produced by a Bolivian nuclear plant would be first and foremost for domestic consumption, but could also be exported.
He made his announcement just 10 days ahead of October 12 elections in which he is expected to be handily reelected to the presidency.
Morales, a virulent critic of the United States who became the country's first indigenous president in 2006, is seeking a third term after winning a Supreme Court ruling allowing him to stand again under a new constitution.
In October 2010, Morales made public agreements with then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, an ally, for Iranian nuclear power plant technology.Otoya Yamaguchi, assassin of Inejiro Asanuma, remembered by right-wing groups on 50-year anniversary
TOKYO (TR) – Right-wing groups celebrated the assassination of socialist politician Inejiro Asanuma by holding a small ceremony to honor his killer, Otoya Yamaguchi, at Hibiya Park in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on Tuesday, the 50-year anniversary of the gruesome event.
Roughly 20 members of various right-wing organizations congregated in front of the Hibiya Public Hall just before 3:03 p.m, the time when the 17-year-old Yamaguchi, brandishing a sword, rushed the stage while Asanuma, head of the Japanese Socialist Party, spoke during a political debate prior to lower house elections. (Other reports indicate the attack actually took place at 3:05 p.m.)
Nationalists had at that time strongly opposed Asanuma, who criticized the Liberal Democratic Party and the United States, proclaiming the latter to be the common enemy of the Japanese and Chinese peoples during a speech in Beijing the year before. He also attempted to block a bill in the Diet that would establish the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the U.S.
The beginning of the debate and subsequent assassination of the 61-year-old radical were shown live on public broadcaster NHK (watch video below).
Right-wing members see the current scandal-plagued state of politics and the ongoing turmoil with China — specifically, the recent dispute over the Senkaku Islands — as evidence that the attack still has merit in a modern context.
“Asanuma was a traitor to his country 50 years ago, and today we have numerous traitors in Japan,” said Takashi Funakawa, a representative of the right-wing group Dai Nippon Aikoku-to, as he stood in front of his blue sound truck in the hall’s parking lot. “For example, [former Democratic Party of Japan leader] Ichiro Ozawa and [Prime Minister] Naoto Kan, they are traitors to their country. We want to send them a message.”
As Asanuma began speaking on that fateful day, right-wing activists taunted him from the edge of the 2,085-seat hall. When police officers attempted to break up the group, Yamaguchi, attired in his school uniform, broke for the stage.
Upon reaching the podium, Yamaguchi thrust his 30-centimeter-long blade into the heavyset Asanuma. Following impact, Yamaguchi lost his glasses and the two separated. The assembled spectators immediately rushed to the scene. Mainichi Shimbun newspaper photographer Yasushi Nagao pointed his camera at the pair just before Yamaguchi plunged his weapon into Asanuma for a second time — the resulting image of which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 (see below).
Yamaguchi was apprehended, and Asanuma died an hour later, before arriving at the hospital. The teenager afterwards, on November 2 of that same year, committed suicide in his detention cell in Tokyo’s Nerima Ward by hanging himself with his bedsheets. One of his last acts was to open a container of toothpaste and smear the concrete wall of his cell with the message: “Seven lives for my country. His Imperial Majesty the Emperor, banzai!”
Positive public remembrances of Asanuma at the park on Tuesday were non-existent. In September, a representative of the Inejiro Asanuma Memorial Assembly Committee, Tamotsu Shima, explained in an article distributed on the Kyodo wire service that a tribute to Asanuma on the anniversary of the event by the ruling DPJ would be unlikely given that scheduling a speech by Naoto Kan would be “difficult.”
However, an editorial in the Mainichi Shimbun, dated October 5, questioned Yamaguchi’s “Seven lives for my country” statement, adding that his death was for glorification purposes and that the state of politics 50 years later is severely ill. “In times of political trouble, incidents do occur,” the editorial concluded. “But don’t let history repeat itself this time.”
Promotional literature was issued by nationalist Web pages to announce the Tuesday event. Nationwide commemorations began on Saturday and concluded Tuesday, when right-wing members entered the Hibiya Public Hall at roughly 3 p.m.
A framed, black-and-white photo of Yamaguchi was quickly propped at the front of the stage. Three minutes later, the lead representative of the Otoya Yamaguchi Memorial Association uttered a short prayer as the members of the contingent bowed their heads (see at right).
“We are here to honor Yamaguchi’s deliverance of justice to Asanuma,” added Dai Nippon Aikoku-to’s Funakawa.Summer is nearly upon us and with the last couple of weeks of term whizzing by if you have school age children they will soon have six weeks off to have lots of fun. The summer holidays are a time of getting outdoors, going on holiday and generally having adventures, so they are a perfect time to get your camera out and capture those memories. However summer can prove challenging when it comes to taking photos- think bright sunlight, harsh shadows, pesky sand and of course water!
But, it’s one of my favourite time of year to take photos, so I thought I would give my top five tips for photographing your kids this summer…
Watch the sun and seek out shade
It’s funny because we all want the sun to shine all summer long but in fact the midday blazing high sun is the worst kind of weather to shoot photos in. It makes children squint, it casts horrible shadows on faces and it just generally isn’t the most flattering time of day to shoot. Of course there are some memories you just don’t want to miss, but if you can try, find some shade.
As an example see this photo below. I love it regardless as it shows my little girl having fun splashing in the sea but at this time the sun was quite high and you can see it casts quite a lot of shadows on her face. It was about 4pm at this point so you can see that if I had done it at midday it would have been even worse.
Image source: Mummy Daddy and Me
These photos below were all taken in the shade outdoors and are some of my favourites. It was still light enough that I didn’t get a grainy image, but I don’t get any of those harsh shadows.
Seek out the golden glow
My absolute favourite type of photography is shooting the golden hour, where you get that beautiful hazy, golden effect on all your photos. Of course this kind of style doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it is my favourite. It is that time in the morning or evening when the sun is low in the sky. The time it is like that really depends on the time of year, but take advantage of the children being off school and let them stay up late to take photos.
Think about the photo you are taking
Photographing pictures of children is difficult. They don’t stop moving, usually don’t want their photo taken, or just are generally finished doing whatever they were doing by the time you take your camera out. But if you can take a couple of minutes to really think about what you are taking a photo of and try and frame your shot.
For example think about the background you are taking a photo of and what will be behind them. In both the below photos you wouldn’t think it but the beach was actually quite busy and there were lots of people swimming in the sea and walking along the beach. But by moving myself to a different position and also waiting for people to walk past it made it look as if the beach was deserted bar us. Sometimes clutter in the background is good, it makes it more like real life, but for certain photos it can look so much better if you think about what is around you before you take the photo.
Photograph movement
It can be really hard to photograph your child moving about and so many times I have got back home after a fun day out to realise half my photos are blurry because I haven’t got my photo settings right. But half the fun of summer is being outdoors and enjoying the sunshine, so it is the perfect time to capture the fun your children are having.
If you have a small compact camera, then sometimes they are really good at freezing movement, but your best bet is to use a DSLR on manual mode. As a rule of thumb if you are photographing movement and want to freeze it, then you need your shutter speed to be really fast. Shutter speed is how much light is let into the camera when the shutter is open. So if you want to freeze motion in a photograph then you want it to be at least 1/500 if you are photographing children. On the opposite end of the scale if you want to add a sense of blur to a photo then you would set you shutter speed to be fast, e.g 1/50 or 1/100.
For example to get some fun shots of my little girl being thrown in the pool I set my settings to be shutter speed 1/640, aperture 3.2 and ISO 160.
Image source: Mummy Daddy & Me
And for this one I set my settings to exactly the same as above…
Image source: Mummy Daddy & Me
Use your Camera Phone
I get really nervous about taking my expensive camera to the beach or by the pool- all the water, sand and suncream, not to mention the heat just generally makes me worried. Don’t be afraid to use your camera phone, you can still get amazing photos from it.
Below are a selection of photos from our recent summer holiday, all taken with my phone. My favourite apps for editing phone photos are VSCO cam and Afterlight.
Image source: Mummy Daddy & MeFor decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada's Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.
But recent geological analysis of the fossil site indicates that the park was deep underwater when these shonisaurs swam the prehistoric seas. So why were their bones laid in such a bizarre pattern? A new theory suggests that a 100-foot-long cephalopod arranged these bones as a self-portrait after drowning the reptiles. And no, we're not talking about Cthulhu.
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After considering the more brutal aspects of modern octopus predation, paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College came to the conclusion that the shonisaur remains had been deposited in a "kraken" lair by its massive, tentacled squatter. From his abstract of research being presented today at The Geological Society of America's annual meeting:
We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a "kraken," with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis. In this scenario, shonisaurs were ambushed by a Triassic kraken, drowned, and dumped on a midden like that of a modern octopus. Where vertebrae in the assemblage are disarticulated, disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity. Close fitting due to spinal ligament contraction is disproved by the juxtaposition of different-sized vertebrae from different parts of the vertebral column. The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in biserial patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each amphicoelous vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. Thus the tessellated vertebral disc pavement may represent the earliest known self‑portrait.
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McMenamin anticipates that this theory will be met with skepticism, as the fleshy body of a giant Triassic octopus wouldn't fossilize well. But the possibility of finding that which is essentially a gargantuan mollusk's macaroni illustration? That's the kind of glorious crazy you hope is reality.
[Via The Geological Society of America. Top artwork via Cyril Van Der Haegan/Deviantart]Copies of the San Diego Union-Tribune are shown on display at a newsstand March 18, 2009 in San Diego, California.
The publisher of the Los Angeles Times is buying U-T San Diego for $85 million, strengthening its presence in Southern California and putting the top newspapers in the state's two largest cities under common ownership.
Tribune Publishing Co., owner of the Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and other publications, said Thursday that the 145-year-old U-T would remain a separate newspaper.
Executives were examining how operations might be consolidated, with one possibility being that the Times would print the San Diego paper, the Times reported. The U-T said the newspapers would share some stories, photos, video and other content.
"We can take the best of what each newsroom can offer, and offer it to a broader customer base," Austin Beutner, the Times' publisher and chief executive, told the newspaper.
Douglas Manchester, a prominent San Diego developer who bought the U-T in 2011 for about $110 million, will keep the U-T's headquarters in the city's Mission Valley area. The newspaper will stay under a short-term lease while Manchester pursues a plan to build 200 apartments there.
Beutner will be publisher of both papers and chief executive of Tribune Publishing's California News Group, which will oversee operations in both markets. The U-T said Jeff Light, its president and editor, would remain at the San Diego paper.
Manchester, who insists that employees and others call him "Papa Doug," used his foray into newspaper publishing to trumpet conservative political views. One of his first moves was to give the U-T a new slogan, "The World's Greatest Country & America's Finest City."
"It has been important to me to speak out positively on a local, national and international level, particularly in denouncing Christian genocide and other oppression throughout the world," Manchester said in the U-T.
Manchester will receive $73 million cash and $12 million in Tribune Publishing stock, the newspapers said. He agreed to sell after saying last year that he would consider shedding the newspaper to a group of San Diego business leaders who wanted to turn it into a nonprofit organization.
The deal is expected to be completed before June 30, according to the U-T.
The U-T reported that the new owners may drop the name that Manchester introduced and return to The San Diego Union-Tribune, which is how it had been known since 1992, when The San Diego Union and The Tribune combined.
The move reshapes a tumultuous Southern California newspaper market in a struggling industry. Digital First Media, the nation's second-largest newspaper chain and owner of the Los Angeles Daily News, said last year that it was exploring the sale of its publications.
Freedom Communications Inc. recently named former casino executive Richard Mirman as its new publisher after pulling the plug on a short-lived expansion in Los Angeles and reversing a newsroom hiring spree. Freedom owns The Press-Enterprise of Riverside.
The Times is the region's largest newspaper by far, with an average print circulation of 650,718 on weekdays and 965,598 on Sundays, according to Alliance for Audited Media.
The U-T has an average print circulation of 268,038 on Sundays and between 177,885 and 216,417 on weekdays, trailing Digital First Media's combined Los Angeles-area publications. The U-T's circulation trails the Orange County Register on Sundays but is ahead on weekdays.
Tribune Publishing's newspapers were spun off from Tribune Media last year as a separate, publicly traded company based in Chicago.
“The acquisition of San Diego Union-Tribune and its related community properties is expected to be accretive to Tribune Publishing and reflects our continuing drive to create value for our shareholders,” Jack Griffin, CEO of Tribune Publishing, said in a statement on Thursday. “This represents another step forward in our strategy to leverage our publishing infrastructure, resources and management teams.”
Copyright Associated Press / NBC 7 San DiegoMalia, left, and Sasha Obama attend the National Christmas Tree Lighting and Pageant of Peace ceremony on the Ellipse in Washington in 2015. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Members of the First Daughters Club sprang into action Friday afternoon when one of their own came under attack.
This week, conservative media outlets and tabloids have been circulating and reporting on videos that they claim show Malia Obama — former president Barack Obama’s elder daughter, who is a student at Harvard — kissing a young man before a football game and blowing smoke rings. Typically, the media refrains from reporting on the personal lives of the children of presidents and former presidents, allowing them to have some privacy.
[Before Ivanka Trump, other presidential daughters also wielded influence at the White House]
This reporting caught the attention of President Trump’s elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former president Bill Clinton and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Both women tweeted criticism of the coverage Friday afternoon.
Ivanka Trump tweeted first, writing: “Malia Obama should be allowed the same privacy as her school aged peers. She is a young adult and private citizen, and should be OFF limits.”
Soon after, Chelsea Clinton tweeted: “Malia Obama’s private life, as a young woman, a college student, a private citizen, should not be your clickbait. Be better.”
Malia Obama should be allowed the same privacy as her school aged peers. She is a young adult and private citizen, and should be OFF limits. — Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) November 24, 2017
Malia Obama’s private life, as a young woman, a college student, a private citizen, should not be your clickbait. Be better. — Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) November 24, 2017
Read more:
A flat-Earther’s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpAnti-Trump Forces Claim Mantle of Science to Beat White, Working Class into Submission
RUSH: All right. Get this. This is the second time I’ve seen this. Psychiatrists at Yale University, quote, “I’ve worked with murderers and rapists, I can recognize dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous [Donald Trump] is.”
Yale psychiatrists. Never examined him. It’s just the left is cracking up. They’re literally crumbling to shreds.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You see this March for Science over the weekend? You know, how absurd. It wasn’t a March for Science. It was another anti-Trump, pro-Democrat Party rally is all it was. It’s trying to unite people who accept the politicized values of science.
Everywhere I look I see the Democrat Party flailing away, not connecting. I’m telling you, if it weren’t for the Drive-By Media, and it’s a big, big part of this — if it weren’t for the Drive-By Media, if the media were just — put it this way. If the media were 40%, 30% less partisan than it is, if they were only 60% all-in for the Democrats, the Democrats would be in deep, deep doo-doo. The only thing that is keeping the Democrat Party alive and viable is the media, and the media is lying to everybody.
I think one of the reasons why so many college students and Democrats and leftists are genuinely unhinged is they believe the BS that passes for the news every day. They believe it. They treat it as gospel. The media lied to them about the Clinton campaign. The media lied to them about the polling of the presidential election. The media is lying to them about the electoral strength and potential of the Democrat Party. They’re just misrepresenting things. And they are lying to them about various characteristics and personality traits of Donald Trump. They’re creating an entire portion of this country that is clinically on the road to insanity, or just shy of it.
I mean, this little tidbit here from Yale, this is incredible. “Yale Psychiatrists Just Warned There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Trump.” Let me read this again. They’re the words of James Gilligan, psychiatrist and professor at New York University. And he’s talking about Trump. “I’ve worked with murderers and rapists, I can recognize dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous this man is.”
Now, this guy’s comments “were one of many from a group of psychiatrists who gathered at Yale’s School of Medicine on Thursday. The message presented was that Donald Trump is mentally unfit to be in the White House.” Didn’t Hillary Clinton try that already? Yes, she did. Mentally unfit was damn well part of what she meant, unstable, unfit, not the right temperament. This is all they’ve got. They cannot even take Trump to town on policy. They try to. But they lose on virtually every prospect that comes up, except in their citadels like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
“Dr. John Gartner, practicing psychiatrist and founding member of Duty to Warn, a group of several dozen mental health professionals who feel it’s their obligation to inform the public about the president’s mental state, says the warning signs have been there from the beginning. ‘Worse than just being a liar or a narcissist, in addition he is paranoid, delusional and grandiose thinking, and he proved that to the country the first day he was president,’ Dr. Gartner said.”
This guy, Gartner, “started a petition calling for Trump to be removed from office. So far, that petition has received nearly 47,000 signatures,” which is not many, folks, compared to how hard they’re working to get them and how long the effort has been underway.
While we’re on the subject of psychiatrists — let me find something — yes. This is a story from Life Site News. Thaddeus Baklinski is the writer here. “A prominent Toronto psychiatrist has severely criticized the assumptions underlying what has been dubbed by critics as the Canadian federal government’s ‘bathroom bill,’ that is, Bill C-279, a private member’s bill that would afford special protection to so-called ‘transgender’ men and women.
“Dr. Joseph Berger has issued a statement saying that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a ‘transgendered’ person, and that terms such as ‘gender expression’ and ‘gender identity’ used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of scientific fact.
“Berger, who is a consulting psychiatrist in Toronto and whose list of credentials establishes him as an expert in the field of mental illness, stated that people who identify themselves as ‘transgendered’ are mentally ill or simply unhappy, and pointed out that hormone therapy and surgery are not appropriate treatments for psychosis or unhappiness.
“‘From a scientific perspective, let me clarify what “transgendered” actually means,’ Dr. Berger said, adding, ‘I am speaking now about the scientific perspective – and not any political lobbying position that may be proposed by any group, medical or non-medical. “Transgendered” are people who claim that they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests,’ Dr. Berger stated. ‘Some times, some of these people have claimed that they are “a woman trapped in a man’s body” or alternatively “a man trapped in a woman’s body.” The medical treatment of delusions, psychosis or emotional happiness is not surgery,’ Dr. Berger stated.”
Now, he’s not the first. The emeritus head of the mental illness psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University has written and published and said the same thing. And I remember reporting it when he did say it, it’s going on |
ilor europene de convergență), în al doilea rând de introducerea unor criterii și măsuri mai clare, mai prompte și mai ferme de care se opun fățiș principiilor și valorilor europene, mergând până la suspendarea temporară (Ungaria pare în acest moment prima vizată, dar nici guvernul de la Varșovia nu e cu mult mai bine văzut de franco-germani) și, în fine, de, solicitată în special de Franța, pentru care ar trebui însă modificat Tratatul Uniunii; În felul acesta, nucleul franco-german, sprijinit aproape necondiționat de țări precum cele din zona Benelux, Austria și Finlanda, speră că va putea da mai multă coerență politică și mai multă eficiență economică UE27, chiar dacă asta va însemna concentrarea deciziilor în Zona Euro;
, chiar dacă asta va însemna concentrarea deciziilor în Zona Euro; Realist vorbind, trebuie admis că plecarea Marii Britanii reduce la minim relevanța decizională a grupului non-Euro din Uniune, existând riscul unei marginalizări politice evidente a celor opt state non-euro care rămân, periferizare de care încep să se teamă inclusiv țări vest-europene dezvoltate, precum Danemarca și Suedia;
, existând riscul unei marginalizări politice evidente a celor opt state non-euro care rămân, periferizare de care încep să se teamă inclusiv țări vest-europene dezvoltate, precum Danemarca și Suedia; Cele 19 economii din Zona Euro vor realiza curând 85-90% din PIB-ul Uniunii Europene, după finalizarea Brexitului, iar această realitate economică aproape covârșitoare este imposibil să nu fie reflectată într-o realitate politică și instituțională pe măsura raportului de forțe;
, după finalizarea Brexitului, iar această realitate economică aproape covârșitoare este imposibil să nu fie reflectată într-o realitate politică și instituțională pe măsura raportului de forțe; Rămâne de rezolvat, în viitorul nu foarte îndepărtat, problema Italiei, “marele bolnav” economic al Uniunii Europene (Grecia fiind cel mic), cu o datorie publică imensă, un sistem bancar relativ fragil și un deficit de competitivitate care dă bătăi de cap Berlinului și Bruxellesului, desigur considerând că președintele Macron și guvernul său vor reuși (rămâne de văzut) să optimizeze în 2-3 ani cheltuielile bugetare exagerate ale Franței, aflată totuși într-o situație mai bună decât cea a Italiei;
(Grecia fiind cel mic) cu o datorie publică imensă, un sistem bancar relativ fragil și un deficit de competitivitate care dă bătăi de cap Berlinului și Bruxellesului, desigur considerând că președintele Macron și guvernul său vor reuși (rămâne de văzut) să optimizeze în 2-3 ani cheltuielile bugetare exagerate ale Franței, aflată totuși într-o situație mai bună decât cea a Italiei; Dacă adăugăm și percepția categoric nefavorabilă (circumspectă în cel mai bun caz) din capitalele europene cu privire la Președintele Donald Trump, înțelegem și mai mult de ce Germania și Franța doresc să avanseze în integrarea europeană, inclusiv pe dimensiunea Apărării;
, înțelegem și mai mult de ce Germania și Franța doresc să avanseze în integrarea europeană, inclusiv pe dimensiunea Apărării; În fine, ne place sau nu, trebuie să recunoaștem că cele două şocuri electorale din 2016, Brexitul și alegerea lui Donald Trump pun România (și nu numai) în fața unei presiuni crescute a opțiunilor nucleului franco-german, nucleu care va prelua curând Europa unită în propriile mâini, oferind celor din jur posibilitatea de a alege dacă doresc să meargă sau nu pe acest drum. Răspunsul este, cred, evident, cel puţin pentru România, pentru a nu vorbi, de exemplu, în numele Grupului de la Vişegrad. Pentru că, așa cum se vorbește deja în mediile de reflecție germane, s-a ajuns la un fel de “make-it or break-it point” iar cei care vor să meargă înainte împreună, respectând acelaşi set de valori şi reguli, o vor face de acum fără să mai piardă prea mult vremea, convingându-i şi explicându-le celorlalți ce și cum.
*
Lunea trecută, pe 15 mai, mă aflam la Berlin când proaspăt învestitul președinte francez făcea prima sa vizită externă, la cancelaria Germaniei. Dincolo de simbolismul întâlnirii destinse a celor doi șefi ai executivelor, începea ceea ce germanii și francezii (și, probabil, mulți alții de pe continent) își doresc să fie o nouă eră a Uniunii Europene, bazată pe motorul franco-german revigorat și pe unitatea regăsită a celor care rămân în UE27.
Ca să fiu sincer în aprecierea mea, e o doză de realism și pragmatism aici, în acest proiect refondator, dar e și puțin idealism în tot acest „nou început” al cărui design îl concep acum Berlinul și Parisul, mizând pe o unitate de la sine înțeleasă a celor mai mici, din eșalonul al doilea și al treilea al Uniunii Europene. Nu va fi deloc simplu, dar nu este nici imposibil. Iar combinația de realism și idealism nu poate fi decât benefică, în principiu, cu singura condiție de a nimeri proporția corectă a ingredientelor.
Nu vreau să fac predicții în acest sens, dar nu exclud ca peste 5-10 ani să vedem o Uniune Europeană mai integrată în adâncime, aproape un supra-stat federal, dar mai restrânsă numeric, bazată așadar pe un nou Tratat, dar unul care nu va fi semnat de toate cele 27 de state membre din prezent. Nu am nicio îndoială că România va dori să facă parte din „nucleul” care va promova reforma UE, dar va trebui să ne grăbim în a ne apropia, politic şi economic, de acest nucleu, şi de a fi mai convingători. Că vor fi 19, 22 sau 27 contează mai puțin, atâta timp cât cei care continuă împreună vor găsi formula coerentă și eficientă de a face față problemelor lumii viitoare și de a menține pacea în Europa.
Dar, de plecat pe calea reformelor, nu se pleacă astăzi de la ideea că nu ar rămâne toți cei 27, ci că Germania și Franța vor avea puterea să îi convingă pe toți să le urmeze, pe același drum. Un vânt optimist adie la Berlin și Paris. Preşedintele Macron pare hotărât să reformeze Franţa şi să sprijine şi reforma Uniunii Europene (de fapt, cum bine se observă, guvernarea celor două mari puteri ale UE a devenit inseparabilă de guvernarea Uniunii însăşi) în timp ce susţinătorii cancelarului Merkel par ceva mai destinşi după victoria CDU din landul-cheie Nordrhein-Westfalen, controlat multă vreme de social-democraţi, şi după ce avansul creştin-democraţilor în sondajele la nivel federal s-a mărit la aproape 10%.
Pentru România, proiectul reformator sau chiar refondator al Uniunii (în funcție de nuanța de entuziasm pe care o afișează interlocutorul german sau francez pe care îl întâlnești) generează riscuri mari dar și câteva oportunități interesante. Și unele, și altele, sunt semnificative pentru noi, ca și pentru întreaga regiune din care facem parte, și ar trebui abordate mai deschis și mai profund la București, momentul fiind critic și decisiv, în sensul cel mai larg al termenului, pentru cel puțin o generație de europeni de acum înainte.
De departe, riscul cel mai mare este să nu facem față din perspectiva competitivității economice și să ajungem la concluzia (tristă) că nu putem adopta moneda Euro prea curând, ceea ce politic ne-ar plasa, oficial, la periferia decizională a noii UE. Dacă până acum Marea Britanie, prin proporțiile ei, echilibra oarecum Eurogrupul cu zona non-Euro, de acum înainte Uniunea Europeană va însemna, în linii mari, Zona Euro (la rândul ei neomogenă, având în vedere diferențele de dezvoltare între nord și sud), la care se adaugă un cerc periferic non-euro, fragmentat pe componentele lui geopolitice și culturale: nordică, central-europeană și sud-estică. Așadar, am rămâne în zona cea mai vulnerabilă posibil, cea non-euro sud-estică, adică periferia periferiei, alături de Bulgaria și Croația, fiind vorba de ultimele trei state care au aderat la Uniune.
Ştiu cât de complexe sunt analizele privind trecerea la Euro, cunosc punctul de vedere al BNR privind necesitatea unui nivel minim de 75% din media UE a indicatorului PIB/locuitor (deocamdată, România ar fi pe la 55% din media UE) dar, având în vedere riscurile politice ale ţintuirii ţării la periferia procesului de integrare europeană, pe termen lung, aş sugera grăbirea procesului de reflecţie internă şi anunţarea unei date privind adoptarea monedei Euro.
Clarificarea aceasta este aşteptată la Berlin şi nu numai. Nimeni nu ne forţează, este decizia noastră suverană (deşi nu trebuie uitat că avem obligaţia adoptării Euro în Tratatul de Aderare, data fiind însă neprecizată) dar formularea de către Bucureşti a unei perspective ar fi de bun augur pentru cooptarea României în grupul reformiştilor. Că va fi vorba de 2022, sau 2023, sau 2024, e mai puţin important, dar ar fi în beneficiul României să dăm semnalul că am decis să facem pasul spre Zona Euro. Comparaţiile în general nu funcţionează, dar putem totuşi observa că economia Slovaciei, care a adoptat Euro în 2009, era oarecum în aceeaşi ligă cu economia României iar Slovacia nu a colapsat după trecerea la moneda unică.
În final, fără să diminuăm cu nimic optimismul, încrederea şi determinarea care şi-au făcut loc recent la Berlin şi Paris, trebuie totuşi să revenim la o perspectivă ceva mai precaută, mai potrivită poate regiunii în care ne aflăm, şi să spunem că este posibil şi ca nimic din aceste speranţe să nu se concretizeze. Da, pro-europenii au câştigat în Olanda şi Franţa iar Angela Merkel este favorită pentru alegerile din 24 septembrie. Dar mai sunt multe alte necunoscute. În iunie, noul partid centrist al lui Macron, Republica în marş, are nevoie de o majoritate în Adunarea Naţională, pentru a guverna stabil. Pe 15 octombrie, urmează legislativele din Austria, iar deocamdată extremiştii anti-UE de la FPÖ conduc în sondaje, cu circa 30%, deşi sunt în uşoară scădere. Va fi posibilă formarea noului guvern de la Viena fără extrema-dreaptă? Greu de spus acum. Pe 20-21 octombrie, vine Cehia, cu o perspectivă foarte complicată de formare a unei majorităţi clar pro-europene. Bun, veţi zice, nu o să se poticnească Germania şi Franţa în rezervele Cehiei de a accelera integrarea. Dar să nu uităm Italia, instabilă politic şi economic, cu alegeri care pot avea loc oricând, şi în care niciun partid nu are curajul de a spune clar lucrurilor pe nume, adică faptul că economia Italiei este pe buza prăpastiei (şi nu de ieri, de azi), că italienii trăiesc periculos în Zona Euro, cu datorii şi deficite tot mai mari, şi că ceva trebuie făcut pentru a evita dezastrul. Iar în cazul unui faliment de stat, să ţinem cont că una e să salvezi Grecia, şi nici acest lucru nu s-a dovedit uşor, şi cu totul altceva este să salvezi Italia.
Este mult prea devreme să spunem că ce a fost mai greu a trecut şi că Uniunea Europeană a depăşit criza. Dar voinţă politică, pricepere, seriozitate şi responsabilitate pentru a gândi o reformă pe termen lung există, cel puţin la Berlin şi, sperăm, la Paris. România este acum în faţa unor riscuri dar şi a unor oportunităţi, şi unele, şi altele, dintre cele mai importante. Dacă vom judeca şi vom acţiona corect în anii următori, este posibil ca noua Uniune Europeană să ne găsească mult mai aproape de o poziţie semnificativă în procesul de integrare. Dacă ratăm acum şi rămânem pe dinafară, va fi mult mai rău decât îşi pot imagina mulţi dintre noi, căci Europa unită se va strânge ca un arici, pentru a-şi proteja pântecele de ameninţările externe. Dacă pentru Marea Britanie a nu fi în Uniunea Europeană nu va fi sfârşitul lumii (deşi, la rândul lor, vor regreta la un moment dat decizia de a ieşi), pentru oricare din ţările regiunii noastre un drum alternativ ar fi catastrofal. E suficient să privim încă o dată harta pentru a înţelege de ce.
Ai informatii despre tema de mai sus? Poti contribui la o mai buna intelegere a subiectului? Scrie articolul tau si trimite-l la editor[at]contributors.roOn Feb. 12, I wrote about moving money internationally, covering the options available to me. Here I want to relate my experience using the BTC-China exchange, which I had not used before.
Things have changed a lot in the Bitcoin world in the last two weeks, as you probably know. Prices against the dollar took a real tumble after Mt. Gox appeared to be terminal, but have rebounded in just the last two days.
Also, BTC-China was accepting direct transfers from Chinese bank accounts into its corporate bank account two weeks ago, but no longer. So, that part of my previous article is already out of date. Now, BTC-China has a voucher arrangement with a partner website. www.yijingdong.com. This same website also handles online game “money” exchanges. It seems BTC-China is using this system as a way around the government banning banks from dealing in Bitcoin.
Well, today was payday for me here in China, so I went ahead and bought bitcoins at BTC-China using this new voucher system. I wanted to find out whether it was any better than the other methods I described in my Feb. 12 blog to send money to my American bank.
Here’s the short version. It was easier than using the Ripple network as an intermediate step, but in some ways slower. It was comparable to using two PayPal accounts in China and the USA to transfer funds, but much cheaper. In fact, because Bitcoin prices rose during the day, my net deposit, even after fees, was $25 more than my withdrawal — a 10% gain.
Since most of you are probably not Chinese residents, the rest of this article may not be so useful to you. But I hope you’ll stick around anyway.
To use the BTC-China/Yijingdong voucher system, you have to have a Chinese bank account with online banking enabled. There are no other fiat currencies offered there beside Chinese New Yuan (CNY), also known as renminbi (RMB). So, this leaves out just about everyone outside China.
The process to buy Bitcoin is very easy on the BTC-China website, given the above restrictions. Click on the choice indicated below.
This takes you to the Yijingdong home page, where there is a prominent BTC-China voucher link. Right below that is the English option, a thoughtful service which no other Chinese Bitcoin exchange offers as yet. Clicking on the English option brings you to a form where you fill in the amount of CNY you want to spend, the name of your Chinese bank, your BTC-China username and your (Chinese) cellphone number.
Clicking “NEXT” brings up your online banking website, where you complete the necessary information to confirm the purchase. After that’s done, when you return to the BTC-China website you’ll find your CNY balance has immediately been credited.
I chose to buy some Bitcoin, keep a fraction in the BTC-China offline wallet called Picasso, and transfer the rest to my Coinbase account for deposit in my US bank account. This was not immediate, as I discovered.
I initiated both transfers around 11:30 am. They were not completed until nearly three hours later, because BTC-China checks each withdrawal manually for new accounts like mine. Coinbase acknowledged receipt at 2:30 pm, and the Picasso wallet transfer occurred just before 3 pm. In contrast, when I used the more complicated CNY-to-Ripple-to-Bitcoin method two weeks ago, the transfers were only delayed by the usual blockchain confirmation waiting time.
On the bright side, I was able to take advantage of arbitrage, as the Bitcoin USD exchange rate at Coinbase was slightly higher than at BTC-China. And, by the time I got to my Coinbase account at the end of the work day, Bitcoin values had risen, so my net deposit to my American bank, even after transaction fees, was $25 more than my withdrawal from BTC-China. Final credit in my bank account will be in two business days.
BTC-China has dropped its transaction fees from 3% to 1% in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox debacle. Additionally, they waive the fees for limit orders (such as mine) and rebate those fees back to the market maker as a reward for helping exchanges move more smoothly. Market orders get no such rebates, but 1% is still minimal.
Would I transfer money again with this method? Yes, if Bitcoin prices were rising against the dollar. If Bitcoin was in decline, as it was a few days ago, I would have used my usual China PayPal-US PayPal route described in my Feb. 12 blog. The PayPal method requires four days total from withdrawal to final credit in my bank account, but the CNY-USD exchange rate is far less volatile than Bitcoin rates, especially lately.
Although many of you can’t benefit from using BTC-China, I hope this article was at least informative. Thanks for reading to the end!Sadegh Nabavi and Sina Alizadeh
Neuroscientists can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Experiments have confirmed a long-standing theory for how memories are made and stored in the brain. Researchers have created and erased frightening associations in rats' brains using light, providing the most direct demonstration yet that the strengthening and weakening of connections between neurons is the basis for memory.
“This is the best evidence so far available, period,” says Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York. Kandel, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work unravelling the molecular basis of memory, was not involved in the latest study, which was published online in Nature1 on 1 June.
In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers in Norway noticed a peculiar property of brain cells2. Repeatedly delivering a burst of electricity to a neuron in an area of the brain known as the hippocampus seemed to boost the cell’s ability to talk to a neighbouring neuron. These communiqués occur across tiny gaps called synapses, which neurons can form with thousands of other nerve cells.
The process was called long-term potentiation (LTP), and neuroscientists suspected that it was the physical basis of memory. The hippocampus, they realized, was important for forming long-term memories, and the long-lasting nature of LTP hinted that information might be stored in a neural circuit for later recall.
Neuroscientists have spent the past four decades probing LTP and its role in memory3–5. They found that synapses are strengthened, for instance, when rodents scamper around a new enclosure and that blocking LTP with drugs6 or mutations in key genes7, 8 can impair memory in mice.
But none of these experiments showed definitively that LTP was the basis of memory, says Robert Malenka, a neurobiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who was not involved in the latest work. “Proof of causality — that LTP is actually used for the encoding of a memory in a manner that is absolutely required — has been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to generate,” he says.
Light-bulb moment
A team led by Roberto Malinow, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, therefore turned to a technique that uses light to activate neurons. The researchers inserted a gene that produces a light-sensitive protein into a virus, then injected the virus into the rat brain cells they wanted to study. Once the gene had been translated into protein, the researchers were able to activate that protein with a pulse of blue light, delivered by an optical fibre implanted in the rat's brain.
In classic conditioning experiments, researchers play a tone to an animal and quickly follow it with an electric shock; the rats soon learn to associate the tone with a shock, and freeze when they hear the tone, in anticipation of the shock. Malinow’s team found that they could create the same kind of fearful memory using optogenetics, by delivering light to the neurons that connect a brain region involved in processing sound with one that handles fear, and then shocking the rats. "We can make a memory of something that the animal never experienced before,” Malinow says.
The synapses of the neurons showed molecular changes that are a hallmark of LTP. But to prove that LTP was involved in actually forming the memory, the researchers next set out to erase the association and then bring it back by re-strengthening the connection using LTP. This, too, could be accomplished with light that activated the neurons that stored the memory.
Rats that were exposed to a sequence of light pulses (previously shown to diminish LTP through a mechanism called long-term depression, or LTD) no longer cowered after a tone was simulated in their brain. The fear could be re-implanted in their brains by delivering light pulses known to create LTP, and then erased and brought back again. “We were playing with memory like a yo-yo,” Malinow says.
Memory mechanism
Kandel calls the work “a significant advance”. “It shows more directly than the indirect evidence that existed before that LTP has a role in memory storage and it can be wiped out by LTD,” he says.
Mark Mayford, a neuroscientist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, says that the role of LTP in memory has been taken for granted by those who do not work closely on it, but has been viewed more sceptically by those who specialize in memory. The latest experiments, he says, are “something that the field needed”. But he cautions that other molecular mechanisms are likely to be involved in memories that are more complex — for instance, remembering the layout of your workplace or local environment — because these are represented in different brain areas from those that process fear.
For his part, Malinow is happy that the experiments worked. “It’s a bit of relief and we can celebrate a little, too,” he says.Under Europe's "Right to be Forgotten" law, citizens there can petition Internet search providers such as Google to remove search results linked to personal information that is negative or defamatory. In many cases, these links lead to information about accusations of criminal activity or financial difficulties, which may be "delisted" if the information is erroneous or no longer relevant.
But "gone" doesn't always mean "forgotten," according to a new study by researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, NYU Shanghai, and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
"The Right to Be Forgotten has been largely working and is responding to legitimate privacy concerns of many Europeans," said New York University Professor Keith Ross. "Our research shows, however, that a third-party, such as a transparency activist or a private investigator, can discover many delisted links and determine the names of the people who requested the delistings." Ross, the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science at NYU Tandon and dean of engineering and computer science at NYU Shanghai, led the research team, which included Professor of Computer Science Virgilio Almeida and doctoral students Evandro Cunha and Gabriel Magno, all of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Minhui Xue, a doctoral student at NYU Shanghai.
They focused only on requests to delist content from mass media sites such as online newspapers and broadcast outlets. Although the law requires search engines to delist search links, it does not require newspaper articles and other source material to be removed from the Internet.
A hacker faces a fairly low bar if he or she knows a particular URL has been delisted. Of 283 delisted URLs used in the study, the authors successfully determined the names of the requesters in 103 cases.
But the authors also demonstrated that a hacker can prevail even when the URL is unknown, by downloading media articles about topics most commonly associated with delisting, including sexual assault and financial misconduct; extracting the names from the articles; then sending multiple queries to a European Google search site to see if the articles were delisted.
The researchers estimate that a third party could potentially determine 30 to 40 percent of the delisted mass-media URLs, along with the names of the people who made the delisting requests. Such hackers do exist and have published the names of people who requested delisting, thereby opening them to even more public scrutiny -- the so-called "Streisand effect," a phenomenon, named for the reclusive star, whereby an attempt to hide a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.
Their results show that the law has fundamental technical flaws that could compromise its effectiveness in the future.
Demographic analysis revealed that the majority of requesters were men, ages 20-40, and most were ordinary citizens, not celebrities. In accordance with the law, Google delisted links for persons who were wrongfully charged, acquitted, or who finished serving their sentences, among other privacy issues.
The researchers believe that defenses to these privacy attacks are limited. One possible defense would be for Google to never display the delisted URL in its search results. (Currently, Jane Doe's delisted robbery article would not show up when her name is used in a search, but would do so if the name of the bank were searched, for example.) This defense is not only a strong form of censorship, but can also be partially circumvented, they said.
A French data protection authority recently ordered Google to delist links from all of its properties including Google.com, in addition to its search engines with European suffixes. Google has so far refused, and the dispute is likely to end up in European courts. "Even if this law is extended throughout all of the Google search properties, the potential for such attacks will be unchanged and they will continue to be effective," said Almeida of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
The researchers noted that they will never publicly share the names discovered in association with their analysis. They informed Google of the research results.Broadcast evening news programs have been virtually silent on Congressional Republicans' repeated efforts to restrict women's access to reproductive health care by pushing an extreme 20-week ban on abortion.
House Republicans voted this week to ban the majority of abortions after 20 weeks. As The New York Times reported, the legislation is a new "version of a bill that Republican leaders had abruptly pulled in January amid objections from some of their own members" over a provision "that would have required women who became pregnant through rape to report their assault to law enforcement authorities" in order to gain an exemption from the ban.
Such legislation would have dangerous implications for women's health should it become law, as many serious health conditions for both mothers and fetuses cannot be discovered until around the 20th week of pregnancy. The latest version of the legislation requires sexual assault survivors to attend counseling 48 hours prior to receiving an abortion, a requirement that, as ThinkProgress noted, "appears to closely resemble the mandatory counseling and waiting period requirements that are already popular on the state level" which have been roundly criticized by health experts and medical professionals for being unnecessary and harmful to women.
Yet broadcast evening news programs have been all but silent in covering the Republicans' abortion ban.
According to a Media Matters review of ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS' nightly news programs since January 1, ABC's World News Tonight and NBC's Nightly News have completely ignored the legislation, while CBS Evening News ran one segment highlighting the GOP proposal on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. PBS' Newshour devoted four segments to the legislation this year, and was the only network to cover the House's passage of the latest abortion ban.
The virtual silence of the broadcast evening news comes amid an unprecedented push by Republicans at both the national and state level to restrict women's constitutional right to abortion. An April 2 report from the Guttmacher Institute found that the first few months of 2015 have seen 332 provisions to restrict access to abortion introduced in the legislatures of nearly every state.
Methodology
Media Matters searched Nexis transcripts of ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS evening news programs from January 1 to April 13, 2015 for the terms "abort!" or "reproduct!" We identified and reviewed all segments that included any of the keywords.Photo taken on Aug. 18, 2017 shows China's future Mars simulation base in Hongya (Red Cliff) region of Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. About 400 million yuan (61 million U.S. dollars) are expected to invest in the Mars scientific research base and eco-tourism site. The red rock area in Qaidam basin in western Qinghai has been called the most "Martian" place on Earth, with its natural features, landscape and climate all similar to those on the red planet. The base is expected to consist of a "Mars community" and a "Mars campsite." The campsite will have a number of experimental module-like accommodations. It will be built as a one-stop base for experiential learning in aerospace, astronomy, geography and new energy. (Xinhua/Wu Gang)
China is building a village simulating the environmental conditions on Mars, in northwest China's Qinghai Province.The project, as part of China's Mars exploration preparation, was approved by experts in Beijing Thursday.The village will be constructed in the red rock area of the Qaidam basin in western Qinghai, which has been dubbed "the most Martian place on Earth."Covering 702 hectares, the "Mars Village" will consist of a tourism center, a Mars community, a simulation base and other facilities.Total investment is estimated at 850 million yuan (about 130 million US dollars).
Photo taken on Aug. 18, 2017 shows China's future Mars simulation base in Hongya (Red Cliff) region of Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. About 400 million yuan (61 million U.S. dollars) are expected to invest in the Mars scientific research base and eco-tourism site. The red rock area in Qaidam basin in western Qinghai has been called the most "Martian" place on Earth, with its natural features, landscape and climate all similar to those on the red planet. The base is expected to consist of a "Mars community" and a "Mars campsite." The campsite will have a number of experimental module-like accommodations. It will be built as a one-stop base for experiential learning in aerospace, astronomy, geography and new energy. (Xinhua/Wu Gang)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2017 shows China's future Mars simulation base in Hongya (Red Cliff) region of Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. About 400 million yuan (61 million U.S. dollars) are expected to invest in the Mars scientific research base and eco-tourism site. The red rock area in Qaidam basin in western Qinghai has been called the most "Martian" place on Earth, with its natural features, landscape and climate all similar to those on the red planet. The base is expected to consist of a "Mars community" and a "Mars campsite." The campsite will have a number of experimental module-like accommodations. It will be built as a one-stop base for experiential learning in aerospace, astronomy, geography and new energy. (Xinhua/Wang Bo)
Photo taken on Aug. 18, 2017 shows stars over China's future Mars simulation base in Hongya (Red Cliff) region of Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. About 400 million yuan (61 million U.S. dollars) are expected to invest in the Mars scientific research base and eco-tourism site. The red rock area in Qaidam basin in western Qinghai has been called the most "Martian" place on Earth, with its natural features, landscape and climate all similar to those on the red planet. The base is expected to consist of a "Mars community" and a "Mars campsite." The campsite will have a number of experimental module-like accommodations. It will be built as a one-stop base for experiential learning in aerospace, astronomy, geography and new energy. (Xinhua/Wu Gang)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2017 shows China's future Mars simulation base in Hongya (Red Cliff) region of Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. About 400 million yuan (61 million U.S. dollars) are expected to invest in the Mars scientific research base and eco-tourism site. The red rock area in Qaidam basin in western Qinghai has been called the most "Martian" place on Earth, with its natural features, landscape and climate all similar to those on the |
like massive leverage, hoping that the economy can be pumped back up to super-leveraged house-of-cards levels.
As the Wall Street Journal article notes:
As they did in the two revolutions in economic thought of the past century, economists are rediscovering relevant work.
It is only “rediscovered” because it was out of favor, and it was only out of favor because it was seen as unnecessarily crimping profits by, for example, arguing for more moderation during boom times.
The powers-that-be do not like economists who say “Boys, if you don’t slow down, that bubble is going to get too big and pop right in your face”. They don’t want to hear that they can’t make endless money using crazy levels of leverage and 30-to-1 levels of fractional reserve banking, and credit derivatives. And of course, they don’t want to hear that the Federal Reserve is a big part of the problem.
Indeed, the Journal and the economists it quotes seem to be in no hurry whatsoever to change things:
The quest is bringing financial economists — long viewed by some as a curiosity mostly relevant to Wall Street — together with macroeconomists. Some believe a viable solution will emerge within a couple of years; others say it could take decades.
Note: I am not necessarily saying that mainstream economists were intentionally wrong, or that they lied because it led to promotions or pleased their Wall Street, Fed or academic bosses.
But it is harder to fight the current and swim upstream then to go with the flow, and with so many rewards for doing so, there is a strong unconscious bias towards believing the prevailing myths. Just like regulators who are too close to their wards often come to adopt their views, many economists suffered “intellectual capture” by being too closely allied with Wall Street and the Fed.
As Upton Sinclair said:Loved ones gathered to remember three boys were allegedly stabbed to death by their father. Relatives struggled to make sense of the tragedy. Robert Kovacik reports for the NBC4 News at 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015. (Published Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015)
Three young brothers were found stabbed to death and covered in blood inside an SUV in South Los Angeles today, and their father, who is suspected of killing them, was taken to a hospital suffering from critical stab wounds.
Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck said the three boys ranged in age from 8 to 12.
Police responded around 7 a.m. to an SUV parked in the 300 block of East 32nd Street on a report of an assault with a deadly weapon, Beck said. The three boys were found dead in the back seat, while the father was found bloodied and suffering from stab wounds, police said.
A man who works near the scene said he was walking by the SUV and saw the man in the front seat, and he appeared to have blood on him. He said as he approached the vehicle, he saw a boy he believed to be about 7 or 8 years old — motionless with his eyes wide open and covered in blood. The man said he then noticed at least one other body in the back seat, and he saw what appeared to be a box-cutter in the vehicle.
Father Allegedly Stabs 3 Young Sons to Death in South LA
Three brothers were stabbed to death, their bodies found in an SUV. Their father, who suffered wounds, was taken to a hospital and was placed under arrest in connection with the killings. Ted Chen reports for the NBC4 News at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015. (Published Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015)
Beck confirmed that a knife was recovered at the scene.
Police said the father is suspected of killing the three children, and they were not searching for any other suspects.
"The biological mother of the children we believe to be deceased. We believe there is a stepmother and she is safe," Beck said. "These are horrific incidents,'' Beck said. "These are incidents that scar not only a community but the first responders who have to handle them. It is a sad day in Los Angeles, made only slightly better by the fact that we have a probable suspect in custody."
The bodies were found near Dolores Huerta Elementary School, but the children did not attend that school.
Los Angeles Unified School District Chief Deputy Superintendent Michelle King said the kids were all students in LAUSD schools, but she declined to identify them.
"The schools they attended have been notified, and crisis counselors have been provided," King said.
Family Members Speak Out After Father Allegedly Stabs Sons
Family members of three boy who were fatally stabbed say they are trying to understand why the boys’ lives were taken. Mekahlo Medina reports for the NBC4 News at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015. (Published Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2015)
Police did not identify the father or the boys. A memorial set up by family members, however, identified the boys as Luis, Alex and Juan Fuentes.
Residents in South Los Angeles held a memorial Wednesday night for the slain brothers at 32nd Street near the scene where they were found dead.
Family members said they were shocked to learn from police that the father allegedly murdered his two sons.
"He loved his kids and it's hard for me to see him do something like this. It's unbelievable. I don't know what drove him to do something like this," said Rene Chanquin, the father's cousin.
Xiomora Mena, the boys' aunt, said the father and his new wife had gotten into an argument, and she begged him not to take the boys. The boys' mother died of an anuerysm in 2008.
The killings occurred amid a rash of deadly violence in South Los Angeles that police have attributed to a raging war between rival gangs. Police have responded by sending more officers from the LAPD's elite Metropolitan Division into the area.
2015 Southern California Images in the News
"I take this personally," said City Councilman Curren Price, who represents the area. "I live right around the corner, and I pass this way many times, been to the school many times. And to know that the kids that are back and forth here -- full of life, full of vibrancy -- and that these three are gone.
"We're going to be working closely with the community, with the police, others in the community to create a fund in memory of these youngsters and provide some support to the family and we ask the community to join us providing resources as a way of expressing our condolences but also providing assistance for the future."
An online fundraiser has been set up for the children. Anyone wishing to donate can do so here.A few teammates, unprompted, predicted in interviews that he would surpass Calvin Johnson’s single-season receiving yardage record (currently 1,892 and counting); inspired by Johnson’s nickname of Megatron, defensive end Carlos Dunlap is considering calling him Bumblebee, another character from the Transformers franchise, if it would direct more attention his way. The Hall of Fame receiver Michael Irvin cited Green’s grace, polish and versatility and characterized him as “the best all-around receiver in the National Football League — period.”
“A guy like A. J. Green, when he popped out of his mom and the doctor tried to spank him, he caught the doctor’s hand,” Irvin said in a telephone interview. “He said: ‘Oh, I’m supposed to let you hit me? I’m sorry. I just naturally catch everything.’ A. J. Green has been a bad man from Day 1. This guy was born to play the position.”
Green said he was humbled by the superlatives, dismissing comparisons to Randy Moss or Larry Fitzgerald as “an honor but definitely weird” while describing himself as “just a country boy from South Carolina.” That is, if country boys honed their hand-eye coordination through juggling, could dunk by seventh grade and had arms longer than a French documentary.
“There are guys around the league who do certain things well,” said Bengals safety Chris Crocker, in his 10th N.F.L. season. “Mike Wallace can run by you, but he’s not the best route runner. Some guys are great after the catch, like Steve Smith. But A. J. does everything good. He can do it all.”
On the field, Crocker meant. But also in the locker room, where Green’s arrival in 2011, as the fourth overall pick, coincided with the dawn of a new era — a new offensive staff, a new quarterback in Andy Dalton. Out went Chad Johnson a few months later, and in came Green, the alpha dog without pretense.
“He’s never thrown a temper tantrum,” said the offensive coordinator Jay Gruden, who was hired three months before the 2011 draft. “He’s just come in and worked and done what’s expected of him and made himself better. I really can’t find one negative thing to say about him, and I usually can.”
Bengals receivers had what Urban, hired a few weeks after Gruden, described as an “obnoxious habit” of waving for the ball when open. Green never waves, so now no one else does. He is repulsed by tardiness, so he shows up early to meetings, boards buses 20 minutes before departure. He demands perfection, so his fellow receivers do, too.
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“When something needs to be done or a play needs to be made, he’s the guy people look up to,” said the rookie Marvin Jones, one of five active Bengals receivers who are in their first or second year. “That’s the kind of guy you want around you.”
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Jones was around Green late Wednesday afternoon, when Jack Brennan, the team’s public relations director, interrupted a receivers meeting to announce that Green had been voted a Pro Bowl starter. As his teammates congratulated him by banging their desks, Green did not budge.
“Not even a smile,” Urban said. “He said, ‘Thanks, fellas,’ and then we went back to watching film.”
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Green inherited his humility, if not his athletic gifts, from his parents, Woodrow and Dora, who joined him here for the second half of the season. Woodrow pulled triple shifts at a steel company, telling his son: “Nothing in life is free. Go get what you want.” Dora has worked for Walmart for nearly 26 years. When A. J. came home from school wearing a do-rag, she scolded him.
“My son is not dressing that way,” Dora said she told him. Sure enough, she added, “it never happened again.”
Dora and Woodrow instilled in him the importance of loyalty, a virtue tested but never compromised after he orally committed to the University of Georgia as a high school junior, upholding the nonbinding pledge for a full 16 months — fending off, among others, Urban Meyer on a visit to Green’s high school — before signing day. His lone misstep in college — he missed four games after selling a jersey for $1,000 to someone the N.C.A.A. determined was an agent — was offset by a standout career, and the Bengals yearned for a dynamic receiver to headline their offensive overhaul.
Already smitten with his talent, Urban and Gruden wanted to assess his character, evaluate him in his natural environment. They took a plane to Georgia, meeting him for dinner at Porterhouse Grill, a popular steakhouse on the outskirts of campus. The coaches arrived to discover that Green had thought ahead to reserve a table, under his name.
The longer they talked, the more Urban and Gruden liked him, and their impressions were confirmed the next morning, when chaos reigned at Green’s pro day. Scouts and coaches were barred from watching Green’s workout from the sideline because Green’s quarterback, by living outside the Athens metropolitan area, did not satisfy the league’s eligibility rules.
“When Jay and I were driving back to the airport, I turned to him and said, ‘He handled everything as well as you could want,’ ” Urban said. “For a while, there was total confusion, but A. J. didn’t stress about it, he didn’t bat an eye. Now you talk to him, and he talks about how stressful it was, but we had no idea then.”
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Two weeks later, when Green visited the Bengals, Gruden asked him which quarterback he would most like to play with. Again, no hesitation. The guy from Texas Christian, Green replied — Dalton. The Bengals took him in the second round.
“Everybody says we’re a dynamic duo and all that kind of stuff,” Dalton said. “I’d like to think we can keep this going.”
Green, like Dalton, knows only of triumph in Cincinnati, not the decades of futility or bag-wearing fans: two seasons, two playoff berths, with the promise of more — perhaps much more — to come. More success, more muted celebrations, more catches for a highlight reel that, whether Green deems them impressive or not, grows by the week.
“He’s the perfect guy to be considered the face of this franchise,” said Dunlap, the defensive end who has known Green since eighth grade. “He’s like Derrick Rose, prime example. A great guy. A humble guy. And he just plays ball.”ACROSS western Europe, parties of the centre-left have struggled to make sense of the fact that Islam is a growing cultural force in their continent. At times, the relationship has veered between close embrace and secularist recoil. But parties of the left will lose out politically unless they can find a way to give Muslims the opportunities to participate in public life that other religious groups already enjoy.
That, in a nutshell, is the argument laid out by Jonathan Laurence, a professor at Boston College, in the latest issue of Dissent, a quarterly journal. As one of the most thoughtful observers of the politics of European Islam, he makes some important, paradoxical points.
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When poor immigrants of Muslim heritage started coming to work in Europe's factories half a century ago, they were welcomed by leftist parties as victims to be defended and promising political allies. But the relationship went sour after Muslim migrants showed their traditionalist side: burning the books of Salman Rushdie, the writer whose death was demanded by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and insisting on traditional headgear for women.
The centre-left has an ambivalent attitude to religion in general. It was once said of Britain's Labour party that, although it was a "broad church", it owed more to Methodism than to Marx. But in most other European countries, social-democratic parties have occupied the secularist ground, in opposition to the moderate religious conservatism of the centre-right. When centre-leftist parties have tried to reach out to Muslim voters, they have sometimes been burned by the experience. Earlier this year, a Muslim member of Sweden's Social Democratic party had to quit the leadership after making a reference to attacking Israel.
The paradox grows sharper, as Mr Laurence points out, when you look at voting patterns among Muslim migrants in Europe. In their new homelands, they still generally vote for centre-leftist parties (unless there a strong reason not to, like the Iraq war), but if they remain active in the politics of their mother country, they lean towards Islamist conservatism. The Islamist parties of Turkey and Tunisia do even better in the European diaspora than they do at home, Mr Laurence notes. (He could have added that the Islamists of Bangladesh do better in east London than they do in Dhaka.)
Although his broad-brush analysis of the European scene is clear and persuasive, some readers will part company with Mr Laurence's conclusion. Despite the relationship's inherent problems, he argues, the centre-left may lose out electorally unless it somehow re-engages with Islam. "When the left 'bets against God'....[it] forgoes potential alliances with faith communities that share common moral, economic and social ground."
In Britain at least, it looks likely that the centre-left will continue to swing erratically between cultivating Islam and cultivating wariness of Islam. In recent days Labour's education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, has scored points over the strange goings-on at the Al-Madinah school in Derby, which asked all prospective women teachers, Muslim or otherwise, whether they would be prepared to cover their hair. This establishment, excoriated in an inspectors' report this week, was a perfect example of the flaws in the Conservative-led government's policy of allowing "free schools" with weak supervision: by making that argument, Mr Hunt will please some citizens and alienate others, including Pakistani-born voters who have reacted defensively to criticism of the school. In the confusing, multicultural Europe of 2013, a politician or political party cannot please everybody and perhaps should not try.The Modern Express cargo ship was still adrift in the Bay of Biscay on Saturday (January 30) some 200 kilometres off the Gironde coast, French maritime authorities said, after attempts to tow the freighter on Friday (January 29) failed.
Despite the extreme 50-degree incline of the ship as well as difficult sea conditions, a specialised team was winched onto the ship and a Spanish tug tried to tow the cargo, but was unsuccessful because of bad weather, the maritime prefecture of the Atlantic said.
The Modern Express was transporting 3,600 tonnes of wood from Owendo in Gabon to France’s northern port of Le Havre, but listed heavily to one side earlier this week in rough seas and has not recovered an upright position, leading to the evacuation of the 22 crew members by helicopter.
French media reports said the problem may be due to its cargo having shifted.
There was no imminent risk of the ship reaching the coast and no sign that water had entered the vessel or that fuel had leaked out, a spokesman for the French Atlantic coast authority told Reuters on Friday, adding that the French navy had sent a specialised anti-pollution ship as a precaution to join French frigate ‘Primauguet’ and three tugboats already at the scene.
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Video Of The Day: Seven charged for impersonating President Uhuru KenyattaOn Monday, the Russian Hockey Federation held a glitzy presentation at Sokolniki Ice Hall in Moscow to show off the new jerseys that the Russian men’s and women’s hockey teams will wear at the upcoming Sochi Olympics.
Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin was selected to model the jerseys along with Alexandra Kapustina from the women’s team. Legendary Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretyak emceed the event.
The sweaters, designed by Nike, come in red and white. The jerseys have eight stars along the shoulder to symbolize each Russian/Soviet Olympic gold medal won by the hockey team.
“It’s a nice jersey, comfortable,” Ovechkin told sports.ru and translated by RMNB’s Fedor Fedin. “Both options look good. I like the white. It’s very unusual.”
“The key is that the jersey should be light,” Ovechkin continued. “Most importantly, we need the new uniform to be a winning one. The stars on the shoulders will remind us about how many times we won gold. We want more of these.”
Ovechkin avoided discussing Russia’s recently enacted gay propaganda laws, which have drawn criticism from the international community.
“[There are] calls to boycott the games?” Ovechkin said. “Our job is to play. I’d rather speak about that.”
Over the weekend, teammate Braden Holtby took a stronger stance telling the Calgary Sun,”It’s hard to go into a country that supports something like that. As athletes, we have to find a way to make sure we can use it to our advantage — gay rights, especially, but human rights — to move it forward.”
Below, check out a few more photos from the event.
See the full gallery.
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PinterestThe "Batman/Superman" movie will be the largest movie shoot Michigan has ever seen. Flickr/blmurch and Melia Robinson/Business Insider It has the potential to be the biggest superhero movie fanboy nation has ever seen. In reality, though, it will be the biggest production Michigan has ever hosted. Zack Snyder's Batman-Superman team up movie has begun pre-production work in Michigan, according to the Detroit Free Press, and it already has established itself as the "biggest movie shoot ever to land in the state."
Specifically, the Michigan Motion Picture Studios in Pontiac, Michigan will host Snyder's massive sequel, with all seven soundstages on the facility being occupied by the Man of Steel sequel. (This thing really needs an official title, because I'm getting a little tired of dancing around its moniker every time we report on the sequel's progress.) "This project will employ more Michigan residents than any other film project has ever employed in the state of Michigan," Michigan Motion Picture Studios COO Anthony Wenson said in the Free-Press story. That's saying a lot, considering the fact that the facility just finished hosting Michael Bay for portions of his Transformers: Age of Extinction shoot. Sam Raimi also filmed his Oz: The Great and Powerful at the Michigan facility in 2011. Snyder isn't filming entirely in Michigan. As most of you know, he already shot football scenes at a California game showing Metropolis versus Gotham, extending the age-old rivalry.
But the production is expected to ramp up in the first quarter of 2014, which is why several major decisions have been made behind the scenes on Snyder's movie, allowing him to stay on the fast track for a 2015 release date.
Recently, Fast & Furious co-star Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman in the sequel. Shortly after that, Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa was rumored to be up for a role (with some speculating he could play a villain, possibly Doomsday). And of course, Ben Affleck has been cast as Bruce Wayne opposite Henry Cavill's Clark Kent. Two big location stories crossed our radar today, with news of James Cameron taking over New Zealand for multiple Avatar sequels breaking as we learn a little more about the Batman-Superman Detroit shoot.
These projects are a long way off, but hearing about pre-production getting underway somehow makes them feel a little bit closer.
For all of your Batman-Superman needs, be sure to bookmark Eric's comprehensive guide. And if you are in the Michigan area, keep us updated on the movie's progress. It opens everywhere on July 17, 2015.BEIJING (Reuters) - A series of deadly bomb blasts in China this week has shown how easy it is to acquire explosives in the country, revealing a major gap in its huge security apparatus as the economy slows and anger grows over issues like graft and poor public services.
A damaged building is seen after explosions hit Liucheng, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in this September 30, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Stringer/Files
In a country where firearms are banned for most people, the bombings in the southwestern city of Liuzhou on Wednesday, and others in recent years around the country, demonstrate lax enforcement of rules to control access to bomb-making material.
Private gun ownership is almost unheard of in China as controls are so strict, meaning gun crime is rare. Explosives, on the other hand, are widely available from the sprawling mining and fireworks industries.
The 17 coordinated blasts across Liuzhou, a relatively obscure part of China, destroyed one whole side of a low-rise residential building, overturned vehicles and sent bricks showering into the street, images carried by state media showed. At least seven people died and more than 50 were injured.
The attack has been blamed on one individual in the city, but such “sudden incidents”, as China refers to them, highlight broader government worries about stability in the world’s second-largest economy, with a widening gap between rich and poor and growing anger at corruption and environmental issues.
“Modern Chinese society has lots of contradictions, and if people want to send a message about their anger or make a point, they can get explosives from any mine,” said Pan Zhiping, a domestic security expert at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences.
“It simply isn’t possible for the police to keep an eye on everybody,” he added.
The ease at which explosives can be obtained in the world’s second-largest economy was underscored in a court case posted online earlier this year as part of a government transparency drive.
In September last year, a court in southwestern China’s Yunnan province jailed a man for three years after finding more than 20 kg of explosives, almost 100 detonators and 1.5 km of fuses at his house.
The man, whose surname was given as Ren, told the court he had been easy to buy the material by saying it was for work needs, according to the judgment.
In fact, Ren said he had been buying the explosives and storing them at home for the last decade without any problems, though he seemed to have no violent intent.
NO MOTIVE
The government says it has no motive for the attacks in Liuzhou in the southwestern region of Guangxi. It has ruled out terrorism. The suspect, a 33-year-old man surnamed Wei, used other people to send the packages, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
“It indicates a serious problem in China in terms of public security. It reflects a lack of effective control by the government to restrict access to these dangerous goods,” said Jian Zhang, a lecturer in international and political studies at UNSW Australia in Canberra.
On Thursday morning, another blast was reported in Liuzhou, although it only caused minor damage and no casualties. It was not clear if it was linked to the previous day’s blasts.
Guangxi is home to many mines, which use explosives, and like the rest of China it will have lots of firework manufacturers.
Last year, police in Liuzhou arrested a father and son who were “unhappy with society and wanted revenge” and blew up trash cans in a public square using home-made firecrackers, injuring a female bystander, according to state media.
However, explosives are not often seen in violence in the far western region of Xinjiang, where China says it is battling an Islamist insurgency, with tight security limiting access to bomb-making materials or guns. Knives are generally involved in the violence there.
State media microblogs have already begun speculating on the motive for the latest attack in Liuzhou, with some suggesting it was the result of a dispute over medical treatment, a cause of several violent incidents in recent years.
While the Chinese government has ramped up health spending, hospitals are frequently overwhelmed with patients. Doctors are also badly paid, leading to corruption and suspicions that staff are more interested in making money by prescribing unnecessary drugs and treatment than tending to the sick.
Property disputes in a country where the government legally owns all land have also led to unruly protests, fights with police, imprisonment and even suicide, and created a major headache for the stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party.
In 2011, a man apparently angry about the illegal demolition of his home set off coordinated explosions at three sites near government buildings in eastern China, killing two.
In the same month, a petrol bomb set off by a disgruntled former employee at a rural bank in a heavily Tibetan region of northwestern China’s Gansu province wounded 49 people.
The worst incident of its kind happened in 2001, when a string of explosions at workers’ dormitories in the northern city of Shijiazhuang killed 108 people, blamed on a man seeking vengeance for family problems, although many doubt that explanation.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A UKIP leadership candidate has said that he personally supports a change in the law to outlaw same-sex marriage in England and Wales.
The comment comes from John Rees-Evans, who is one of the eleven candidates who have put their name forward to replace Paul Nuttall as head of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party.
Answering a survey from a group of ultra-conservative UKIP supporters known as ‘Support 4 the Family’, Mr Rees-Evans said he “personally” wants to ban equal marriage.
The decision would have a chilling effect on the thousands of same-sex couples who have already tied the knot in the country since the first weddings were allowed in 2014.
Asked about re-banning same-sex marriage, Mr Rees-Evans said: “We first need to make the argument to our membership and seek their consent for this stance. I would press for this personally, but S4TF need to assist in the work of presenting compelling evidence to our members.”
Mr Rees-Evans also called for sex education in schools to be “limited to the biology involved in reproduction”, effectively outlawing gay-inclusive sex ed lessons.
He said: “Sexual health should be taught in the context of lessons about human health and disease. Further, that chastity, fidelity in relationships and marriage are all as a matter of undisputed fact, preservatives against the spread of STV’s [sic] and unwanted pregnancies.”
He added: “The Schools Inspectorate should have an ethos of respect for Christian, Jewish and Muslim Faith Schools if they have a traditional sexual ethics syllabus.”
Meanwhile, the candidate insisted that he “rejects the notion sexual orientation is fixed at birth”.
He said: “LGBT campaigns ought to be cautious about professing ‘gender-fluidity’ while at the same time professing sexuality is absolutely fixed, as this is clearly a contradiction in terms.”
The candidate described homosexuality as “a lifestyle which I may consider contrary to my understanding of God’s perfect standards”, but insisted, “as an old fashioned Anglican I believe the whole Bible and that God hates all sins, including those that I commit.”
Mr Rees-Evans is best known for claiming that a “homosexual donkey” tried to rape his horse.
The outspoken activist made the claim in 2014, when he was challenged to condemn UKIP Oxford chair Dr Julia Gasper’s claims that homosexuals prefer sex with animals.
Mr Rees-Evans insisted: “Actually I’ve witnessed that. I was personally quite amazed.
“I’ve got a horse, it was in the fields, and a donkey came up – my horse is a stallion.
“A donkey came up which is male, and I’m afraid tried to rape my horse.
“My horse bit the side of the donkey, and I had to give my horse a slap to protect the donkey.”
Rees-Evans ran for UKIP leader during the last election, nine months ago.
He came last with just 2775 votes.
During the race, Mr Rees-Evans insisted that homophobic views should be “entirely acceptable” within UKIP.
Speaking about UKIP candidate Alan Craig, who has attacked the “Nazi expansionist ambitions” of the “gay-rights storm troopers” and compared same-sex adoption to “child trafficking”, Mr Rees-Evans insisted his views were not unacceptable.
He said: “It is entirely acceptable for a UKIP candidate to have any views that he likes.
“He’s not homophobic, what he’s saying is that the LGBT militant wing, not people who happen to be gay or lesbian, but people who go and protest against Christians’ rights, these people are militants.”
He added: “It’s interesting, because my campaign manager, who happens to identify himself as gay, would say pretty much the same thing. He very much opposes this militant attitude that a lot of the LGBT, you know…”
Asked if racist views would be accepted, Mr Rees-Evans continued: “I’d need you to define what you mean by racist.”
PinkNews broke the news last week that David Kurten, an elected member of the London Assembly and a candidate for UKIP leader, had made comments linking homosexuality to childhood sexual abuse.The Sad Story of Pro Athletes and Their Untimely Deaths
Believe it or not, the athletes that play the sports we watch and love on a daily basis are mere mortals, just like us. While many athletes are able to happily retire and live their lives to the fullest, not all are able to even retire. Old age simply does not apply to this list of athletes who saw their lives cut short in some of the most bizarre and peculiar ways possible.col
10 - Geoff Watt (1969)
Geoff was a distance runner from Victoria. While never receiving international acclaim, Watt was an astounding runner. In fact, he was the first person to run up and down Mount Kilimanjaro. Unfortunately, all the running in the cold would be the death of him. Watt died from exposure to snow while training on Mount Erica.
9 - Danny Frisella (March 4th, 1946 – January 1st, 1977)
Danny Frisella was a baseball player who played for five teams over the course of his career. He was a relief pitcher who was quite valuable to the teams that he played for, as he had a winning career record and an ERA around 3.00. Unfortunately, Danny’s life was cut short when he was involved in a dune buggy accident on New Year’s Day.
8 - Don Fleming (June 11th, 1937 – June 4th, 1963)
Don Fleming was a professional American football player who played for the Cleveland Browns. During the off-season, Fleming worked construction to stay in shape and gain experience, as he was a building construction major in college. Unfortunately, Fleming and a co-worker were electrocuted when a 12,000 volt transmission line struck them.
7 - Chris Benoit (May 21st, 1967 – June 24th, 2007)
Chris Benoit was a professional wrestler from Canada whose life ended in an absolutely horrifying murder-suicide case. Benoit was responsible for drugging his wife and son and consequently killing them over the course of three days. Upon murdering his wife and son, Benoit committed suicide in his house with a weight machine. Autopsy reports revealed that Benoit’s brain was in terrible condition.
6 - Andrés Escobar (March 13th, 1967 – July 2nd, 1994)
Andrés Escobar was a professional Colombian soccer player who was shot and killed in Colombia. The murder itself is not bizarre, but rather the reason for which he was killed. In the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Escobar scored on his own goal in a game versus the United States that ultimately led his team’s loss. A wide consensus believe that this goal led to his death. His team's loss caused immense losses to the Colombian drug lords, who bet heavily on the Colombian team to win.
5 - Geremi González (January 8th, 1975 – May 25th, 2008)
González was a professional baseball player who played for the Milwaukee Brewers at the time of his death. However, he played for five teams over the course of his career. There really is not an interesting story to the death of Geremi. All that needs to be known is that he overcame the 1 in 280,000 odds of being struck by lightning. González died immediately.
4 - Chris Henry (May 17th, 1983 – December 17th, 2009)
Henry was a professional American football player who played five seasons in the NFL with the Cincinnati Bengals. On December 16th, Chris was involved in a dispute with his wife. Apparently, Henry fell off the back of a moving pickup truck that was being driven by his wife. Henry died the next day from the trauma sustained during the dispute.
3 - Ed Delahanty (October 30th, 1867 – July 2nd, 1903)
Ed, a Hall of Fame player in the MLB, was killed after being swept over Niagara Falls. Drunk, Ed was kicked off the train he was riding for threatening passengers with a razor. He then started walking, making his way to the International Bridge, where he fell or jumped off.
2 - Mario Danelo (July 3rd, 1985 – January 6th, 2007)
Mario Danelo was an American collegiate level placekicker that played football for the USC Trojans. On January 6th, after partying, Mario went for a walk and never returned. Danelo, drunk at the time, had accidentally fallen off a 120-foot high cliff to his death in San Pedro.
1 - Corey Smith (October 2nd, 1979 – March 2009)
& Marquis Cooper (March 11th, 1982 – March 2009)
Corey Smith and Marquis Cooper, professional American football players, were never actually able to be confirmed dead. On March 1st, a fishing boat was reported missing off the coast of Florida. Smith and Cooper were accompanied by two other friends. The boat was supposed to have returned later that night, but never did. The boat was found the next day, capsized, with one of the friends hanging onto it. The men were searched for, but after a month, they were presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.Earlier today (Sept. 7), we reported that Drake's DJ Future the Prince had been robbed of millions of dollars worth of jewelry from his tour bus last night in Phoenix. Now, a suspect has been arrested for the crime, and you can see his picture above.
His name is Travion King, according to TMZ, and cops describe him as a transient. He was arrested this afternoon on the campus of Arizona State University with a briefcase containing the stolen jewelry.
The jewels were lifted from Drake's tour bus outside the Talking Stick Arena in downtown Phoenix while Aubrey was performing at his Summer Sixteen tour.
TMZ reports that King has worked at the Talking Stick Arena for concerts in the past, but wasn't working last night.
Robbery aside, there's some good news for Drake fans today courtesy of Kanye West. After a mysterious billboard popped up that had the G.O.O.D. Music logo and OVO insignia stamped on it, Kanye has confirmed that he is in fact working on an album with Aubrey. “We’re just working on music, working on a bunch of music together, just having fun going into the studio,” said Kanye in an interview with Vogue that ran prior to his Yeezy Season 4 show today. “We’re working on an album, so there’s some exciting things coming up soon.”
Below you can see footage of Drake having a fit after learning that his DJ was robbed.
The Phoenix Police Department has released a statement |
are far more complex than those facing direct-to-consumer genetics, because a test that provides health information to consumers clearly falls under the FDA’s jurisdiction. However, noninvasive brain-stimulation devices for cognitive enhancement—if they indeed provide such an effect—get at a deeper philosophical issue: What, exactly, is the difference between enhancement and treatment? Though philosophers and bioethicists have the luxury of endless pontification, the FDA is tasked with making a real-world decision.
Last month, the FDA held a public workshop on this topic. (I spoke on one of the panels, though I have no financial interests in these products.) Based on the discussion paper released ahead of the workshop, it seems that the agency intends to regulate these devices—it just hasn’t quite figured out how to do so. But although the FDA may have the expertise to regulate these devices, the idiosyncrasies of medical device law—namely, the complications regarding “intended use” claims—may not make this the best option, especially given the recent entrance to the market of devices that make no claims at all and instead bill themselves as “direct current sources.” The situation may require a novel solution—such as collaboration between the FDA and CPSC or the involvement of a third party, such as the National Academy of Medicine—to ensure the construction of a coherent framework that best encompasses devices on the market now and anticipates the complex issues that may arise in the future.
This piece was adapted from a research paper that appeared in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.After studying accident and claims figures, we saw that the Islands surrounding Great Britain are very low risk areas. We take into account the low crime and accident rates to try and give you the most competitive rate available.
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“Rambling, shouting, warning, and bullying his ‘enemies.’ He knows what issues click, what emojis to use. To be populist than being right,” said Villarin, a member of the opposition Magnificent Seven bloc.
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Amid all that, Villarin pointed out that he failed to mention certain key social issues including those that have been part of his campaign promises.
“Again, no mention of endo, coconut farmers’ trust fund, other social legislation. Frustrating!” he said in a message sent to reporters.
Anakpawis Party-list Rep. Ariel Casilao of the militant Makabayan bloc said Mr. Duterte “missed the opportunity to revert back to the path towards fundamental reforms for the benefit of the marginalized sector.”
Casilao noted that the President sidestepped the issue of genuine agrarian reform, and criticized his “skewed” statement on the utilization of national resources because “he embraces the messianic belief the foreign investments via foreign monopoly will build the national industry in the country.”
Like Villarin, he also slammed the “total omission” of his campaign promise to end contractualization.
He said the President only continued to coddle military abuses and neglected the state of farmers and indigenous peoples in Mindanao.
“He never assured the people of Mindanao of safety, of being subjected under a martial law rule and condemned them to the abuses of state forces,” Casilao said.
Meanwhile, Dinagat Islands Rep. Kaka Bag-ao of the Liberal Party said the SONA seemingly only “focused on a single issue—the war against drugs, which has turned into a war against the poor.”
“This Administration is led by Mindanaoans—this should entail a better potential for the development of the provinces of Mindanao. However, one year into the term, the most glaring occurrence that we have in Mindanao is an extended martial law,” Bag-ao said.
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“We need policies that are effective not because they are based on fear, but on facts,” she added. “We need comprehensive solutions that are anchored on our fundamental values, not simplistic, single-issue
responses that are based on a hunger for violence.”
On the other hand, she credited Mr. Duterte’s mention of the proposed National Land Use Act, which she had championed.
“In the coming year, I hope we can truly fight for progressive causes here in Congress, and not fight against repressive proposals like the death penalty or criminalizing children,” she said.
Deputy Speaker Fredenil Castro and Muntinlupa City Rep. Rozzano Rufino Biazon, meanwhile, lauded the President’s pronouncements on the allocation of resources to the armed forces, response to climate change, destructive mining, and disaster mitigation.
Castro said the President’s SONA was a SONA “stripped of imaginary situations aimed at playing on the imagination of the nation.”
“It was straight, real and frank, capable of evaluation if not quantification to evaluate his actual performance,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in a text message.
Biazon and Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone specifically zeroed in on Mr. Duterte’s call for the return of the Balangiga bells to the country.
“But I would have appreciated it even more if a more assertive statement on our rights to the west Philippine sea was given on top of it being addressed at a certain time,” Biazon said. It may be noted that Mr. Duterte only mentioned the said issue in a throwaway line.
Biazon, who is a vice-chair of the House national defense committee, said he agreed that “we should already render irrelevant those left leaders who are outside the country and begin peace efforts locally.”
“I would even go so far as say that the government deal with the rebels even on a per province level. Divide and conquer them,” he told the Inquirer.
He acknowledged that Mr. Duterte’s words against human rights advocates “may have been harsh.”
“But I think it’s quite obvious that it is brought about by his passion in the fight against drugs and criminality,” he said. “But of course, government should always take action within the bounds of
rights enshrined in the constitution and international agreements on human rights.”
The INQUIRER counted a total of around 80 rounds of applause throughout the two-hour speech that mostly tackled the criticism on his war on drugs, martial law in Mindanao, destructive mining, disaster mitigation, the death penalty, the falling-out with the communist groups with whom he had been negotiating peace, the foreign policy pivot towards China, the United States’ abuses during the 1901 Balangiga massacre, the effect of strict procurement regulations on military purchases, the effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling ordering the Food and Drug Administration to entertain opposition prior to the
approval of contraceptives, and tax reform. SFM
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MOST READSenior figures behind efforts to curtail the powers of American spy agencies have seized on the decision by the world’s largest tech companies to call for radical surveillance reform, saying the unexpected intervention is a potential “game-changer”.
In an open letter published jointly on Monday, eight tech giants, including Apple, Google and Facebook, said disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that basic rights and freedoms were being undermined.
The companies – which also include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Twitter, and have a combined value of $1.4tn – called for widespread changes that, if enacted, would end many of the current programs through which governments spy on citizens at home and abroad.
"This is a major game-changer,” Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group, told the Guardian.
She said the letter was certain to get the attention of the White House and Congress, not least because the often-cautious tech companies wrote the letter in unison, accompanied by personal statements from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his counterpart at Google, Larry Page.
Tech giants usually leave public lobbying to the dozen or so industry associations in Washington. It is unprecedented for the major tech giants to put their names to a single political statement of this kind.
“These are companies that have been deputised to be in the middle of a new, massive, systematic collection regime, against their will,” Harris said. “They are being told they can’t tell their users about it; they are losing business around the world and discovering that their data centres are being broken into. And I think they’re ready to fight back.”
Harris said senior executives in tech companies had coalesced around a set of political demands closely aligned with those called for by the internet freedom community, including her organisation. The Center for Democracy and Technology receives some funding from all eight tech giants behind the letter, but is a non-profit advocacy group.
The letter comes at a critical juncture. In six days, President Barack Obama will receive the findings of an independent review panel, consisting of five top-level experts appointed by the White House to propose a raft of possible reforms.
The make-up of the group, which includes Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism chief, and Michael Morell, the previous deputy director of the CIA, has been criticised as being too close to the intelligence community, but the administration insists its work has been independent and robust and will inform Obama's thinking about surveillance reform.
Next month, Congress is expected to debate competing legislation that will either substantially change how the NSA and partner agencies do business – for example, by rendering illegal the current practice of collecting phone records in bulk – or make only a few marginal changes.
The US intelligence community and its supporters on Capitol Hill are advocating only superficial changes that would leave their powers untouched and even codify practices that some legal experts argue are unconstitutional. This sets up a major legislative battle in the new year, which observers say could go either way. The position the White House takes in the debate could prove crucial.
A key barometer of change will be whether the phone records collection program survives. In their letter, the eight internet companies pointedly said governments should “limit surveillance to specific known users for lawful purposes” and “should not undertake bulk data collection”. The letter also does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, revealing, perhaps, that executives at the companies are acutely aware of the potential for NSA revelations to damage their business abroad.
Justin Amash, the House Republican whose amendment to end the mass collection of American citizens’ phone records was only narrowly defeated in July, said the tech companies' statement would galvanise support for the USA Freedom Act, the bill which is proposing to end bulk collection. “Businesses increasingly recognise that our government's out-of-control surveillance hurts their bottom line and costs American jobs,” Amash said in a statement.
The legislation, which is authored by Republican Jim Sensenbrenner in the House and Democrat Patrick Leahy in the Senate, and has 120 bipartisan co-sponsors in both chambers, has become the rallying point for advocates of reform on Capitol Hill. Sensenbrenner said on Monday that tech companies were among those “directly impacted by the NSA’s overreach”. The open letter, he added, “helps add to the growing momentum for much-needed reform”.
Leahy, in a statement emailed to the Guardian, pressed the case for reform in the wake of the letter. “The global competitiveness of the American technology industry has been undermined by revelations of massive dragnet surveillance programs," Leahy said. "We need to make substantial reforms to our surveillance laws to address the privacy concerns of innocent people whose information has been swept up in these programs, and to rebuild confidence in the US technology industry.”
Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic congresswoman whose California district includes part of Silicon Valley, said it was too early to determine the extent to which the intervention would alter the debate in a significant way. She pointed out that while the tech industry has a large and growing influence in Washington, and includes major donors to Obama’s re-election campaign, “they’ve not always, or even often, got their way on policy issues”.
“It is my perception that the spy agencies are pretty much oblivious to the impact on the country when it comes to the economy, credibility and the like,” she told the Guardian. “I don’t know if this is going to convince them.”
Lofgren is close to the tech industry; earlier this year she introduced legislation to enable tech firms to disclose the nature of government surveillance orders they receive – a proposal that was incorporated into the USA Freedom Act and was among the demands in Monday’s open letter.
She said that irrespective of whether Congress implemented the kind of reform advocated by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, those companies already recognise “the potential economic harm to overseas business is substantial”, and are taking defensive action. That involves hiring the best cryptologists they can find in what Lofgren described as a developing “encryption race” between the private sector and government.
“All of these companies are scrambling to increase security in order to prevent surveillance from their own government,” she said. “It is very clear that the technology companies are not going to wait for Congress. They are going to amplify and deploy additional measures to protect the privacy of their users.”
Additional reporting by Spencer Ackerman in New YorkIt’s been nearly three months since the NDP took power in British Columbia, but we are still waiting to see how it will get a handle on the housing affordability crisis.
Housing Minister Selina Robinson says they don’t want to do what the B.C Liberals did by bringing in new taxes without fully considering the ramifications.
“And that is whack-a-mole you just sort of come in with one thing hoping that it settles things down and then you don’t discover for some time that it hasn’t the effect that you are looking for. So it’s really important that we take the time – you know the Minister of Finance is doing a whole lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that we’re going through all the pieces that we need to do.”
She also says they want a solid plan before asking the federal government to step up.
READ MORE: ‘We just got the file,’ B.C. Housing Minister on next steps
“We want to make sure that we have it all covered and make sure that we are asking for the right thing and that’s really important for British Columbians to make sure that we are, get it right and we are taking our time to make sure we get it right.”
As for when we might find out the plan, Robinson will only say “soon.”
Recent reports from the Vancouver Sun’s Sam Cooper lay out how foreign or illegally earned money is being laundered in Metro Vancouver casinos and funneled into the housing market.When the Miami Heat eliminated the Washington Wizards from the 2005 NBA playoffs, the end of the season felt more like the beginning of a new era of professional basketball in Washington. Led by all-stars Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison, the Wizards appeared poised for a breakthrough, having won 45 regular season games and beaten the Chicago Bulls in the first round for the franchise's first playoff series win in 23 years.
Nearly five years later, Jamison is gone, traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Also departed are Larry Hughes, Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood and DeShawn Stevenson -- all key blocks in what once appeared to be a solid foundation. All that remains in Washington is Arenas, the public face of both the team's captivating success and its embarrassing implosion.
Arenas is scheduled to be sentenced Friday for a felony charge of carrying an unlicensed pistol to the Verizon Center locker room in December. He entered a guilty plea on Jan. 15. In a scathing sentencing memo, prosecutors recommended three months in jail, though the judge could sentence him to up to five years. Regardless, he is suspended from the NBA for the remainder of the season, and whether he will again play for the Wizards remains unclear.
Just as Arenas's arrival in the summer of 2003 signaled new hope for a Washington franchise mired in mediocrity, his experiences since that 2005 breakthrough -- from the departure of his close friend Hughes to his signing of a lucrative long-term contract to his injury and subsequent surgeries to his gun escapade -- have mirrored the team's downward arc.
As Arenas heads to court Friday to learn his immediate future from a judge, the Wizards are 21-49, the fourth-worst record in NBA.
Jamison, like many others, left town with one main question: "Where did it go wrong?"
Hughes departs
In the summer following the Wizards' second-round loss to the Heat in 2005, Hughes bolted in free agency to sign a five-year, $70 million deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The on-court loss to the team was significant; the off-court loss to Arenas was irreparable.
Hughes and Arenas had formed a special connection, dating from their lone season together in Golden State. When the Warriors drafted Arenas with the 31st pick in 2001, Hughes was among the first people the front office contacted to help him with the adjustment. He would invite Arenas to his house to hang out, and offered him clothes that were piled up in his closet.
His influence on the mercurial, unpredictable Arenas was profound.
"I'm pretty quiet and I'm pretty calming," Hughes said. Arenas "just figured that I was real."
In their two seasons in Washington, they became almost interchangeable at point guard and shooting guard.
"I could tell everything he was doing. I knew every movement, I knew why he did something before he did it," Hughes said. "And that's why it made us tough in the back court because we fed off each other. We always talked. We had that respect that we could do that for a whole game and there wouldn't be no problems."A 17-year-old girl who died when she bungee jumped off a bridge in Spain without being tied to the ledge plunged to her death in a mix-up over an instructor's English.
Vera Mol had a rope attached to her, but it wasn't tied to anything else when she took part in the popular adrenaline-fuelled activity on the bridge of Cabezon de la Sal in Cantabria back in 2015.
Her instructor told her, 'no jump', but his pronunciation was so bad the teenager thought he had said 'now jump' so she leapt to her untimely death.
Vera Mol, the tragic Dutch teenager who plunged to her death at the Spanish bungee site
Mol had a rope attached to her, but it wasn't tied to anything else when she took part in the popular adrenaline-fuelled activity on the bridge of Cabezon de la Sal in Cantabria back in 2015
Her instructor told her, 'no jump', but his pronunciation was so bad the teenager thought he had said 'now jump' so she leapt to her untimely death from the bridge (pictured above)
The instructor, who has not been named, has appeared in court accused of causing the Dutch girl's death.
The court alleged the bridge was not supposed to be used for bungee jumping under Spanish regulations
Judges in the court of Cantabria, northern Spain, say the instructor should have checked for ID to make sure Vera was 18 years old, adding that his English was'macarronico', which translates to'very bad'.
The court heard how tragic Vera Mol died after the misunderstanding during the jumping process, which could have been avoided had the instructor used the phrase 'don't jump' as opposed to 'no jump' as was reportedly the correct protocol.
It is also alleged the bridge was not supposed to be used for bungee jumping under Spanish regulations.
Flowtrack, who run the bungee jumping company which employed the man, claim it was an accident, but Martijn Klom from the company admitted the girl's death was caused by a misunderstanding when she was receiving instructions for the jump.
He confirmed the girl jumped when she was tied by the rope, but without being secured to the bridge.While the Manchester United squad were dancing on an open-top bus in front of 100,000 supporters, David Moyes addressed the Cambridge University Union on Monday night in one of his first public appearances since being unveiled as the successor to Sir Alex Ferguson.
Moyes was asked a series of questions that offer a fascinating insight into his vision for United’s academy, his philosophy of football and his ambition for his time at Old Trafford.
He describes Wayne Rooney as an ‘outstanding talent’, insists that longevity is the secret to success, and demands retrospective action to punish cheats that dive in the game.
Here are his words..
Earn your stripes: Moyes says he has to earn the confidence of his big name stars at Old Trafford
Chosen one: Moyes will take over from Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United next season
Meanwhile: United were enjoying an open-top bus title parade in Manchester on Monday Delight: The team arrived at Albert Square at around 8pm where the parade concluded
On walking into Everton
'They teach you a lot of things on these coaching courses but they don’t tell you what to do when you stroll into a dressing room to see Paul Gascoigne, Duncan Ferguson and David Ginola waiting for you as I did when I took over at Everton in 2002. And I’m thinking "Oh no! What am I going to say? – They probably don’t even know who I am". It was tough but we worked hard and I had support from an excellent team of staff.'
On dealing with Paul Gascoigne on his first day
'Paul Gascoigne was crying, in tears, when I walked in. And I am thinking "What am I supposed to do here?" I joined when Paul was about to sign for Burnley. I had just left Preston and they were set to play Burnley in their next game but I couldn’t let my old team Preston play against Paul Gascoigne – could you imagine?'
Tough crowd: Moyes took over at Everton with Paul Gascoigne (above) and David Ginola (below) at the club
'The fans would have gone mad! I managed to delay the move just long enough but it was a real carry on! Paul was a great guy, everyone in the game is trying to help him and I’m glad to hear he is doing better now.'
On Wayne Rooney
'When we sold him at Everton, Wayne was an outstanding talent and a really good player. We would watch him in training and say "Wow, did he really just do that?" You could see the staff looking across at each other shaking their heads in disbelief. He was football mad - heading the ball and volleying the ball here, there and everywhere. He was just a really good 16-year-old footballer.
'He would just leave the training ground and play football with his pals on the street and think nothing of it. A lot of people use the term "street footballers" and I think Wayne was the last of the street footballers, hitting the balls off the wall, playing with his mates. Part of that culture has gone from football. He reminded me of my days growing up in Glasgow where you would be playing on the streets but I do think he was the last of those great street players.'
Departing star: Rooney was sold to Manchester United in 2004
On whether Rooney has fulfilled his potential or stagnated…
(Laughs) 'I don’t watch all the Manchester United games! I have had my own job. But I do see international games and you are talking about one of the best players in the world. If you are an England supporter, you are thinking what a great player you have. If you are from Scotland, you’re saying ‘Oh no!’ – but he is a brilliant player. He has had a very good career.'
On whether his experience of inheriting Paul Gascoigne at Everton has prepared him for taking on Wayne Rooney
'I hope that I may have matured a little bit myself since I was dealing with Paul Gascoigne and that I will be able to deal with that kind of situation a bit better. It’s great working with the big players but I can’t answer your question fully - I couldn’t quite hear the end of your question (laughs). Like Arsene Wenger would say - “I didn’t see it!”'
Not bad: Rooney has won five Premier Leagues and a Champions League at Manchester United
Problems: Rooney was left out of United's game against Swansea after requesting a transfer although he took part in the on-pitch celebrations after. He was also subdued on the bus during Monday's title parade (below)
On diving and cheating
'I would be in favour of retrospective action on diving. I referee the small-sided games in training and you can’t tell whether the players are diving or not – they’re so good at it! In fairness, the referees are very good on that and get it right more often than not.
'We should look at the offences, though, and show up the divers. I have always told my players not to dive or cheat in any way. If it went to a panel and they find the player dived, I’d be the first to say the player deserves any punishment coming their way.'
Clamp down: Tottenham's Gareth Bale has been in trouble a number of times for diving
Coming clean: Luis Suarez admitted to diving in a match against Stoke earlier this season
On the importance of longevity
'Chelsea have had a level of success and have won a lot of trophies but I can’t see how continually sacking and changing managers, especially when you have to pay so much in compensation, is helpful. I think the best clubs are those with longevity.
'Sir Alex at Man United, when you look at everything he has achieved there. Arsene Wenger at Arsenal - you can see how the club has grown and the way he has developed players. Even at Everton, they gave me a chance and believed that I would get it right.
'The owners and chairmen must be stable. They shouldn’t be too high when you win or too low when you lose. You really need to work for good people. I have worked for excellent people at Preston, including Bryan Gray and then a wonderful chairman in Bill Kenwright at Everton.'
Eternity: Sir Alex Ferguson has just called time on his 26-year reign as Manchester United boss
Stretch: Arsene Wenger has been in charge at Arsenal since 1996 All change: Rafa Benitez was named interim manager at Chelsea this season after Roberto Di Matteo's sacking
'The refereeing job is very difficult but if you ask me truthfully, I think it has been a hard year for referees. I don’t think they have had the best season.'
On continuing United’s tradition of academy players
'Manchester United have always relied hugely on young players and my priority will always be to promote these talents. It is the right way to go. We need to be producing better English players and we are working to find the solutions. My aim would be to develop these young English players and get more and more coming through.
'There are issues to resolve: How do we get them more games at a competitive level? I like the Spanish model where there is a ‘B’ team playing in the lower divisions. Could we implement the same here? That would be a starting point. Three years ago, I wanted to get the young Everton team into the conference, as it would be a good place to compete. The FA told us we would have to start from the bottom – in division 27 or something!'
On Mancini’s sacking (Moyes was speaking before Mancini’s sacking was confirmed)
'It is difficult to say on Mancini because I am not on the inside there but I look at a club that has won a title and FA Cup recently, been in another FA Cup final and finished second in the league. That’s not too shabby and I think it is harsh if the rumours are true about Mancini.'
Dismissed: Roberto Mancini was sacked by Manchester City on Monday night
On the Champions League (Everton were knocked out in the qualifying round by Villarreal in 2005)
'The experience was incredible. I decided for the Champions League that we needed to do something different. We normally wore club suits but I wanted something else and felt it should be special. I got the boys blue blazers and cream slacks. The biggest mistake of my life! We lost but the referee on the night disallowed Duncan Ferguson’s header that should have taken us through. It was a goal!'
Defeat: Everton were eliminated from the Champions League in 2005 in the qualifying rounds by Villarreal
On the most talented players he’s worked with
'Thomas Gravesen was an excellent player and he ended up at Real Madrid. Wayne Rooney is an incredible player. For us at Everton though, it has rarely been about individuals – it has been about team spirit and commitment with a sprinkle of quality. Tim Cahill came back for my final game yesterday and he was a great team player for me.'
Talent: Tim Cahill spent eight years at Everton before moving to New York last year
On the legacy of Scottish managers
'We developed everything, us Scots! I grew up looking up to Jock Stein. Sir Matt Busby was before my time, Bill Shankly was another – and they were great Scottish managers. Sir Alex Ferguson, of course. There has been a trend of brilliant Scottish leaders and managers.
'Scottish football is renowned for its coaching courses and the managers it produces. There is a bit of Scottish grit in there, too. We have always been a nation that has had to fight back and it is ingrained into our personality. I hope I don’t lose that and change at all. It is a wonderful heritage.'
On the emotion of leaving Everton
'Not many as a manager are given eleven years in charge. You need a good chairman, strong staff and brilliant supporters who will give you a chance. The sad thing is that I brought all these players together and it is hard to walk away from that.
'All the players have been excellent and understand why I have to move on. Everton are back on track, competing in the top half and I can leave in the knowledge that I am leaving the club in a better shape than when I joined.'
Farewell: Moyes waved goodbye to Goodison Park with a 2-0 win against West Ham on Sunday
'I would be in favour of retrospective action on diving. We should look at the offences, though, and show up the divers.'
'Over the last few years, we have closed the gap on Liverpool and finished above them – that is a big turnaround. There are very few managers who have the opportunity to be cheered off in your last game as manager – I have to thank everybody at Everton and the supporters for that – it showed real class. The atmosphere was incredible. I didn’t expect it. I have one more game to go, if we win then it will be our highest points total during my time there. Who knows, I may be back one day.'
On his potential successor as Everton manager
'The chairman will make the decision and I do think that a few people within the club could easily step into the role. There are also candidates outside the club. That’s everybody!' (laughs)
On refereeing standards
'The refereeing job is very difficult but if you ask me truthfully, I think it has been a hard year for referees. I don’t think they have had the best season. Goal-line technology will help but only in a small way.
'Each and every one of them tries to do their job fairly, honestly and with integrity. It has been a hard year for them and the scrutiny has been on the referees as much as the players. I actually think the referees don’t train often enough. I think they physically train every day but they don’t come together often enough to practice on their skills of being a referee. They come together once a fortnight, but for me, if you are a professional and full-time, you should come together more often and they should be invited into the clubs to educate the players, and particularly the young players.'
Tough job: Moyes believes it has been a hard season for England's referees
On Financial Fair Play
'I think we are all still trying to come to terms with it. You now can only use a small amount of the television money on your wages. There is more emphasis on the club doing its job well in terms of the marketing and commercial side – selling more season tickets and corporate boxes. If you are a club that is good at that, FFP will help you.
'If you are a smaller club, with poorer attendances, then it will affect you. It could make the rich richer and the poor poorer, increasing the gulf in the Premier League. It has been brought in with good intentions but we could end up concluding that it is restricting trading. For example, if you want to buy a football club and spend money, then it would be more difficult to do that now.'
On Scottish teams in the Premier League
'My best experience for Celtic was playing against Juventus in the European Cup in Turin. That was incredible. We played against Ajax, in a team featuring Johan Cruyff and it was a fantastic team. We won and went through, that was my best memory. I didn’t play all the games but to be a part was great. Celtic is a fantastic football club and I learned more from those players and that dressing room than anywhere else in my career. Scottish football needs a strong Celtic and a strong Rangers – it is a shame what’s happened at Rangers.'
Tough times: Rangers have began their climb back to the top of Scottish football from the Third Division
'We developed everything, us Scots! I grew up looking up to Jock Stein. Sir Matt Busby was before my time, Bill Shankly was another – and they were great Scottish managers. Sir Alex Ferguson, of course. There has been a trend of brilliant Scottish leaders and managers.'
'However, Scottish football is now bringing through young players and in the moment, it may not look good but I hope once these players develop, the future could be bright. I’d like to see Celtic and Rangers in the English Premier League. I used to say "It won’t be long till we’re down in England". Both clubs would enhance English football with their fabulous support and brilliant stadiums.'
On Scotland
'I followed Scotland everywhere when I was younger and still do now. We are a very proud nation. We don’t like anybody talking about us. At the moment, they are all having a good laugh at us. But we’ll rise again, don’t worry about that! I’m too young to manage my country at the moment. I’m ambitious to win trophies and be successful. In time maybe, if I got offered the job, I would think about it.'
On Callum McManaman (The star of Wigan’s FA Cup triumph who Everton released at the age of 16)
'Since we let him go, Callum has had six years to go and develop. He played so well in the FA Cup Final and was rightly awarded Man Of The Match. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out and you get released. When you are young, released and you feel unwanted, it is so hard but you must persevere and hope that the day will come when you are picked up. Callum is the perfect example of that.'
Influence: Callum McManaman played a starring role in Wigan's FA Cup final win against Manchester City
Greetings: Duncan Ferguson throttles Steffen Freund
On Duncan Ferguson
'Duncan was an awesome centre forward. I played against him when he was at Dundee United as a youngster and eventually he was playing under me at Everton. We beat |
above average seems about right. Of more import is his injury history: while Gordon got almost 700 plate appearances in 2011 before being shut down, he spent time on the disabled least in each of the prior three seasons, including a serious hip injury in 2009. Due to attrition, players should never be projected to play 162 games; I usually project them for around 85 or 90 percent playing time. In Gordon’s case, 80 percent seems like a safer bet, although I admit that is less-than-scientific (unlike the utterly rigorous and irrefutable portions of the rest of this post. Ahem.).
In the past I’ve usually done a bit of arithmetic at this stage. These days I feel like it tends to give an impression of greater exactitude than I would like, but just to show my work, here’s what we have for Gordon’s 2012 projection: +21 hitting + 4 fielding + 1 base running – 7.5 positional adjustment for left field + 25 AL replacement level, all times 80 percent playing time, then converted to wins give us about 3.5 WAR for 2012. I am a bit uncomfortable with even one decimal place there, so it might be helpful to read that as “between three and four wins” rather than 3.5 on the money. In any case, although Gordon does not project as a “superstar” going forward, a three-to-four-win player is very good.
What should the Royals do with their “merely very good” player? They do not have to give Gordon an extension, as he is under team control for 2012 and 2013. However, the Royals are not exactly stacked in the outfield in either the short- or long-term. If you think Gordon’s projection falls short of “superstar status,” check out Melky Cabrera and Jeff Francoeur’s. Lorenzo Cain could not convince the organization to give him Melky or Frenchy’s job, and while Wil Myers is still a good prospect after a tough 2011 season, he probably will not see serious time in the majors until at least 2013. Bubba Starling might be the next Royals savior, but that particular parousia will probably not happen for some time.
This is likely the last off-season the Royals will have leverage to negotiate with Gordon in favorable circumstances, as if he performs decently in 2012, Gordon will be close enough to free agency that he would be better off going on another one-year contract and getting to free agency faster. So while they do not have to re-sign him, this is probably the last chance to do it in a manner that favors the club financially.
To figure out a fair deal for Gordon, we need to look at arbitration figures for players in comparable situations. Rather than embarrass myself (further), I consulted our own Matt Swartz, who has done extensive work on this topic. He suggests that Gordon would be likely to get around $4.4 million in arbitration this off-season, and assuming he has a decent 2012, more than $7 million the next off-season. That would be about $12 million total.
Unless the team gets a great deal when buying out the arbitration years, they are going to want at least one extra year of control of the player. Assuming the 3.5 win projection from above for 2012 and a standard half-win-a-season decline for Gordon, by 2014 we would expect him to be something like a 2.5 win player. Assuming the average price of a marginal win is up to around $6 million by then that would be worth about $15 million on the free agent market.
Altogether, something around (again, this is a ballpark figure) three years and $25 million dollars seems like a fair deal for the Royals and Gordon this off-season. In exchange for guaranteed security for Gordon, the Royals get his first free agent seasons and perhaps a slight discount. As I said, this is something like a fair deal. Obviously, a deal with substantially more money or other things such as a no-trade clause would favor Gordon, and club options and/or much less money would favor the Royals. A guaranteed fourth year is a trickier issue, as even a player with a fairly balanced skill-set like Gordon is a risk after 30 — the parties would need to strike a balance between compensating Gordon for putting off free agency by yet another season with the risk the Royals would take on by guaranteeing another season. Hey, they can’t all be Yunel Escobar deals, although I am sure the Royals (and every other team) would love it if they were.
Despite all of their missteps in recent seasons, the Royals have enough young talent to potentially contend in 2013 and beyond if they play their cards right and have a bit of luck. The Royals probably do not have a true-talent “superstar” on their hands in Gordon, much less the “next George Brett.” However, although Air Gordon is unlikely to replicate 2011’s under-the-radar awesomeness, he does not have to do so to be a major contributor to the next winning team in Kansas City. If you made it this far, thanks for indulging me. Hopefully, my next two-part, 3000+ word novel will be about that winning team, not a not-quite-superstar-level player.The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has formed a task force to counter purported efforts by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to recruit fighters in the restive southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
Mr Mohagher Iqbal, the spokesman for the group, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that recruitment videos released last month by local Islamist groups which have pledged allegiance to ISIS were "authentic".
But he said the 12,000-strong MILF, which signed a peace deal with the government in March 2014 after fighting a decades-long secessionist war, has yet to verify whether there is already a "formal ISIS organisation" in Mindanao.
Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla, the Philippine military's spokesman, told The Straits Times that the creation of the MILF task force is a "welcome development".
"Any effort aimed at controlling extremism, especially within their organisation, is a welcome development," he said.
Mr Iqbal said the task force consists of Islamic preachers tasked to counter ISIS' "distortions" of the Quran and Islamic teachings.
KEEPING THE PEACE A mixture of strategic and ideological disputes are at play here. The MILF leadership is portraying itself as a partner for peace and a bulwark against radicalisation in Mindanao. COUNTER-TERROR EXPERT RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN
He believes ISIS has been gaining ground, especially among Muslims in the Philippines who are frustrated over political wrangling that has derailed efforts to create an autonomous Muslim region in Mindanao.
Counter-terror expert Richard Javad Heydarian, of De La Salle University, said that the MILF, in creating the task force, may be taking steps to prevent extremists seeking to sabotage its peace deal with the government from recruiting "loose cannons" from within its ranks.
"A mixture of strategic and ideological disputes are at play here. The MILF leadership is portraying itself as a partner for peace and a bulwark against radicalisation in Mindanao," said Mr Heydarian.
Brig-Gen Padilla said earlier that security forces were "well aware of the emerging threat (from ISIS), and have been conducting operations to prevent terror acts anywhere in the country".
But he dismissed as "propaganda" the recruitment videos released by Muslim extremists in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia in the past month.
"There remains no credible and direct connection to the bigger group in the Middle East up to this time," he said.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino had hoped a Bill creating the Muslim region - the cornerstone of the MILF peace deal - would become a law before he steps down in June this year.
But a botched operation to arrest Malaysian extremist Zulkifli Hir, alias Marwan, last year provided opportunities for opposition lawmakers to stonewall the proposed law.
More than 40 police commandos who fought hundreds of Muslim fighters, including some who belonged to the MILF, were killed in that operation, provoking public outrage and fuelling opposition to the Mindanao peace pact.
With the campaign season for this year's elections set to kick off later this month, the Bill will likely be passed on to the next Congress, where it will again go through a series of hearings.
Recent intelligence reports suggest that the Philippines is becoming a breeding ground for Islamist fighters seeking to join ISIS.
Two videos released in the past month sought to show the militants' purported strength.
A three-minute video posted on Dec 20 showed a group of men, clad mostly in black and with the ISIS flag as their background, coaxing Muslims to travel to Syria and fight for ISIS.
A spokesman said that they were members of Ansar Khalifa Philippines, a group believed to be sheltering at least three South-east Asian extremists who have returned after fighting with ISIS in Syria.
The video also showed footage of what appeared to be a training camp on a clearing in the middle of a jungle somewhere in Mindanao.
A second video, released early this month, claimed that four battalions of militants from the Philippines and Malaysia have merged into a single unit under a leadership council now being steered by Abu Sayyaf ideologue Isnilon Hapilon.
The council is said to be paving the way for the declaration of a South-east Asia "wilayat", or province, of ISIS.poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201707/2499/1155968404_5527114319001_5527094417001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true White House insists: No chaos here
The White House on Monday installed its second chief of staff and dumped its recently hired communications director, capping a 10-day period in which the press secretary, a communications aide and the original chief of staff all took their leave.
In the White House’s telling, everything is fine.
Story Continued Below
President Donald Trump kicked off Monday morning with a series of tweets, one of which pointed to economic and jobs data as he claimed: “No WH chaos!”
Hours later, after the White House revealed Anthony Scaramucci was out as communications director just 10 days after announcing he was taking the job, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit the same message.
“I’ve said it before: If you want to see chaos, come to my house with three preschoolers,” Sanders, smiling, told reporters at a briefing. “This doesn’t hold a candle to that.”
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Scaramucci’s ascent to the White House prompted the July 21 resignation of Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, who opposed his hiring as communications director. Days later, Scaramucci publicly debated firing press aide Michael Short, leading him to quit, and delivered a profane rant that helped push out the president’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.
In two public appearances Monday morning, the president appeared intent on showing his new chief of staff, former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, that he wasn’t entering a chaotic White House. Kelly was sworn in Monday morning, and Trump’s message was, in short, that everything was going well — “and I think the general will just add to it,” he told reporters.
Scaramucci’s exit, announced later in the day Monday, came after other high-profile White House departures, including national security adviser Michael Flynn and communications director Mike Dubke.
The administration said in a statement that “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team.” The language mirrored Spicer’s reason for resigning after Scaramucci’s hire.
Sanders said at Monday afternoon’s news briefing that Scaramucci, who promoted her to replace Spicer as press secretary, has no role in the administration “at this time.” Asked whether Scaramucci’s departure will change Spicer’s status in the White House, Sanders said she wasn’t “aware of any changes that have been made on that front.”
She added that Trump found Scaramucci’s rhetoric in a profanity-laced phone call last week with a reporter from The New Yorker to be “inappropriate for a person in that position,” and the president “didn’t want to burden” Kelly with “that line of succession.” Scaramucci had blasted Priebus and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in the interview, and stressed that he reported directly to the president.
“Gen. Kelly has the full authority to operate within the White House, and all staff will report to him,” Sanders said. “Gen. Kelly, I think, will bring a new structure to the White House and discipline and strength, and we’re all really excited to work with him.”
11 days of the Mooch poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201707/1691/1155968404_5527106378001_5527102804001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404"
Trump, who has repeatedly heaped praise on Kelly since announcing Friday that he would serve as chief of staff, predicted Monday that Kelly “will do a spectacular job” and will outperform his role as DHS secretary, a run Trump said had “been nothing short of miraculous.”
“I have no doubt that he will be an absolutely superb chief of staff,” Trump said. “I predict that Gen. Kelly will go down in terms of the position of chief of staff one of the great[est] ever.”
Voters aren't convinced, though. In a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, a majority of respondents said the administration is running somewhat or very chaotically.Breitbart News Executive Chairman and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon tore into establishment anti-Trump Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) Tuesday over Flake’s decision to write a $100 check to Democratic Alabama senate candidate Doug Jones.
“Come on brother, if you’re gonna write a check, write a check,” Bannon said in front of an Alabama crowd at a rally for Republican candidate Judge Roy Moore. “Don’t give the man $100, are you kidding me?”
Bannon was reacting to a typically haughty tweet from the outgoing Arizona senator, in which he tweeted a photo of his check with the memo line reading: “Country over Party.”
Country over Party pic.twitter.com/JZMTaEYdxQ — Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) December 5, 2017
Flake’s tweet quickly drew ire from conservatives, who noted it was one thing to oppose Trump and another to support a pro-abortion Democrat in a typically red state.
Bannon suggested that the showboating from Flake was a reason why his approval ratings are underwater in Arizona.
“Hey Flake, this is why your approval rating in your home state is like 11 percent,” Bannon laughed. “Man, You’re a total embarrassment.”
Bannon also said it was typical of Flake, who had opposed Trump and the economic nationalist movement since day one.
“Flake has hated this movement from day one. He wrote the book, the anti-populist, anti-economic nationalist book … trash all the deplorables, trash all the silent majority, trash everybody associated with this movement,” he said.
Bannon noted that Flake had predicted Trump’s defeat a day before he won the election and that it was typical of a broader narrative driving the narrative behind many anti-Trump Republicans.
“Jeff Flake has done nothing except run the President of the United States down since the president won, and now he comes out at the last second and says, ‘I’m going to give 100 dollars to a Democrat.’ This tells you all you need to know.”
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.When you want no-compromise performance for CPU- and graphics-intensive tasks like 3D modeling, 4K video editing or running engineering software, you need a mobile workstation. With its optional Intel Xeon CPU and Nvidia Quadro graphics, Lenovo's 15.6-inch ThinkPad P50 is powerful enough to run cycle-sucking programs with ease but portable enough to take on the road. While other 15-inch workstations offer similar performance at lighter weights, this $1,322 laptop ($2,515 as tested) stands out for its best-in-class keyboard and all-day battery life.
Specs
Design
The 5.8-pound, 1.16-inch-thick ThinkPad P50 is just compact enough to be squeezed into a typical laptop bag or be carried around the office, and is much lighter than Lenovo's 17-inch, 7.6-pound ThinkPad P70. However, other 15-inch workstations are much more portable, such as the Apple MacBook Pro (4.4 pounds, 0.71 inches thick), the Dell Precision 5510 (4.6 pounds, 0.66 inches thick) and the HP ZBook Studio G3 (4.6 pounds, 0.71 inches thick).
The P50's raven-black, rectangular chassis follows Lenovo's classy but staid ThinkPad design language, with splashes of color provided by the bright-red TrackPoint pointing stick and status lights on the lid and deck. However, a soft-touch surface on the lid -- something you don't see on most other ThinkPads -- makes this laptop more pleasant to grip. I just wish the palm rest had the same comfortable texture.
With a glass-reinforced plastic lid and magnesium/aluminum base, the ThinkPad P50 is designed to withstand some abuse. According to Lenovo, the laptop has passed MIL-STD 810G durability tests for extreme temperatures, humidity, sand blasts, vibrations and shocks.
Security Features
Lenovo's workstation has the kind of security and manageability features that enterprise IT departments require. All of its CPU options come with Intel vPro management technology and TPM encryption. The P50 also comes standard with a single-touch fingerprint reader on the deck.
Keyboard, TrackPoint and Touchpad
The P50 has the kind of best-in-class, snappy keyboard we expect from a ThinkPad. The large, smile-shaped keys provide a deep 1.95 millimeters of vertical travel (1.5 to 2 mm is typical) and strong 60 grams of required actuation force. I felt extremely comfortable taking the 10fastfingers.com typing test, achieving a rate of 93 words per minute, which is in my typical range.
Like most other ThinkPads, the P50 has a TrackPoint pointing stick in addition to a touchpad. As always, I found that the little red nub provided extremely accurate navigation around the desktop and allowed me to move windows, highlight text or click icons, without lifting my hands off of the home row.
MORE: The Best Laptops for Business and Productivity
If you're not a big fan of pointing sticks, you'll appreciate the ThinkPad P50's 3.9 x 2.1-inch touchpad. During my testing, the matte-textured pad responded quickly and accurately to both simple pointer movements and complex multitouch gestures, such as three-finger swipe and pinch to zoom. I really appreciated its dedicated left, right and middle mouse buttons, which help it avoid the jumpiness we sometimes experience on other units, where you have to press down on the pad to click.
Display and Audio
The ThinkPad P50's 15.6-inch, 3840 x 2160 display provided extremely sharp images with vibrant tones and wide viewing angles. Every part of the Windows 10 user interface and software looked rich and lively, from the bright blue in the Edge browser icon to the deep green of the Xbox app. A desktop wallpaper of a bright, blue sky above orange-brown cliffs really popped.
When I played a 1080p trailer for Captain America: Civil War, colors like the red in Iron Man's suit and the slate blue in Steve Rogers' mask appeared very true to life, though not overly saturated. Fine details like the wrinkles in Robert Downey Jr.'s forehead and the ridges in Captain America's costume were extremely prominent. The picture remained true, even when I moved 90 degrees to the left and right.
According to our colorimeter, the ThinkPad P50's screen can output an impressive 183 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is even better than the desktop-replacement category average (121 percent), the Dell Precision 5510 (177 percent), the HP ZBook Studio G3 (169 percent) and the 15-inch MacBook Pro (89.8 percent). Any screen that can display over 100 percent is excellent.
MORE: The Best Laptops for Business and Productivity
The ThinkPad P50 comes with an optional color calibrator built into the deck that you can use to improve the display's accuracy. After I fired up the Pantone application and clicked a couple of buttons, the software prompted me to close the lid so the calibrator could do its work. After a minute or two, the laptop beeped to let me know that the process was complete and that the colors were just a little richer than before.
Though it provides strong viewing angles, the P50's display isn't quite as luminous as some competitors', registering 276 nits of brightness on our light meter. That number is almost identical to the brightness of the P70 (277 nits) and slightly better than the HP ZBook Studio G3 (241 nits). However, the MacBook Pro (317), the Precision 5510 (322) and the category average (293) were all brighter.
Sitting in a thin bar above the keyboard, the ThinkPad P50's speakers provided tinny but bearable audio that was only loud enough to fill a small room. When we played both the bass-heavy "Forget Me Nots" and guitar-laden "Smoke on the Water," the vocals, bass and guitar sounded fairly accurate, but the percussion was distractingly tinny. The preloaded Dolby Audio software offers equalizer presets optimized for Movies, Music, Games and Voice, but we prefer the Dynamic setting, which adjusts the output based on the content.
Heat
The top surface of the ThinkPad P50 stayed relatively cool throughout our tests. After the laptop streamed video for 15 minutes, the touchpad and keyboard measured 83 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. However, the bottom hit 104 degrees, which is quite a bit higher than our 95-degree comfort threshold but won't be a problem unless you try balancing this relatively bulky system on your lap.
Ports and Webcam
The ThinkPad P50 has a generous array of ports; we just wish that most of them weren't on the back, where we had to lower the lid or turn the system to get to them.
The back surface houses the power connector, an HDMI out port, a Thunderbolt/USB Type-C port, an Ethernet jack and two USB 3.0 ports.
The right side contains mini DisplayPorts, an audio jack and two more USB 3.0 ports, for a total of four.
The left side only has an SD card reader, an optional ExpressCard 34 port and an optional smart-card reader.
The laptop's 720p webcam captured decent images of my face, both under the bright fluorescent lights of our office and in my dark living room. However, as with most other webcams, there was more than a little pixelation in dark areas.
Performance
With its 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB PCIe NVME SSD and an Nvidia M2000M GPU with 2GB of VRAM, our review configuration of the ThinkPad P50 is more than fast enough to handle intense productivity work or even 3D modeling. When I ran a 4K offline video in one window and used Chrome with over a dozen tabs open, I didn't notice even a hint of lag.
The ThinkPad P50 scored a strong 13,378 on Geekbench 3, a synthetic benchmark that measures overall performance. That's comfortably above the desktop-replacement category average (12,796), just a tad higher than the Xeon E3-1505M-powered ThinkPad P70 (13,158) and about on a par with the Core i7-powered 15-inch MacBook Pro (13,352). However, the Dell Precision 5510 (14,316) and the HP ZBook Studio G3 (14,276), both of which have the same Xeon E3-1505M CPU, did slightly better.
Lenovo's workstation can crunch data with the best laptops on the market. It took the P50 just 3 minutes and 23 seconds to complete the Laptop Spreadsheet Macro Test, which involves matching 20,000 names with their addresses in OpenOffice. That's faster than the category average (3:43) and the Dell Precision 5510 (3:40). However, the ZBook Studio G3 and the ThinkPad P70 got the same exact time, and the MacBook Pro was 19 seconds quicker.
Our P50 configuration came with a 512GB NVME-PCIe SSD, which delivers speeds much faster than you'll get from a typical SATA SSD. It took the laptop just 11 seconds to copy 4.97GB of mixed media files, for a rate of 457.1 MBps. That's much faster than the MacBook Pro (282.7 MBps). However, both the category average (528 MBps) and competing machines with the same kind of drive were even quicker; the P70 (848.2 MBps), the ZBook Studio G3 (5090 MBps) and the Precision 5510 (565 MBps) were all ahead.
With its Nvidia Quadro M2000M GPU, the ThinkPad P50 has enough graphics prowess to run serious CAD software or do high-end video editing. Lenovo's laptop scored a solid 120,890 on the synthetic 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark. That's ahead of the category average (116,691), the Nvidia Quadro M1000M-powered Dell Precision 5510 (117,636) and the HP ZBook Studio G3 (117,745). However, the ThinkPad P70, with its Quadro M4000M GPU, scored an impressive 144,030.
Battery Life
Unlike most other mobile workstations, the ThinkPad P50 can last a full day on a charge. Lenovo's laptop endured for a full 8 hours and 25 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits of brightness.
MORE: Laptops with the Longest Battery Life
That's about on a par with the 15-inch MacBook Pro (8:29) and much longer than the Dell Precision 5510 (5:34), the HP ZBook Studio G3 (5:08), the ThinkPad P70 (5:53) and the desktop-replacement category average (4:24).
Software and Warranty
Lenovo preloads the ThinkPad P50 with a handful of useful first-party apps and no bloatware at all. Lenovo Settings gives you fine control over a number of features, including the camera, wireless configuration, screen, audio, power consumption and touchpad.
Lenovo Companion runs hardware scans, searches for driver updates and provides links to user guides and support forums. REACHit helps you manage your cloud storage accounts, and SHAREit allows you to send or receive files directly from other devices, such as your phone.
Lenovo backs the ThinkPad P50 with a one-year "depot" warranty on parts and labor, which means that the company will pay for return shipping on a product that needs service. You can also pay extra to upgrade to on-site service, add accidental damage protection and extend the warranty to up to five years, with prices ranging from $19 to $649.
Configurations
The ThinkPad P50 starts at $1,322.10, but with configure-to-order options on Lenovo.com, it can zoom up over $2,500. The base model comes with a Core i7-6700HQ, a 1080p nontouch screen, 8GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and an Nvidia Quadro M1000M GPU with 2GB of VRAM. Our $2,515 review configuration came with a 4K display, an Intel Xeon E3-1505M CPU, Nvidia M2000M graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVME-PCIe SSD.
If you buy through Lenovo, you can choose a Core i7 or Xeon CPU, a Quadro M1000M or M2000M GPU and up to 64GB of RAM. Unlike with the ThinkPad P70, you cannot choose an Nvidia M4000M card. You get to choose from a 1080p nontouch display, a 1080p touch panel and a 4K nontouch screen. You also get a choice of hard drives and SSDs, with the option to have one of each.
Bottom Line
The ThinkPad P50 delivers workstation-class performance, a snappy keyboard and a gorgeous 4K display, as well as over 8 hours of battery life -- enough to leave its heavy power brick at home. Creative professionals may prefer the MacBook Pro, which is 1.4 pounds lighter and offers similar battery life.
MORE: Best Lenovo Laptops
For a lighter Windows laptop, consider the Dell Precision 5510, which weighs 1.2 pounds less but has a lower-quality keyboard and lasts just 5 and a half hours on a charge. Professionals who want strong performance and don't care about portability should look at the ThinkPad P70, which is available with an even faster Nvidia Quadro M4000M GPU. However, if you want a long-lasting Windows workstation that can handle anything you throw at it, the ThinkPad P50 is your best choice.Washington (CNN) An ISIS fighter who calls for jihad in a new online video was trained in counterterrorism tactics on American soil, in a program run by the United States, officials tell CNN.
The video features a former police commander from Tajikistan named Col. Gulmurod Khalimov. He appears in black ISIS garb with a sniper rifle and a bandolier of ammunition. He says in the video that he participated in programs on U.S. soil three times, at least one of which was in Louisiana.
The State Department has confirmed this claim.
"From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State's Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program," said spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.
The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.
A State Department official said Khalimov was trained in crisis response, tactical management of special events, tactical leadership training and related issues.
In the video, Khalimov says that what he saw during his training sessions turned him against his sponsors.
"Listen, you American pigs: I've been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims," he says in Russian. "You taught your soldiers how to surround and attack, in order to exterminate Islam and Muslims."
Then, in the most chilling part of the 10-minute video, he looks directly into the camera and says, "God willing, we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you."
He then demonstrates his dexterity with a sniper rifle by blowing apart a tomato from a distance of perhaps 25 yards. The scene is played in slow motion.
The American program in which Khalimov participated is designed to teach tactics used by police and military units against terrorists by countries that cooperate with the United States on security matters. But now experts are concerned that this defector has brought ISIS not only a propaganda victory, but also an insider's knowledge of the playbook the United States is using in the fight against ISIS.
"That is a dangerous capability," said former Army intelligence officer Michael Breen. "It's never a good thing to have senior counterterrorism people become terrorists."
"It sounds like he was involved in defending sensitive people and sensitive targets," said Breen, who is now with the Truman Project in Washington. "He knows how to plan counterterrorism operations. So he knows how the people who protect a high-value target will be thinking; he knows how people who protect an embassy would be thinking."
Former Army sniper Paul Scharre, now with the Center for a New American Security, said Khalimov could not only help train other ISIS fighters in tactics, but also serve as a recruiter for the group.
"They're obviously trying to draw in recruits" with the video, he said.
Khalimov was an officer of the primary counterterrorism unit which responds to terrorist threats in Tajikistan, a State Department official said, so he and other members of his unit were recommended for the program by the Tajik government.
"All appropriate Leahy vetting was undertaken in advance of this training," said spokeswoman Jhunjhunwala.
Scharre, who has served as a trainer of Afghan soldiers in Afghanistan, says there is always a risk that a trainee will turn against their American instructors.
But Breen, who has also participated in training sessions overseas, said building counterterrorism partners requires a necessary leap of faith. "There's absolutely no way to beat an opponent like the Islamic State, without training a lot of people," he said. "That's a core of our strategy."SAN ANTONIO – The USL Game of the Week on ESPNU visits Toyota Field on Friday night as San Antonio FC plays host to OKC Energy FC looking to close the gap at the top of the USL Western Conference standings ahead of its showdown with conference leader Real Monarchs SLC next Saturday night. The Video Assistant Referee system will be in use, and kickoff is set for 8 p.m. CT.
Matchcenter: http://bit.ly/2vdaSyF | Tickets: http://bit.ly/2nEm3xS | Broadcast: ESPNU, SiriusXM FC (Ch. 85)
San Antonio FC news and notes
Current record: 10-1-5, 35pts
San Antonio earned a 1-1 draw against Sacramento Republic FC on July 1 at Papa Murphy’s Park in their last league outing as A.J. Ajeakwa scored for the visitors.
SAFC took a break from the USL regular season last Saturday when it played to a 1-1 draw with Liga MX side Santos Laguna before falling in a penalty shootout in front of 8,007 fans at Toyota Field.
Billy Forbes scored for the hosts against Santos as the club hosted its first international exhibition.
San Antonio enters the weekend eight points behind Real Monarchs SLC – which has the weekend off – going into Friday night’s contest.
OKC Energy FC news and notes
Current record: 5-8-3, 18pts
Energy FC fell 2-1 to in-state rivals Tulsa Roughnecks FC last Saturday night in the first Black Gold Derby of the 2017 season at Taft Stadium.
OKC took the lead late in the first half through Daniel Gonzalez, but a pair of goals by the Roughnecks after the break saw the visitors earn all three points.
Energy FC announced this week the addition on loan of 2013 USL Most Valuable Player Jose Angulo from Saint Louis FC for the remainder of the season. The club also announced Daniel Jackson would head to Saint Louis on a separate permanent deal.
Goalkeeper Carl Cochran Jr. had a memorable outing on Tuesday night as he recorded 13 saves in Energy FC’s 0-0 draw against Liga MX side C.F. Pachuca in an international exhibition at Taft Stadium.
Series Notes
Energy FC is 1-0-3 all-time against San Antonio after the two sides played to a 0-0 draw at Taft Stadium in their first meeting this season.
Squads
San Antonio – GK: Matt Cardone, Diego Restrepo, Lee Johnston; D: Sebastien Ibeagha, Cyprian Hedrick, Ben Newnam, Stephen McCarthy, Greg Cochrane, Ryan Roushandel; M: Miguel Salazar, Pecka, Billy Forbes, Michael Reed, Victor Araujo, Rafael Castillo, Kris Tyrpak, Mark O’Ojong, Devin Vega, Maxi Rodriguez, Zach Herivaux; F: Aly Hassan, Cesar Elizondo, A.J. Ajeakwa, Shawn Chin
OKC – GK: Cody Laurendi, C.J. Cochran; D: Michael Harris, Richard Dixon, Mickey Daly, Coady Andrews, Sam Fink, Anthony Wallace, Kyle Hyland; M: Chad Bond, Juan Pablo Guzman, Alex Dixon, Miguel Gonzalez, Luis Martinez, Daniel Gonzalez, Jose Barril; F: Jose Angulo
Discipline
San Antonio – Accumulation warning: Ben Newnam
OKC – Accumulation warning: Juan Pablo Guzman
Officials
REF: CALEB MENDEZ
AR1: Diego Blas
AR2: Elton Garcia
4TH: Baltazar Peral Hana
VAR: Jose Carlos Rivero
Game hashtag:
#SAvOKC
Twitter social handlesPage Content
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury today released a report that examines the current regulatory framework for the asset management and insurance industries and makes recommendations to ensure the regulatory framework is aligned with the Administration's Core Principles for financial regulation.
Treasury's evaluation focuses on four key areas: the proper evaluation of systemic risk, ensuring effective regulation and government processes, rationalizing international engagement, and promoting economic growth and informed choices.
"The regulatory framework for both the asset management and insurance industries can be significantly improved," said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. "We are recommending more efficient and effective regulation to give consumers access to the products they need while providing individuals with opportunities to save for retirement."
This report was in response to Executive Order 13772, issued by President Trump on February 3, which calls on Treasury to identify laws and regulations that are inconsistent with the Core Principles for financial regulation set forth in the Executive Order.
The U.S. asset management and insurance industries are the global leaders in promoting vibrant capital markets and diverse investment opportunities, and ensuring Americans can safeguard themselves, their property, and their businesses against unexpected events. Nine of the top 10 global asset managers are headquartered in the United States. Further, the U.S. insurance market is the largest in the world, representing 29% of the global market. In the report, Treasury identifies numerous ways to improve the regulatory framework for asset managers and insurance companies, and the products and services they offer, including:
· Supporting activities-based evaluations of systemic risk in the asset |
trans, and claimed that Dru was causing her great damage by doing so. I quote:
… how you want to call yourself is up to you off course, but if any body calls or labels me “a trans person” then I’m disgusted and angry as any woman would be. How dare you suggest that I’m ugly or look like a man.
I’ll not link to the rest of it because after some discussion the person concerned calmed down a lot and hopefully that’s sorted, but it is fairly typical of the sort of attack that trans activists get from those who prefer to keep themselves very private. If you’d like to read the interview, it is here, on page 46.
I haven’t had any of that, but I have been complained at from the other end of the spectrum for being supposedly overly feminine. Well I’m sorry, but I refuse to grow a beard so that everyone can see that I’m trans (and yes, I have been told I have a moral duty to do that).
This sort of thing is sadly common in the trans community, but my jaw dropped earlier today when I read a blog post by Brit Mandelo about her anthology, Beyond Binary. One of the interesting things about the book is that it provided a whole spectrum of different ways of a challenging the gender binary. The book was a bit limited due to being a reprint collection, but I thought it did a fine job of providing a range of different views on gender. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that Brit has come under attack from non-binary-identified people for Doing Non-Binary Wrong. (Her post is here, but it’s on LiveJournal so good luck actually getting it to load.)
Really, people, this is madness. There is nothing to be gained from abandoning one “one true way” approach to gender, only to adopt another that is often even more rigid. I wish people could see that.During the Crash Course you will often encounter numbers that are expressed in trillions. How much is a trillion?
You know what? I’m not really sure myself.
A trillion is a very, very big number, and I think it would be worth spending a couple of minutes trying to get our arms around the concept.
First, a numerical review.
A thousand is a one with three zeros after it.
A million is a thousand times bigger than that and it’s a one with six zeros after it. At this level I can really get my mind around the difference between these two numbers. A million dollars in the bank is a very different concept from a thousand dollars in the bank. I get that.
A billion then is a thousand times bigger than a million, and it’s a one followed by 9 zeros.
And a trillion is a thousand times bigger than that, and it’s a one followed by 12 zeros.
So a trillion is a thousand billions, which means it is a million millions. You know what? I don’t know what that means! I can’t visualize that, so let’s take a different tack on this.
Suppose I gave you a thousand dollar bill and said you and a friend had to spend it all in a single evening out on the town. You’d have a pretty good time.
Now suppose you had a stack of thousand dollar bills that was four inches in height. If you did, you know what? Congratulations, you’d be a millionaire.
Now suppose you wanted to enter the super-elite of the wealthy and have a billion dollars. How tall of a stack of thousand dollar bills would that be?
The answer is a stack only 358 feet high, seen here barely reaching 1/3rd of the way up the Petronas towers.
Now how about a stack of thousand dollar bills to equal a trillion dollars? How tall would that stack be? Think of an answer.
Well, that stack would be 67.9 miles high.
And I meant stack, not laid end to end or anything cheesy like that. A solid stack of thousand dollar bills, 67.9 miles high. Now that’s a trillion dollars.
That still doesn’t do it for you?
Okay, I want you to imagine that you’re in a car on a roadway that is lined at the side with a sideways stack of thousand dollar bills. A nice, compact, rectangular column of thousand dollar bills is snaking along the roadside next to you as you drive.
You drive along brrrrrrrrrrrrr without stopping for a little more than an hour, and the entire way there’s that stack of thousand dollar bills right next you, on the side of the road, the whole way.
Said another way, the amount of money created in the past 4.5 months in our economic system, if it had been printed up as thousand dollar bills and stacked along the side of the road, would stretch from Springfield, Massachusetts to Albany, New York.
So there it is. Either you can visualize the stack better by driving along next to it, or by standing on top if it, or any other way you wish to express this statement.
But make no mistake, a trillion is a very, very big number and we should not be lulled into complacency simply because it is too big to really get our minds around. That should drive us to action instead.
Keep this lesson in mind as we discuss the total accumulated debts and liabilities of the US, which are many tens of trillions of dollars.By FRANCO PANIZO
A new option in Miami has presented itself to David Beckham.
A group that last year purchased a building on Biscayne Bay where the Miami Herald used to operate has invited Beckham to look into the possibility of building a soccer-specific stadium in the area. Malaysian-based Genting Group, which has developed resorts and casinos from Hong Kong to New York, initially planned to construct a luxury casino resort at the location. However, state law doesn’t allow casino gambling at the site.
“I’ve invited Beckham to have a discussion with them because if you wanted to create a downtown stadium, that is a place where you can accomplish that,” City of Miami commissioner Marc Sarnoff told Local10.com.
Sarnoff added that the move to partner the Genting Group with Beckham has been in the works for a couple of months now. Beckham has met with Genting executives at least twice in New York, according to Sarnoff.
Beckham has had a hard time finding a stadium location in downtown Miami since announcing his plans to use his MLS franchise expansion discount on the South Florida metropolis back in May. He first saw his preferred PortMiami site receive lots of public objection before a boat slip next to the AmericanAirlines Arena was also shot down.
———-
What do you make of this development? Think this will be the location where Beckham will ultimately build his stadium? Do you see an agreement being made by the end of the year?
Share your thoughts below.In the foyer of Frankfurt's Commerzbank Tower stands a Christmas tree decorated with all manner of glitter. The idea is to brighten up the gloomy mood with a bit of seasonal cheer. Next to the tree is a notice board covered with children's wish lists for the Yuletide. Most of the youngsters want computer games and other forms of amusement -- small wishes, for the most part, that can easily be fulfilled.
It will be more difficult to indulge the man sitting on the 48th floor of the building. If Commerzbank CEO Martin Blessing could make one wish, he would presumably ask for a few billion euros, or that someone would take the bank's ailing subsidiary Eurohypo off his hands, or that the entire sovereign debt crisis would simply disappear.
But banks, along with their managers and owners, are not allowed to pin their hopes on miracles. They need money, as quickly as possible. And since Commerzbank's survival is at stake once again, the major shareholder in Berlin is thinking the unthinkable: One-quarter of Germany's second-largest financial institution already belongs to the state; now the government is considering fully nationalizing the bank if necessary.
According to government sources, if Commerzbank doesn't manage to raise sufficient capital on its own by next summer, Berlin will reactivate the Special Fund for Financial Market Stabilization (Soffin) and purchase additional shares in the bank. The sources say that they assume the government would acquire a majority of the bank's shares in a capital increase.
But things haven't reached that stage yet -- and they won't necessarily have to, either. Commerzbank management is working round the clock to solve the problem without government aid. It's a difficult job that will mainly have to be tackled by the new Chief financial Officer, Stephan Engels, who was appointed by the supervisory board last Friday.
If Commerzbank fails to meet the challenge, though, Blessing's days at the head of the commercial lending giant may very well be numbered. "I'm not going there again," he recently said, in reference to a government bailout of 16.2 billion ($21.7 billion) that the bank received in 2009. His statement was not well received in Berlin.
Euro Crisis Management Has Hit Banks
Relations between politicians and the financial industry are already extremely strained. Bank managers say that the ballooning debts of a number of euro-zone countries are to blame for this renewed banking crisis only three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers -- and they contend that the crisis management pursued by Brussels, Berlin and Paris has merely exacerbated the problem. First, the heads of government in the euro-zone pressured their banks to waive a portion of Greece's debts. Then the EU imposed new, stricter capital requirements on financial institutions. By the end of June 2012, European banks will have to raise their core capital ratios to at least nine percent.
The fate of the lending institutions now depends more than ever on how the crisis develops. What's more, "Commerzbank is the clinical thermometer for the euro crisis," said one insider. Financial market players doubt that the euro member countries can get their debt problems under control -- and since the banks have invested heavily in government bonds, investors also mistrust the banks.
True, the world's leading central banks provided some relief to lenders last week. They showered the increasingly dry financial system with cheap money. But the flood of cash has not removed the causes of the crisis. The banks will only stabilize when investors regain trust in their stability. It's hoped that the stress test and the new capital requirements introduced by the EU and its regulatory agency, the European Banking Authority (EBA), will achieve just that. After weeks of wrangling, the regulators have apparently agreed to a compromise; exact figures are expected to be presented this week.
According to sources within the agency, the regulations will be much tougher than what the EBA announced in October. European banks could require up to 200 billion in fresh capital, with the Germans alone needing 10 billion. Commerzbank is likely to account for approximately 5 billion of this, and Deutsche Bank for nearly 3 billion.
Where is the money supposed to come from? "It's a mystery to me how some banks can be expected to meet the higher capital requirements at such short notice," says bank expert Michael Göttgens from the auditing and consulting company Deloitte.
The traditional way would be to raise capital by issuing new shares on the stock exchange. Investors, though, are avoiding European bank stocks precisely because of the sovereign debt crisis. To make matters worse, financial institutions will probably also generate lower returns over the long term due to the more stringent regulatory demands.
Only Italy's largest bank, Unicredit, and Austria's Raiffeisen Bank have dared to announce significant capital increases. Unicredit, which owns Germany's HypoVereinsbank, intends to raise 7.5 billion -- although it recently made a loss of 10 billion in just one quarter.
Scaling Down Loans
The Italian Securities and Exchange Commission (CONSOB) is making a stand against the EBA, which is headed by an Italian, Andrea Enria. CONSOB is afraid that the strict regulations for financial institutions will strangle the Italian economy. In effect, so the argument goes, banks can also increase their capital ratios by reducing their balance sheets -- in other words, by granting fewer loans.
This is also the approach that Commerzbank is likely to take. Industry insiders calculate that the bank could free up some 3 billion in capital by allowing loans and bonds to mature without renewal. Since such transactions have to be backed by equity capital, this would reduce the demand for fresh capital.
However, banks that scale back their operations also pass up opportunities for profits. "It's alarming if Commerzbank has to significantly reduce its volume of business," says a member of the supervisory board. It's not enough, though, for the bank merely to refrain from conducting new business -- it would also have to sell off loan portfolios.
Other banks are considering this as well. This could revive a business that had been pronounced dead after the Lehman crisis: Risks that can't easily be reduced are simply sorted out and sold.
"Regulatory capital relief trades" is the term for the deals that are currently coming into fashion among European banks. This involves, for instance, taking loan packages apart and reassembling them according to risk classes. Elements that entail a particularly high risk of financial loss end up in so-called junior tranches. Banks have to retain an extremely high amount of capital to cover such high-risk bundles. Nevertheless, when converted to securitized investments, banking sector regulations allow for 95 percent of such unwanted packages to be written off the books.
Buyers of such products include US banks, which don't have to adhere to the same equity regulations as European lenders. It's primarily hedge funds, though, that seize upon such opportunities and cash in on fat interest rates.
As long as everything goes smoothly, the deals are worthwhile for everyone involved. Yet such transactions merely shuffle the risk back and forth, says Merck Finck analyst Konrad Becker. "This runs contrary to the goal of making the financial system more secure by introducing stricter equity capital regulations for banks."
Whether such credit swaps will swiftly help the banks out of their predicament is debatable anyway. Indeed, on Friday Commerzbank executives presented the supervisory board with additional ideas to bolster their capital reserves. For example, the board of directors wants to retain profits rather than distribute them. But there are two problems with this: First, the bank recently drifted into the red; second, shareholders don't like their dividends being scrapped. This in turn compounds the difficulties of winning over shareholders for a capital increase.
Commerzbank Mulling Radical Measures
Nevertheless, all of these efforts could ultimately prove insufficient. This realization has prompted government experts in Berlin, as well as in the bank, to examine even more radical ideas.
A top priority is finding a solution for the ailing subsidiary Eurohypo, which holds the shaky sovereign bonds. "As long as Commerzbank fails to get rid of the Eurohypo problem, it won't be able to raise any capital on the market," says an investment banker. The commercial lender is highly unlikely, though, to find a private buyer for Eurohypo. Banks are currently seen as practically unsellable.
Wouldn't it make sense then to hand Eurohypo to the German government? It could pool the toxic assets in a bad bank, allowing Commerzbank to face a brighter future, freed of this burden.
However, it seems very unlikely that Berlin would go along with this. "The state is not a dumping ground for the private economy," says Volker Wissing, the deputy parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's junior coalition partners, the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP). He also argues that handing Eurohypo to the German government could trigger a new round of state aid investigations. The arbitrary assumptions of a stress test cannot justify decisions that burden taxpayers, says Carsten Schneider, a finance expert for the center-left opposition Social Democrats (SPD). "If capital is needed, then it should be raised through common stock and without dubious compromises."
Investment bankers say that if the bank were nationalized, it would be possible to hive off Eurohypo and subsequently sell off the healthy remainder of Commerzbank. The proceeds could then be used to balance out any losses sustained from Eurohypo.
Politicians in Berlin express only muted enthusiasm for such a bailout scheme. "The parliamentarians don't want yet another bank that will become a source of political dispute," says one Commerzbank manager. This reluctance is understandable. The MPs still vividly remember a similar situation with Hypo Real Estate: In 2009, the German government took full control of this ailing group of real estate financing banks and split off the riskiest investments into a bad bank. But it still remains totally unclear exactly how much money taxpayers lost during the deal.
The Berlin government and Commerzbank have one Christmas wish in common: that the euro debt crisis doesn't bring down Italy, which would put governments and banks under even greater strain. Cynics, however, would add: If Italy defaults on its loans, the euro crisis will reach such dimensions that Commerzbank's problems will be negligible by comparison.Open Quarter 2018
Welcome to Open Quarter 2018! This summer you are invited to explore the Creative Quarter’s hidden spaces and meet the people that are the driving force behind this unique and creative community. This year, for the very first time, we are extending Open Quarter over ten days! We launch the event with the ever-popular Connecting Creatives on Friday 15 June, featuring a line-up of speakers from Folkestone’s thriving creative industries. Over the following nine days the Creative Quarter will throw open its doors offering open studios, exhibitions, performances workshops, on-street entertainment, theatre, live music and much more. Highlights include two weekend workshops, as well as midweek schools’ workshops at Block 67, TEDxFolkestone returns for its second year at Folkestone Quarterhouse, and we will once again be feasting at the Payers Park Big Lunch with music from Nat and the Noise Brigade! So come and join us in our creative village and talk to the interesting folk that have chosen to live and work here. With ten days of events we can guarantee you will have ample time to relax, learn, explore and play. We would like to thank all of the people who are contributing to this year’s event and look forward to seeing you at Open Quarter 2018.
Join the Facebook event page here!
Find out about our newest additions to the 2018 programme here
Connecting Creatives
Open Quarter 2018 launches with the fourth annual Connecting Creatives on Friday 15 June, 5.30pm at Folkestone Quarterhouse. Local business owners, artists and start-ups are invited to meet, share knowledge and talk about plans for the future. Featuring a programme of speakers working across the creative industries, this casual mini-conference condenses big ideas into bite size portions.
Join the Facebook event here.
This year’s speakers include:
Rachel Langford – Core Therapies
Rachel & Saul Kitchen – Bounce Vintage
Katy Baird – Performance artist and Producer at Steakhouse Live
David Lay & Maryanne Traylen – Pavement Pounders
Rebekah Jones – 1DegreeEast
Kerry Ryan – Write Like a Grrrl
Daniel Fosbery – Fosbery Studio
Louis Pryer – codeHarbour
Daniel Fosbery – Fosbery Studio
James Hooker – Hack The Box
Tomás Poblete and Nina Shen-Poblete – HOP Projects CT20
Adrian Lockwood – Folkestone Creative Quarter
You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and also join our mailing list to keep up to date with exhibitions, events and news!Portable Click-Once Implementation maatspencer May 15th, 2017 ( edited ) 1,101 Never 1,101Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint VB.NET 4.19 KB Imports System Imports System. Net Imports System. IO Imports System. Text. RegularExpressions Imports System. IO. Compression Imports System. IO. Compression. ZipFileExtensions Imports IWshRuntimeLibrary'Public Partial Class MainForm Public Sub New ( )'The Me.InitializeComponent call is required for Windows Forms designer support. Me. InitializeComponent ( ) 'Download Version.txt from github Dim web_client As WebClient = New WebClient Dim hostedVersion As String = web_client. DownloadString ( "VERSION URL" )'Initial download If Not My. Computer. FileSystem. FileExists ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt" ) Then MessageBox. Show ( "Please wait while the application installs!" )'Download the version string Using sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt" ) sw. Write ( hostedVersion. Trim ) End Using'Download the package downloadZip ( )'Extract the Package extractZip ( )'Create a desktop Icon? If MessageBox. Show ( "Would you like to create a desktop icon?", "Update?",MessageBoxButtons. YesNo ) = DialogResult. Yes Then Dim WshShell As WshShellClass = New WshShellClass Dim MyShortcut As IWshRuntimeLibrary. IWshShortcut'The shortcut will be created on the desktop Dim DesktopFolder As String = Environment. GetFolderPath ( Environment. SpecialFolder. DesktopDirectory ) MyShortcut = CType ( WshShell. CreateShortcut ( DesktopFolder & "\PROGRAM NAME.lnk" ), IWshRuntimeLibrary. IWshShortcut ) MyShortcut. TargetPath = Application. StartupPath & "\YourApp.exe" 'Specify target app full path MyShortcut. Save ( ) End If 'Start the Package Process. Start ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe" ) Else'Read Current Version Dim version As String = "" Using sr As StreamReader = New StreamReader ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt" ) version = sr. ReadLine ( ) End Using If version. Trim ( ) = hostedVersion. Trim Then'Up to date Process. Start ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe" ) Else'Out of date If MessageBox. Show ( "Your Draft Loadout is out of date do you want to Update it?", "Update?",MessageBoxButtons. YesNo ) = DialogResult. Yes Then'Download the version string Using sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt" ) sw. WriteLine ( hostedVersion. Trim ) End Using'Download the package downloadZip ( )'Extract the Package extractZip ( ) MessageBox. Show ( "Update Finished." ) Process. Start ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe" ) Else 'Start the Package Process. Start ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe" ) End If End If End If End Sub Private Shared Sub downloadZip ( ) Dim web_client As WebClient = New WebClient web_client. DownloadFile ( "ZIPPED ARCHIVE URL",My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip" ) End Sub Private Shared Sub extractZip ( ) Dim zipPath As String = My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip" Dim extractPath As String = My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER" Using archive As ZipArchive = ZipFile. OpenRead ( zipPath ) For Each entry As ZipArchiveEntry In archive. Entries Dim entryFullname = Path. Combine ( extractPath, entry. FullName ) Dim entryPath = Path. GetDirectoryName ( entryFullName ) If ( Not ( Directory. Exists ( entryPath ) ) ) Then Directory. CreateDirectory ( entryPath ) End If Dim entryFn = Path. GetFileName ( entryFullname ) If ( Not String. IsNullOrEmpty ( entryFn ) ) Then entry. ExtractToFile ( entryFullname, True ) End If Next End Using My. Computer. FileSystem. DeleteFile ( My. Application. Info. DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip" ) End Sub Sub MainFormShown ( sender As Object, e As EventArgs ) Application. Exit END End Sub End Class
RAW Paste Data
Imports System Imports System.Net Imports System.IO Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions Imports System.IO.Compression Imports System.IO.Compression.ZipFileExtensions Imports IWshRuntimeLibrary'Public Partial Class MainForm Public Sub New()'The Me.InitializeComponent call is required for Windows Forms designer support. Me.InitializeComponent() 'Download Version.txt from github Dim web_client As WebClient = New WebClient Dim hostedVersion As String = web_client.DownloadString("VERSION URL")'Initial download If Not My.Computer.FileSystem.FileExists(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt") Then MessageBox.Show("Please wait while the application installs!")'Download the version string Using sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt") sw.Write(hostedVersion.Trim) End Using'Download the package downloadZip()'Extract the Package extractZip()'Create a desktop Icon? If MessageBox.Show("Would you like to create a desktop icon?","Update?",MessageBoxButtons.YesNo) = DialogResult.Yes Then Dim WshShell As WshShellClass = New WshShellClass Dim MyShortcut As IWshRuntimeLibrary.IWshShortcut'The shortcut will be created on the desktop Dim DesktopFolder As String = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.DesktopDirectory) MyShortcut = CType(WshShell.CreateShortcut(DesktopFolder & "\PROGRAM NAME.lnk"), IWshRuntimeLibrary.IWshShortcut) MyShortcut.TargetPath = Application.StartupPath & "\YourApp.exe" 'Specify target app full path MyShortcut.Save() End If 'Start the Package Process.Start(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe") Else'Read Current Version Dim version As String = "" Using sr As StreamReader = New StreamReader(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt") version = sr.ReadLine() End Using If version.Trim() = hostedVersion.Trim Then'Up to date Process.Start(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe") Else'Out of date If MessageBox.Show("Your Draft Loadout is out of date do you want to Update it?","Update?",MessageBoxButtons.YesNo) = DialogResult.Yes Then'Download the version string Using sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\Version.txt") sw.WriteLine(hostedVersion.Trim) End Using'Download the package downloadZip()'Extract the Package extractZip() MessageBox.Show("Update Finished.") Process.Start(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe") Else 'Start the Package Process.Start(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER\YourApp.exe") End If End If End If End Sub Private Shared Sub downloadZip() Dim web_client As WebClient = New WebClient web_client.DownloadFile("ZIPPED ARCHIVE URL",My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip") End Sub Private Shared Sub extractZip() Dim zipPath As String = My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip" Dim extractPath As String = My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\APP FOLDER" Using archive As ZipArchive = ZipFile.OpenRead(zipPath) For Each entry As ZipArchiveEntry In archive.Entries Dim entryFullname = Path.Combine(extractPath, entry.FullName) Dim entryPath = Path.GetDirectoryName(entryFullName) If (Not (Directory.Exists(entryPath))) Then Directory.CreateDirectory(entryPath) End If Dim entryFn = Path.GetFileName(entryFullname) If (Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(entryFn)) Then entry.ExtractToFile(entryFullname, True) End If Next End Using My.Computer.FileSystem.DeleteFile(My.Application.Info.DirectoryPath & "\YourApp.zip") End Sub Sub MainFormShown(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Application.Exit END End Sub End ClassThe NHL will be moving from Reebok jerseys to Adidas uniforms for the 2017-18 campaign, and a leaked jersey shows potential changes that would pull from the World Cup of Hockey designs.
While a number of teams have modified their primary marks or made slight alterations to the design of their uniforms over the past decade, the base design of NHL jerseys hasn’t changed all that much in the past decade.
That’s set to change next season, though.
Ahead of the 2015-16 season, it was announced that Adidas would be taking over as the official jersey supplier of the NHL in time for the 2017-18 campaign, and fans might be able to get a taste of a few features of the jerseys they could come to expect, thanks to a report from SportsLogos.net’s Chris Creamer.
On Tuesday, Creamer reported that an auction on eBay seemed to have leaked the Pittsburgh Penguins’ practice jerseys for the 2017-18 campaign, and Creamer later confirmed that the jerseys are, in fact, what the team will be wearing during training sessions. The jersey, via SportsLogos.net, can be viewed below:
The most notable changes to the jerseys — and, keep in mind, this is just a practice uniform — is the collar design, placement of the Adidas logo on the back of the sweater and the Adidas-staple three-stripe design on the sides of the jersey.
The neckline, specifically, is interesting because it meshes with what was worn during the World Cup of Hockey, which was the first glimpse fans got of what Adidas jerseys may look like when they make their debut next season. The iconic brand designed jerseys for each of the tournament’s eight squads, and the Canadian, American, Finnish and Czech uniforms each had a similar design, with the block of color stopping midway through the collar instead of continuing down to the WCH logo. That is mimicked on the Penguins jersey, with the white portion of the collar stopping before it reaches the NHL logo.
It’s also worth noting that the three-stripe deisgn found its way onto each of the World Cup jerseys. The Canadian jersey, for example, had three white stripes along the inside of their red sweater and three red stripes in the same spot on their white uniform.
Making that design a staple of each of the league’s 31 teams — remember, the Vegas Golden Knights will enter the league with Adidas jerseys — seems a tough ask, especially when it comes to iconic jerseys such as the Montreal Canadiens, Detroit Red Wings, Toronto Maple Leafs and Chicago Blackhawks. So when it comes to the Penguins’ practice jersey, there’s a chance, as Creamer explains, that it’s simply a design that will be used on all practice uniforms, regardless of the in-game jersey design.
The other obvious change on the jersey, at least as it pertains to this specific Penguins sweater, is the circle around the logo. Most likely that’s a practice design, though, and not something Pittsburgh will wear outside of practice. Creamer hypothesized that it could simply be a league-wide change on practice jerseys.
(All images via SportsLogos.net)
Want more in-depth features and expert analysis on the game you love? Subscribe to The Hockey News magazine.SPRINGFIELD – When a probation officer on Friday made a spot check of the apartment of Lisa Lavoie -- the former Holyoke middle school teacher on probation for having sex with a 15-year-old student in 2009 -- the officer found the now 18-year-old man hiding in Lavoie’s closet.
One of the conditions of Lavoie’s probation when she pleaded guilty in early 2011 to statutory rape from the 2009 allegation was to have no contact with the boy or his family.
So Lavoie, 26, was arrested for violating probation and brought into Hampden Superior Court Monday in handcuffs.
Defense lawyer David P. Hoose said the victim in the original case showed up at her apartment saying he had no place to go and had no place to live.
He said given Lavoie’s psychological makeup and struggles with alcohol, the victim’s pleading with her fell “on someone who will listen.”
Judge Richard J. Carey set her bail at $25,000 cash or $250,000 surety, the amount requested by Assistant District Attorney Patrick S. Sabbs and Probation Officer Kevin Horne.
Hoose asked that Lavoie be allowed to live with her mother with electronic monitoring until her probation period is over.
He said that when the victim showed up at her apartment Lavoie should have called police and the Probation Department.
“That’s easier said than done,” Hoose said of Lavoie.
Hoose said the 18-year-old man, now an adult, seems to believe the court should not interfere with him pursing a relationship with Lavoie.
When Hampden Superior Court Judge Cornelius J. Moriarty sentence Lavoie to five years probation in January 2011 after she pleaded guilty to three counts of statutory rape and one of enticement of a child, he kept personal jurisdiction of the case.
That means the probation violation case will proceed in front of Moriarty.
When Moriarty sentenced her to probation he said he didn’t believe Lavoie was “a sexual predator likely to reoffend.”
At the sentencing on the statutory rape, Sabbs had asked Moriarty to sentence her to 3 to 5 years in state prison. He said the victim’s mother agreed with the sentencing request.
Moriarty attached 10 conditions to Lavoie’s probation, including having no contact with the young man or his immediate family. If the young man contacted her, Lavoie was to report it to the Probation Department immediately.
Another condition of probation was to remain drug and alcohol free and complete an intensive alcohol rehabilitation program with aftercare.
Lavoie was a teacher at the Maurice Donohue Elementary School when she ran off with the 15-year-old male student in February 2009.
After a multi-state search that involved the FBI and U.S. Border Patrol, Lavoie was found with the boy in a motel room in West Virginia on Feb. 23, 2009.The threat comes a day after North Korea vowed to target the USA, its "sworn enemy," with a nuclear test and further long-range missile tests.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks at an event for rocket scientists in Pyongyang. (Photo: AP) Story Highlights The North has rejected the possibility of dialogue about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
It will likely join talks only if the U.S. grants it equal status as a nuclear state, one observer says
North Korea is estimated to have stored up enough weaponized plutonium for four to eight bombs
BEIJING — North Korea warned Friday it will take "strong physical countermeasures" against South Korea if Seoul takes part in United Nations sanctions aimed at punishing Pyongyang for the rocket launch.
"Sanctions mean war and a declaration of war against us," the Committee for Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland said in a statement carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency.
The threat comes a day after North Korea vowed Thursday to target the USA, its "sworn enemy," with a nuclear test and further long-range missile tests, as Pyongyang continued to reject a U.N. Security Council resolution that expanded sanctions against the already highly isolated nation.
South Korea said Friday it will not tolerate North Korean provocations but will continue to push for dialogue with Pyongyang, a special envoy to President-elect Park Geun Hye said after the North's top governing body declared it would continue atomic tests and rocket launches.
"President-elect Park makes it clear that North Korea's nuclear ambitions and further provocations against the South will not be tolerated," envoy Rhee In Je said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The U.N. resolution Tuesday condemned the North's Dec. 12 rocket launch that itself breached earlier U.N. resolutions. North Korea claimed that launch was a peaceful satellite mission, but the U.S. and South Korean governments said it was a test of Pyongyang's banned ballistic missile program.
In a new phase of "our century-long struggle against the United States, we do not hide the fact that various satellites, long-range missiles that we will continue to launch and high-level nuclear test we will conduct will target our sworn enemy, the United States," said a statement Thursday from the National Defense Commission, the North's top military body, reported the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Rejecting the possibility of dialogue about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, including the long-stalled six-party talks hosted by China, the commission promised to "launch an all-out action to foil the hostile policy toward the DPRK being pursued by the US and those dishonest forces following the US."
Some North Korea watchers based in South Korea said Pyongyang's threats Thursday were expected and familiar, but one expert detected a new seriousness. Besides genuine acts of military aggression, the famously bellicose North has for decades waged a war of words with the "US imperialists" and their "puppets" in South Korea, where the USA stations nearly 30,000 troops.
"It's not a real surprise to see North Korea's harsh response," said Park Young Ho, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. "And it's only slightly harsher than normal." North Korea, which already sees itself as a nuclear weapons state, will only join negotiations on denuclearizing the peninsula if the U.S. grants it equal status as a nuclear state, he said.
The language from the North was similar to previous outbursts from Pyongyang, agreed Tong Kim, an international relations expert at Korea University in Seoul. Last month's launch "was successful as it gave legitimacy to Kim Jung Un's power base, he carried out his father's will," he said. Kim succeeded his father Kim Jong Il in 2011, the third generation of a family dictatorship founded by grandfather Kim Il Sung.
The international community had to increase sanctions, but "sanctions have never worked on North Korea and I don't think they will again," Tong said. "We must somehow open up a window of dialogue, nothing will be solved with confrontation or crisis."
South Korean military investigators who examined debris from the December launch concluded that North Korea made most of the key parts itself. But the nation still has "a long way to go" before its intercontinental missile technology is advanced enough to worry U.S. authorities, Tong said. He doubted the North will soon conduct another nuclear test, due to a limited supply of plutonium, but expressed concern over its uranium enrichment program, another way to make atomic weapons.
"Whether North Korea tests or not, it's up to North Korea," said Glyn Davies, the U.S. special envoy on North Korea policy, in Seoul Thursday, reported the Yonhap news agency. "We hope they don't do it, we call on them not to do it. It will be a mistake and a missed opportunity if they were to do it," he said.
A third nuclear test, after previous underground tests in 2006 and 2009, "is very likely, in a few weeks, after the North sees how the U.S. and South Korean governments respond to their harsh statement," said Lim Eul Chul, a professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul. "I never saw this kind of seriousness before" in the North's response, which reflects Pyongyang's disappointment that the USA has not pursued a more "positive" relationship, he said.
Besides the removal of sanctions, Pyongyang craves more attention from the USA after years of "strategic patience" under Obama, he said. The North's officials "hate that kind of words," Lim said. "Without dialogue, frustration |
you think, Rocketeers? Are these the remains an epic sea monster or does something smell a little bit fishy here? Surely if this was a simple hoax its designers would have waited until today to go public?
Source: Byoukan Sunday (Japanese)
Video via YouTube Micgadget Map image via Google Maps
▼Qindao is located in Shandong Province, China.With little to tell its rivals apart, the far left party is thriving and may transform the political landscape with its populist agenda
Against a backdrop of multicoloured pre-fabricated housing blocks, a tanning salon and a travel agent offering last-minute deals to the Baltic coast, Frank Spieth handed out red balloons, pens and advice in equal measure.
The concerns of those who approached his campaign bus in Erfurt, the former communist east of Germany, were primarily local: a woman fighting for compensation from a hospital after contracting MRSA, another seeking a ramp access to her building, a man complaining about the state of windows in the city's schools, which he said needed replacing even before the fall of the wall 20 years ago.
But in little more than a week, when Germans vote for a new parliament, Spieth and his allies are hoping to make a national impact.
His anti-capitalist, pro-social justice Die Linke is striking a chord with an increasingly disenfranchised electorate, espousing causes – such as inequality, reunification issues and, crucially, the war in Afghanistan – that are finding a receptive audience in both east and west.
"Our voters are representative of millions of Germans who feel cut off from the political process and they could have a significant impact on Germany's political landscape," said 62-year-old Spieth, who left the Social Democratic party (SPD) in 2003 after 37 years in protest at its restructuring of the social welfare state.
While Die Linke's rivals have mercilessly attacked it for its radical wealth redistribution plans and its links to the defunct communist regime, its message is clearly getting through.
"The promises [of the mainstream parties] to us about the blossoming landscapes which would follow after unification are mere speech bubbles," said 68-year old Erika Seebach, the MRSA sufferer, in Erfurt. "While some might accuse Die Linke of populism, they get things on to the agenda that really matter."
Polls gives the party about 14%, but after huge gains recently made in key regional elections at the end of August, where it won 21% in the western state of Saarland, Die Linke is being seen as the party that could shake up the political landscape in the 27 September vote.
The policies of bigger parties, including the chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU and its junior Social Democrat partner, are now seen to be disturbingly similar in comparison.
"Generally there are only a few themes that particularly distinguish most of the parties," according to Renate Köcher, joint head of the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy. "It's only really Die Linke that stands out, in particular for their critical position regarding the German economy and societal order."
Spieth embodies the verve and drive of many in Die Linke. The party, founded just two years ago is, he admits, "a motley crew of democratic socialists, social democrats, communists, Christians, you name it".
Broadly speaking it consists of disillusioned easterners, former members of the ruling communists, and disaffected members of the centre-left SPD.
Die Linke is promising to redress the rich-poor divide by pumping €200bn (£178bn) a year into job creation and financing a gigantic public spending programme, a plan opponents dismiss as unworkable.
Its anti-capitalist stance has raised its profile at a time when expressing such views has become increasingly fashionable, though it has failed to cash in on the economic crisis as growth resumes in Europe's largest economy.
But it came into its own in the aftermath of a recent Nato air strike, ordered by the German military, in northern Afghanistan. The attack triggered a fierce debate about pulling German forces out of Afghanistan. Die Linke is the only party in parliament that is calling for the immediate withdrawal of German troops. As many as 80% of people in Germany are against the Afghan mission.
"It's got people talking about the war, which the other parties had wanted to exclude from the discussion, and that can only be a good thing for us," said Oskar Lafontaine, a former SPD finance minister and one of Die Linke's most prominent leaders.
"The majority of people are against this war due to our own appalling experiences in two world wars but if we don't keep this issue on the agenda, no one will," he told the Guardian at an anti-war rally at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
As he went on stage there were roars of approval as he punched the air and with sweat dripping down his shirt, proclaimed: "We're proud to be anti-war. As Willy Brandt said there should never be war on German soil ever again. That should be the message for now and the future."Christoph Hein, a leading German novelist from Leipzig, who as a pacifist said he was a Die Linke supporter, albeit a reluctant one, put the rise in its popularity down to the increase in floating voters.
"The days when people voted for one party are over. People feel deceived by the other parties, but at least they feel Die Linke speaks their language, and this war issue is a good example of that."If there is one factor holding the party back, it is the claim that it is a home for the "loony left".
It has been accused of not standing up sufficiently to the crimes committed by the East German regime, even for giving a home to people who have called for the reintroduction of the communist-era secret police, the Stasi, or who have compared the Bundeswehr mission with East German soldiers' orders to shoot those who tried to cross the border between the GDR and the West.
The Nobel prizewinning writer Günter Grass, a staunch SPD supporter, has given voice to those who believe that Die Linke has not sufficiently distanced itself from the crimes of the communist era. "Before we could even begin to talk to them they would have to apologise for their persecution of Social Democrats," he said at a recent rally.
A steady rise in the polls and the party's inclusion in regional governments are giving it a stamp of acceptability, but its prospects of national government are slim because its putative allies – the SPD and the Greens – say they are unwilling to accept its demands.
"The problem for the SPD is by opening the gates to let Die Linke in, the SPD would help contribute to their social acceptability," said Manfred Güllner of the Forsa polling institute.
But Petra Pau, one of the first two representatives in the Bundestag of the party when it was in its infancy, insisted Die Linke was not interested in entering government, where its policies would become diluted and wanted to stay in opposition instead where it would have a better chance of enacting change.
"If you look at issues for which I was laughed at when I first put them on the agenda, such as the minimum wage, now they're part of mainstream debate," the politician, who is famous for her spiky red hairstyle, told The Guardian.
"Our aim is to strengthen our position first rather than risk betraying our supporters by compromising on issues," she said.
At the anti-war rally, Ursula Albert, 72, a retired book keeper who spent most of her life in communist east Germany, stood among rainbow peace flags and banners reading "Make Capitalism History" and "Get out of Afghanistan".
Die Linke, she said, was the only party that was trying to redress the inequalities in a reunited Germany, such as the fact that her pension is about 15-20% less than that of a pensioner in the west even though costs were on the same level. "A small group is getting ever richer, child poverty is on the rise. When Germany was divided it was better," she said.Journal Friends Archive Profile Memories Turtles! - Chalain Feb. 1st, 2008 08:28 pm Turtles! Sometimes smart answers produce dumb code.
I wrote Reg an e-mail about the Object#if_not_nil misunderstanding, and while discussing it I pointed out that his Object#andand code only works one level down. This code would work:
puts Store.find(...).andand.location but this code would not:
puts Store.find(...).andand.city.name If Store.find() returns nil, andand will catch it, but city will then be nil and city.name will raise a NoMethodErorr in NilClass. Obviously, we could add andand's to each level of the chain, but for long chains this becomes almost perverse: puts Store.find(...).andand.city.andand.region.andand.country.andand.name It seems to me that we need some way to arrange things so that if, when traversing a guarded chain, and you hit a guarded link that returns nil, if you continue traversing the chain, you will still be guarded. Invoking a method on a nil object returns a nil object, and invoking a method on that nil object returns another nil object, and so on and so on.
It's turtles all the way down!
And so it was that I wrote the Turtles module.
Turtles works very much like Reg's Object#andand, only it is somewhat more convenient, considerably more dangerous, and altogether more absurd. You alert the reader that you are doing operations with turtles simply by placing code in a with_turtles block:
with_turtles do puts Store.find(...).location puts Store.find(...).city.name puts Store.find(...).city.region.country.name end or inline:
with_turtles { puts Store.find(...).location } Turtles is also smart enough to handle blocks without freaking out:
>> arr = [1,2,3] >> x = with_turtles { arr.collect { |f| f * 2 } } => [2, 4, 6] >> arr = nil >> x = with_turtles { arr.collect { |f| f * 2 } } => nil The thing I love best about turtles mode is that you can turn on turtles for your entire application:
turtles! puts Store.find(...).city.region.country.name and you can turn turtles mode back off with the equally appropriately-named no_turtles! command:
no_turtles! Now, defenders of Reg's code might point out that with_turtles is not, in fact more convenient than andand but on a character-by-character basis I think you will find that with_turtles is the clear winner if the chains are longer than 1 level deep. But I don't think too many people will disagree with me that the global turtles! mode is as considerably more dangerous as advertised.
The best thing about this code is... well, there are two best parts. The first best part is that now you can cobble together expressions that chain together every single object in your system, safe in the knowledge that the turtles are watching over you even as your entire application becomes a single, monolithic mass of fused code.
And the second best part, and really, this is the better best part, is getting to start your programs like this:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w turtles!
I mean seriously. turtles! What is not to love?!?
turtles.rb
turtles_spec.rb Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Living in a Bubble - Eiffel 65
21 comments - Leave a comment From: chalain Date: February 2nd, 2008 04:16 am (UTC) (Link) again.
Also, this is the best code I think I have ever written in my life:
no_turtles! unless already_turtles P.S. HAHAHA! Random music selection FTWAlso, this is the best code I think I have ever written in my life: Reply ) ( Thread From: jfargo Date: February 2nd, 2008 04:47 am (UTC) (Link) The layman's reaction:
"I like turtles!" Reply ) ( Thread From: bibliophage Date: February 2nd, 2008 06:24 am (UTC) (Link) Don't you mean tortoises, since you're not talking about a functioning involving aquatic behavior?
if pond, then turtles, else tortoises?
Reply ) ( Thread From: darthparadox Date: February 2nd, 2008 06:37 am (UTC) (Link) There may be a pond at the bottom, or maybe not. We don't know; it's turtles all the way down. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread (no subject) - (Anonymous) From: chalain Date: February 2nd, 2008 06:47 pm (UTC) Re: What's not to like? (Link)
I don't know what the Kitties module does, but it exposes two methods:
1. omg!(obj) which takes a Kitties object as its argument and exits the program, and
2. kitties!() which takes no arguments and returns a Kitties object.
Remember that Ruby makes parentheses optional. This means that you can now exit a script at any time by calling
omg! kitties! HAHAHA! Just last night I was talking with Vornicus about this.I don't know what the Kitties module does, but it exposes two methods:1. omg!(obj) which takes a Kitties object as its argument and exits the program, and2. kitties!() which takes no arguments and returns a Kitties object.Remember that Ruby makes parentheses optional. This means that you can now exit a script at any time by calling Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread (no subject) - pnsm From: chalain Date: February 3rd, 2008 10:48 pm (UTC) Re: Bwaha! (Link) Yeah, I've been rolling around the idea for NilFoos objects for a while, even since I read about Ron Jeffries doing some agile project in Java where they had a Null version of every important class. So if you searched for a User, you either got a User or a NullUser object. Either way you were guaranteed that you would get back an object that acted like a user. NullUser did things like respond to name with "", etc.
turtles! is more sort of a "the logical conclusion is absurdity" thing, but a few people are taking it seriously--and I am tempted to make a gem and/or a plugin out of it. If I can keep a straight face, I may be able to turn this humor into a practical joke.... Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: February 3rd, 2008 06:46 pm (UTC) Exceptions (Link) In with_turtles, shouldn't no_turtles! be in the ensure clause of the method? As it is, turtles are not reset when the block yielded to raises an exception. Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: February 3rd, 2008 10:36 pm (UTC) Re: Exceptions (Link) Brilliant! I've added a spec for it, and coded it up. Thanks! Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: ext_83411 Date: February 4th, 2008 05:39 pm (UTC) Demeter (Link) This strikes me as spackle over a more serious issue. The turtled objects seem to have too much knowledge about methods more than a single step down the Demeter chain.
Sounds like it might be useful when writing a unit-testing framework around legacy code, but otherwise I'd steer clear.
Neat trick though! Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: February 4th, 2008 06:56 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) I can't decide if I am tickled or horrified that so many people are taking this code seriously.
It IS a neat trick, and it may even have its place. If I ever used this code, however, it would mean:
1. That the code blatantly violated the Law of Demeter.
2. That I was not in a position to refactor the LoD violation away.
3. That I didn't care enough about the project to fix it.
I direct your attention to the first sentence of the post. This is dumb code! Sure, Bobby Fischer once said, "There may not be a good move, but there is always a best move," and I can see that there might be times when turtles would be the best code you could use, but as I think about it they all fit into the 3 conditions I described above. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 04:00 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) Sorry for such a late comment, but I'm not sure I agree with your statement that null-guarding always implies a Demeter violation. I'd like to understand this better, but I don't at the moment. Here's an example of a real case where I'm not sure there is a Demeter violation, or at least not a significant one. (I should preface this by saying that while I'm extremely dedicated to the best object modeling possible, I'm somewhat skeptical about the Law of Demeter -- I think it may be needlessly restrictive in some cases.) The issue in question arose in implementing an instance method that should do some operations on a String-or-nil field of self (so I'm not playing with anyone else's toys here). Namely, it should return the lowercase String, or nil if the field is nil. In other words, we have something like class User def do_stuff @name.downcase end end Presumably this is playing with myself, and so not a Demeter violation. Now, if this is simply playing with myself, why is it suddenly a Demeter violation if we replace line 3 with self.name.check_for_nil!.downcase? Am I taking too much apart? That seems arbitrary -- after all, it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think of defining NilClass#downcase as returning nil. I guess what I'm asking is: if you think this is a Demeter violation, what would you do differently here? I suppose I could create a method User#name_in_lowercase, but that seems really ugly and not particularly scalable (I might need #address_in_lowercase, #name_in_uppercase, #name_with_html_escaped_in_title_case...y ou see where I'm going with this). I'm obviously missing some key concept here, but I'm not sure what that concept is. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 04:37 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link)
In short, the C2 article suggests that the LoD may be better understood as a question of semantics than syntax, which I take to mean that my original example is arguably within the spirit, if not the letter, of Demeter, and thus I think my point about nil-guarding stands. But so many people seem to
I'm not trying to be antagonistic. I just genuinely don't know if I'm guilty of insufficient insight, or if "strong Demeter" advocates like yourself are guilty of cargo-cult programming. Or both. Or neither. :) FWIW, see https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LawOfDemeterRevisited for mostly similar arguments to mine, with some possible answers of how these views may be reconciled with LoD. (I didn't discover this page till after I wrote my first comment.)In short, the C2 article suggests that the LoD may be better understood as a question of semantics than syntax, which I take to mean that my original example is arguably within the spirit, if not the letter, of Demeter, and thus I think my point about nil-guarding stands. But so many people seem to hate nil-guarding that I would really like to understand what the big deal is here.I'm not trying to be antagonistic. I just genuinely don't know if I'm guilty of insufficient insight, or if "strong Demeter" advocates like yourself are guilty of cargo-cult programming. Or both. Or neither. :) Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: March 24th, 2009 06:35 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) Ahhh... yes. Okay, yes, I have unintentionally conflated Demeter violations with nil guarding in my writing.
I have absolutely no problem with nil guarding. We use Reg Braithewaite's wonderful andand library in our production code.
I think maybe someone could make the argument that @name.downcase is a LoD violation because Matz might change the definition of String, or because you might change the @name variable from a String to a Name object. I that this someone needs to be slapped with a ruler.
It only becomes an egregious LoD violation when I nil guard five layers deep. :-)
The opponents of nil guarding want you to always have valid objects. This is easily accomplished in your case: just initialize @name to "". It's just as empty (to the user's perception) as nil and you can downcase it without guarding. The problem comes when you try to build up that awful chain I wrote, of contact.city.state.country.name. The solution these guys come up with there is to initialize each object in the chain to an empty object. But coming up with a NullCity and a NullState (which would respond to all of City and State's methods) is pretty tricky and repetetive, so they end up writing a generic NullObject class. It responds to all methods by returning another NullObject.
Yay, that's great! They've avoided null guarding, right?
No they haven't. They've just hidden that null in the object model. They have an entire object system devoted to what our friend andand does for us.
As for cargo cult programming vs. sufficient insight. When you have done a major system refactor and had to tease apart a Demeter violation in 77 places throughout the code, then you will have sufficient insight. I have done this, and now I tend to favor Demeter. If have done a major refactor like this, I will respect your opinion regardless of what decision you make. :-)
I don't think I'm a cargo cult programmer, but then again, nobody ever does, so... maybe?
I will say that I generally favor of Demeter but not rabid about it. I will violate it from time to time, and every time I do I can see exactly how it places strain on the design in unpleasant ways. I'll use a LoD violation if it will get the job done most effectively, such as when we just don't have the time to split up that big class that has too many responsibilities. So I dunno, I think I'm less culty than pragmatic. :-)
I do tell programmers who don't know the difference to not violate it, and I may be guilty of spawing cargo culting there if they never try to figure out why. But there also seems to be a strong counter-Demeter sentiment out there that I just can't explain.
I haven't heard a good argument for why the LoD is supposed to be such a bad idea, other than people reacting to the part where it says "Law". There's something in the hacker spirit that objects to that sort of thing, I guess. It's not the kind of law that says "thou shalt not do this". It's more like the law of gravity: if you do this, your program will exhibit lower modularity and higher coupling. Cargo culters would say "we must never do that!" but I say "Eh, sometimes that's the right choice."
So yeah, in short: I think Demeter is a good idea, I'm comfortable with null guarding, and I really really like cheese.
Sorry, I sort of needed a third thing there to round out the triad. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: March 24th, 2009 06:00 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) Hi Marnen!
I think you're right, that's not really a Demeter violation. You're only ever playing with your own toys there.
The way you make this a Demeter violation is to start grabbing other children's toys. If you want to print the User's country name and the User has a Contact, Contact belongs to City, City belongs to State, State belongs to Country and Country has a name (so we're talking about 5 different classes here):
def country_name
with_turtles { @contact.city.state.country.name }
end
This code definitely makes Demeter sob in a corner. And I haven't even thrown the.downcase on the end yet. :-) Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 06:19 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link)
It's stuff like your country_name example, though, that makes me wonder about the utility of the Law of Demeter outside the Demeter project. I would probably delegate several of these methods, but I don't really think I could justify telescoping any further than @contact.country.to_s : after all, what if a User's Contacts belong to different countries? (And if they don't have the potential to belong to different countries, then
How would you improve country_name? Would you improve it? Where would you consider the Demeter violations to lie? Or is Demeter just fundamentally incompatible with literate/fluent interfaces (which typically do lots of utility method chaining)?
My understanding is that Demeter got around the problem of excessive delegation partly by including some automated tools, but I'm still not convinced that such things really attack the issue at hand. (For that matter, Rails has Forwardable, about which I think the same objection can be made.)
So anyway...I think I still take issue with your statement that nil-guarding is always non-Demetrian (is that a word?), and that it is ipso facto bad because of that. I just don't see how to write real-world code while avoiding both nil-guarding and excessive delegation. If there is a pattern here I'm overlooking, please feel free to whack me with a clue-by-four! Interesting. So I wonder why Demetrians tend to be the ones who hate nil-guarding so much.It's stuff like your country_name example, though, that makes me wonder about the utility of the Law of Demeter outside the Demeter project. I would probably delegate several of these methods, but I don't really think I could justify telescoping any further than @contact.country.to_s : after all, what if a User's Contacts belong to different countries? (And if they don't have the potential to belong to different countries, then #country should be in User, not Contact!)How would you improve country_name? Would you improve it? Where would you consider the Demeter violations to lie? Or is Demeter just fundamentally incompatible with literate/fluent interfaces (which typically do lots of utility method chaining)?My understanding is that Demeter got around the problem of excessive delegation partly by including some automated tools, but I'm still not convinced that such things really attack the issue at hand. (For that matter, Rails has Forwardable, about which I think the same objection can be made.)So anyway...I think I still take issue with your statement that nil-guarding is always non-Demetrian (is that a word?), and that it isbad because of that. I just don't see how to write real-world code while avoiding both nil-guarding and excessive delegation. If there is a pattern here I'm overlooking, please feel free to whack me with a clue-by-four! Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: March 24th, 2009 07:03 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) So anyway...I think I still take issue with your statement that nil-guarding is always non-Demetrian (is that a word?), and that it is ipso facto bad because of that.
You should take issue with it, because I agree with you. I don't think I actually made that statement. If I implied it, I did not I meant to. :-)
I just don't see how to write real-world code while avoiding both nil-guarding and excessive delegation.
Welcome to the rest of your programming career! These any many other variables will play in constant tension against one another. Choosing to violate the Law of Demeter will shift the values of many of these variables, and it will be your job to decide what the best overall state of the program should be.
If there is a pattern here I'm overlooking, please feel free to whack me with a clue-by-four!
Heh. Actually, the fact that you're asking these kinds of questions means that you're about to level as a programmer. (Make sure you have all your leveling gear on before your next grind.)
The epiphany that's coming at your head full steam right now is strategy versus tactics. Delegation vs. Proxying, Nil-guarding vs. RAI*... these are not good vs. evil choices so much as "appropriate to the situation" vs. "not".
And the answer to "how to fix the Contact example" question lies in strategy. Tactics won't work. There is no trick I can do in the code to make such a staggeringly stupid design work. So let's fix the design:
User has a Contact, Contact has City, State, and Country. We've flattened out the City->State and State->Country relationship for now, but that's the DBA's problem, not ours. :-) Now I would just use @contact.country.name And yes, I just broke the law of Demeter there a little bit, but I'm okay with it.
Now, if this code were part of a larger block of code that was ALL playing with Contact's toys, like
def mailing_address
str <<=EOS
#{@contact.first_name} #{@contact.last_name}
#{@contact.address1}
#{@contact.address2}
#{@contact.city}, #{@contact.state.abbrev} #{@contact.zip} #{@contact.country.name}
EOS
end
Then I think it's pretty clear that this method is totally living in the wrong place. It should be moved to contact. You could keep User#mailing_address if you really wanted, and just have it forward to contact, but to be honest I'd be tempted to just use @user.contact.mailing_address unless I had a good reason.
So... yeah. I'm a lot more likely to violate LoD if it's just ONE layer. I'll play with my friend's toys. Just not my friend's friend's toys....
* RAI: "Resource Allocation is Initialization" is a programming design in which you never ever have invalid objects. If you create a City object, and do not initialize it, it will still know enough to return a valid (but empty) string when you ask its name, and a 0 when you ask its population. When practiced in moderation it looks a lot like defensive programming. When practiced in extremes it becomes as clunky and unwieldy as extreme LoD. (For example, Person.bloodtype MUST return one of A, B, AB or O. What blood type should an uninitialized person have? Say you pick O. If you ever write a bug that accidentally admits uninitialized Person objects into the report, you've just silently overrepresented blood type O, and you have violated the law of Fail Early And Fail Loud.) So again, it's just another design choice that results in a tradeoff. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 08:31 pm (UTC) Re: Demeter (Link) You wrote: If I implied it, I did not I meant to. :-) Ah, OK. I was going from your statement "if I ever used [Turtles], it would mean I was violating LoD". Heh. Actually, the fact that you're asking these kinds of questions means that you're about to level as a programmer. (Make sure you have all your leveling gear on before your next grind.) Glad to hear you say that. Working with Ruby and Rails, as well as hanging around Ward's Wiki, has made me think harder about many things. The epiphany that's coming at your head full steam right now is strategy versus tactics. I'm not sure it's an epiphany so much as a continuous process -- I was trained as a composer, not a programmer, and so one of the things that I'm very aware of is that there's another level beyond theory. But especially since I'm self-taught as a programmer, it's always nice to have some confirmation that I'm at least asking the right questions. :) Anyway, thanks for your comprehensive explanation. It looks like, at least in practice, I've been approaching these issues more or less the way you recommend. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 06:41 pm (UTC) More Demeter ramblings (Link)
class User { Contact contact; String getCountryName() { return this.contact.getCity().getState().getCountry().getName() } } class Contact { City getCity(); } // likewise for State and Country
...and the Ruby example you gave. They look similar, but really they're not, because of Java and Ruby's different semantics for typing and method invocation.
The Java example really does have to know too much about every step of the chain: it is explicitly asserting that Contact.getCity() will return a State, that State.getCountry() will return a Country, and that Country.getName() will return a String. The Ruby example, however, is asserting no such thing. It is simply asserting that each step in the chain will not raise MethodNotFound -- for all the caller knows, there might be some code somewhere that says
class << @contact.city def method_missing(*args) return self end end
and yet the trainwreck would still work.
In other words, I think there's a case to be made that method chaining in a message-passing, duck-typed language like Ruby implies a lot less coupling than in a function-calling, strongly-typed language like Java, and so Law of Demeter (which was first formulated in C++, right?) may need modification for Ruby. Your thoughts? Another thought occurs to me. Is LoD really necessary in a duck-typed language like Ruby? Consider the conceptual differences between this Java code:...and the Ruby example you gave. They look similar, but really they're not, because of Java and Ruby's different semantics for typing and method invocation.The Java example really does have to know too much about every step of the chain: it is explicitly asserting that Contact.getCity() will return a State, that State.getCountry() will return a Country, and that Country.getName() will return a String. The Ruby example, however, is asserting no such thing. It is simply asserting that each step in the chain will not raise MethodNotFound -- for all the caller knows, there might be some code somewhere that saysand yet the trainwreck would still work.In other words, I think there's a case to be made that method chaining in a message-passing, duck-typed language like Ruby implies a lot less coupling than in a function-calling, strongly-typed language like Java, and so Law of Demeter (which was first formulated in C++, right?) may need modification for Ruby. Your thoughts? Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: March 24th, 2009 07:19 pm (UTC) Re: More Demeter ramblings (Link)
Hmm... oh, wow. Okay, I think maybe it's actually a "reverse feature". It doesn't really relieve you of the implications of coupling, it just makes it harder to feel the symptoms. I think this might be a dangerous thing. :-)
So let's say we flattened Contact to have City, State and Country. Now we have to find all the code that uses city.state.country.name and change it. The Java code will break because it no longer compiles. The Ruby code will break because your tests/specs/features won't run. (TATFT, baby!)
Ultimately, the pain of a LoD violation comes when you change the interface of a class somewhere in the chain. In the case of flattening contact, you can see that it breaks code in both languages.
The Ruby code does the same thing the Java code does, really:
Java: getCity() returns a State object, which has a getCountry() method
Ruby: city returns a State object, which responds to :country
But if city suddenly returns a String because the state has been moved to Contact
Now go hunt down the 77 other places in your code where you call contact.city.state and change them. Your code won't run until you do. Oh, and don't miss the places that do it this way:
c = user.city c.state
Welcome to coupling hell. :-) Hmm... okay, my first reaction is "no way", but I'm not sure why. Just take my word for it, kid, and stack the crates higher on the north side of the runway.Hmm... oh, wow. Okay, I think maybe it's actually a "reverse feature". It doesn't really relieve you of the implications of coupling, it just makes it harder to feel the symptoms. I think this might be a dangerous thing. :-)So let's say we flattened Contact to have City, State and Country. Now we have to find all the code that uses city.state.country.name and change it. The Java code will break because it no longer compiles. The Ruby code will break because your tests/specs/features won't run. (TATFT, baby!)Ultimately, the pain of a LoD violation comes when you change the interface of a class somewhere in the chain. In the case of flattening contact, you can see that it breaks code in both languages.The Ruby code does the same thing the Java code does, really:Java: getCity() returns a State object, which has a getCountry() methodRuby: city returns a State object, which responds to :countryBut if city suddenly returns a String because the state has been moved to Contact #state, your code breaks, no matter what language you're in.Now go hunt down the 77 other places in your code where you call contact.city.state and change them. Your code won't run until you do. Oh, and don't miss the places that do it this way:Welcome to coupling hell. :-) Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: marnen Date: March 24th, 2009 08:33 pm (UTC) Re: More Demeter ramblings (Link)
Hmm. So perhaps duck-typing violates fail-fast? There are some amusing examples on Ward's wiki about Spraypaint.spray versus Cat.spray... Fair enough. I think I was asking more |
2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.The Pebble Time is a great smartwatch. But it's also a great watch. And a watch is an item that follows you all day long.
For all those moments when you don't want to worry about scratching your watch.
The Pebble Time bumper snaps on the body securely. It took me many iterations to get it right. It protects the metal ring from scratches. It also protects the glass by being a little taller than the middle of the glass. For example, you can put your watch upside down on a table without worry.
It is easy to keep the bumper in your bag and snap it on during commute and off when you arrive at destination.
The buttons remain clear and easy to push, there is also a hole for the microphone.
This is a new version, much stronger than the previous one. As I decided to make it very secure and tight, it may feel a little hard to put on. Don't worry, just start with the bottom and push on the top. I do it every day and did not have any issue yet :)For the victims of predatory priests and their families, there will never be enough transparency to counter the years of perceived lies and secrets at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. But thanks to a legal settlement between the archdiocese of Chicago and the victims of 30 pedophilic priests, a cache of 6,000 secret documents has just been made public, proving what victims have always believed: that the Catholic Church knowingly covered up years of abuse.
Some of the documents released on Tuesday and published on the website of attorney Jeff Anderson, who brokered the deal in 2008, are deeply disturbing. Many show a terrible level of child abuse, including detailed allegations by young boys of sodomy, forced oral sex and, in one case, a young girl who recounted how a priest masturbated and ejaculated on top of her. One complaint details how a priest threatened his victim at gunpoint not to tell authorities about the ongoing rape. The documents also show how the hierarchy within the Chicago diocese willingly moved priests around and lied to the victims’ families, legal teams and even the local police. At one point, as many as 60 percent of the churches in the Chicago archdiocese had pedophile priests, according to a Voices of the Faithful study conducted in 2010.
Several documents also show that Chicago bishops petitioned the Holy See in Rome and asked for guidance, despite years of denials from Rome that these matters were dealt with on a purely local level. In the case of Father Daniel Mark Holihan—who, according to the documents, was referred to as “Happy Hands Holihan” by his Catechism students—a memorandum was submitted to the Chicago church by a representative from the Archdiocese of Chicago Office for Child Abuse Investigations and Review. “I referred this matter to the Holy See on 15 September 2003, receiving a reply on 16 June 2004 dispensing from canonical prescription and instructing me to conduct an administrative penal process,” the memorandum said.
According to complaints against Holihan spanning 10 years, the priest had been seen unzipping a young altar boy’s pants, and he had been caught in bed masturbating an underage minor. He was eventually removed from public ministry in 2002 and sentenced to a life of prayer. According to the memorandum, “he is directed to spend at least one hour per day in prayer for the victims of abuse, particularly those whom he has harmed.”
According to the website Bishop Accountability, which keeps a detailed record of predator priests and those who move them around, Holihan was removed from public ministry but never laicized.
Many of the documents show how the bishops in charge of the Chicago archdiocese signed off on transfers of problem priests to other American parishes. In some cases, the priests were moved with their case file, alerting the new diocese that the incoming priest had disturbing carnal weaknesses. In other cases, there was no warning at all, effectively sending the known predators to new diocese where they could reoffend unhindered.
Chicago attorney Marc Pearlman, who, together with attorney Jeff Anderson, secured the release of the documents in a settlement with the church, says that they only cover 30 of 65 priests known to be sexually abusive in Chicago. At a press conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Pearlman said that each case file shows “systematic cover up of abuse.” He said that in each instance the victims “reported abuse, reported allegations, the archdiocese worked hard to cover it up and keep it secret, then the transfer of priests.” Pearlman says the clergy knew exactly what they were doing. “They were not mistakes,” he said.
One of the more disturbing letters is from Cardinal Francis George to Father Norbert Maday, who was convicted and is serving 20 years in prison for child abuse, explaining how the diocese has tried to lighten his sentence. “We have tried, as you known, a number of avenues to see if your sentenced might be reduced or parole be given early,” the cardinal wrote. “So far, we have not had any success, but we’ll keep trying and I personally hope that you will not lose hope.”
Maday was accused of abusing between 35 and 45 children in Wisconsin, which is under the Chicago Archdiocese. According to the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap), he was even accused of bringing troubled children to his diocese under false pretenses and abusing them. One of the priest’s victims committed suicide in 2002, leaving a heartbreaking note blaming the priest for his loss of hope. According to the Chicago Tribune, Maday was released in July 2013 and is living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin under a program that monitors sexual predators.
A Vatican spokesman refused comment on the Chicago document dump. But the Chicago Archdiocese released a statement: “The Archdiocese acknowledges that its leaders made some decisions decades ago that are now difficult to justify. They made those decisions in accordance with the prevailing knowledge at the time… We realize the information included in these documents is upsetting. It is painful to read. It is not the Church we know or the Church we want to be. The Archdiocese sincerely apologizes for the hurt and suffering of the victims and their families as a result of this abuse.”
Of the 30 priests whose files were outed in the Chicago documents, only four were removed from the priesthood and four were convicted in secular courts. Only one was both convicted and defrocked. Fourteen of the priests are deceased. The Chicago Archdiocese also says that the practice of covering up for the sins of the priests is over. “Today no priest with even one substantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor serves in ministry in the Archdiocese of Chicago.” But for the victims of the abuse who have been vindicated after years of apparent lies, assurance from the Church is simply not good enough.Crossovers. Crossovers that pretend to be sports cars. Cars that pretend to be crossovers. Weird-looking designs. Artificial this. Autonomous that. Drive modes. Ah man, what a head-spinning car spectrum we’re sitting in my friends. I tell y’all, it’s one hell of a time to be writing about cars, because it’s become extremely difficult to distinguish which segment today’s cars belong in.
That’s why I’m here.
I gotta say, I’m happy I had the opportunity to spend some seat time inside the 2017 Buick LaCrosse. Because, contrary to what I had imagined, the LaCrosse isn’t a car that tries to be anything different than what it actually is. This is a big, brash, American, front-wheel-drive sedan with a big V6 sitting on top of its front wheels. That’s it. And if there’s something America knows how to build well, it’s powerful, full-size sedans – The 2017 Buick LaCrosse, well it’s doing it right.
Looking Patriotic
The LaCrosse is an interesting car in Buick’s lineup, because it carries the responsibility of bridging the gap between the old Buick, and the company’s younger, more dynamic brand image. You probably remember the compact Verano I drove last year, it was a car that impressed me with its excellent road manners, quiet ride, and affordable packaging put together to attract younger buyers inside Buick showrooms.
As a marketing exercise, the Verano is pretty straight forward.
For the LaCrosse, however, things are somewhat more challenging. It must continue satisfying Buick loyalists, who, although now considerably ageing, are still buying Buicks by the masses. The challenge is: the LaCrosse must also look modern and in tune with the times. Not an easy feat to accomplish.
Thankfully, Buick has seriously talented designers among its team to help achieve this goal. I must say, I’m a big fan of Buick’s new design language. I know Cadillac is America’s official luxury brand, but I believe Buick is doing a much better job at looking American these days. There’s that Avista concept they’ve presented at auto shows lately. GM, why don’t you market that thing already? We know there’s a Camaro sitting underneath.
That being said, the Lacrosse is a typical American example of a slow-slung, wide, opulent sedan. Of course, being a LaCrosse, it has no say in the matter. But it looks good. The overall appearance, especially the front end, evokes the Avenir Concept, a rear-wheel-drive sedan Buick launched a few years back.
But yeah, as a full-size sedan, this LaCrosse works. It’s elegant, feels premium, and more importantly, doesn’t look like a Chevrolet with a different grille and headlights.
Sharing the Good Stuff
Mind you, it’s no secret that the LaCrosse shares several mechanical components with the Chevrolet Impala, notably GM’s Epsilon II platform and the 3.6L V6 – the same one I sampled in the GMC Acadia.
That V6, well it churns out 310 hp and 282 lb-ft of torque and gives the LaCrosse more than ample mojo to get around. It’s a strong power train, one which emits a satisfying intake bark all while letting itself rev past the 6800 rpm power peak. It’s also very lively and helps give this otherwise grandpa-style sedan a lot of character. And even if it weighs in at 1691 kg, this Buick has no trouble getting off the line. 0-100 km/h, according to GM, is achieved in 5.9 seconds. That’s almost as quick as that sexy Scandinavian sedan I drove a few weeks back.
Power in the LaCrosse is sent to the front, or 4 wheels via an 8-speed automatic, not a 6-speed like in the Malibu. I’ve said it before and say it again, GM is really nailing the automatic transmission department these days with smooth upshifts, quick downshifts, and a tendency to blend in the background no matter how you drive it.
That transmission does come with its share of flaws, however. I’m really not a fan of the over-complicated and goofy-looking shift lever, which not only takes up a large part of the centre console, but is downright infuriating to use due to a clumsy BMW-style joystick mechanism. There is a manual mode, with actual steering-mounted paddle shifters. They do work a lot better than the useless trigger buttons typically found in Chevrolet cars and trucks.
If it were up to me though, I’d fit all LaCrosse models with all-wheel drive, because torque steer, especially when traction control is removed, is excessive. And a Canadian winter storm isn’t this front-wheel-drive Buick’s ideal environment. I often struggled to get some actual traction out of the thing in the snow.
Quiet, Spacious, and a Good Value
Inside, again, the 2017 Buick LaCrosse is not a GM parts bin special, but rather an elegant, well put-together, and attractive sedan. I love the simplicity of the dashboard covered in soft plastics and fake wood. The overall theme is clean and reserved, while remaining luxurious.
Buick’s IntelliLink 8.0-inch touch-screen interface, a near carbon copy of other GM interfaces, remains easy to use and quick to respond, with physical knobs for basic controls. IntelliLink also features all the latest in smart phone connectivity such as Android Auto and Apple Carplay. Like most GM products, in-car Wi-Fi is also available.
I did have some gripes with the interior, such as limited rear and lateral visibility due to the car’s high beltline and tiny side mirrors. I guess that’s the inevitable trade-off for an attractive exterior design.
General ergonomics remain an issue in GM products. Again, there’s an inconsistency in the position of the controls and knobs throughout GM’s distinctive brands, making each car feel like it was built by a different carmaker. Also, the LaCrosse’s dashboard sits higher than the seats, so you always feel like you’re sitting inside a bathtub.
On the road, the LaCrosse is smooth and very quiet, thanks to Buick’s Quiet Tuning technology, where the car has been fortified at key locations to isolate exterior noise from the cabin. To my surprise, the LaCrosse was quieter than the Volvo S90 at highway speeds. Rear leg and head room are more than abundant, and so is trunk space. The suspension, as expected from a full-size sedan wearing a tri-shield insignia on its grille, leans more towards the soft side.
However, steering is sharp in the LaCrosse and the brakes are firm. If you need to, this big girl will boogey, but it prefers a laid-back, relaxing ride out of town over an apex-carving weekend adventure.
One thing I particularly enjoyed about the LaCrosse is the absence of drive modes. You just put this thing in D and gun the throttle. Now that’s how I like my American sedans.
Pricing for the 2017 Buick Lacrosse ranges between $37 445 for a base, front-wheel-drive model, and tops out at $49 500 for a LaCrosse Premium with all-wheel-drive. My tester was the Premium front-wheel-drive, complete with the panoramic roof, premium Bose sound system and full package of semi-autonomous safety tech. It stickers at $47 545.
It’s hard to want to cross-shop a Buick over a Toyota Avalon or a Nissan Maxima, because the nameplate still has to deal with an ageing brand image. But I’d reckon the Buick LaCrosse has more to do with a Lexus ES in terms of luxury and refinement. To sum it all up, if you’re looking for an honest-to-goodness all-American full-size sedan that looks the part, drives smoothly, offers plenty of power on tap, and is an excellent value for the money, the 2017 Buick LaCrosse is a car I’d suggest you consider.
Also, in case you haven’t been following, Buick is now the third most reliable car brand according to Consumer Reports. Not bad for an old fart.
Clavey’s Verdict Review of the 2017 Buick LaCrosse by William Clavey 8 / 10
Full-size Luxury Sedans +
+ Beautifully designed automobile.
+ Powerful and lively V6 engine.
+ Comfortable, spacious and quiet interior. –
– Limited rear and lateral visibility.
– Questionable interior ergonomics.
– Complicated shifter.
Clavey’s Corner is located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Prices and trim levels discussed in this article reflect the Canadian car market.
Special thanks: Buick Canada
Photography: Appearance
Join the Tribe
Contact the author: william@claveyscorner.comBoy, it really is good having LeBron James back in the state of Ohio, and the Ohio State basketball team would definitely agree with that after their early Xmas gifts.
It’s really no secret that LeBron James is a huge supporter of Ohio State athletics. As a matter of fact, it’s know that if the rule were in place when he was coming out of high school that he had to attend at least one year of college, he would have spent some time as a Buckeye.
Well now that he is back in the state with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he feels like giving back to the program that he would have called home if he had to.
LeBron sent the Ohio State basketball team maybe the best Christmas gift that he could. He sent them pairs of his newest sneaker, the LeBron 12s.
That might be one of the best Christmas gifts that these young men ever received. I know it would definitely be one of the best for me.
Also, and so this doesn’t get overlooked, this is also a pretty big tool on the recruiting trail for Thad Matta and the rest of the coaching staff.A eurypterid, or giant sea scorpion, would be taller than a man. Courtesy Simon Powell/ University of Bristol
You find yourself sitting at the edge of a lake. It's a beautiful day: The sky is a clearer blue than you've ever seen it. Even the air feels cleaner, easier to breathe. You decide to wade into the lake; the cool water feels good against your skin. As you wade deeper, you stub your toe on something that feels like a long rock or log. You find a branch at one end, tapering off into a crescent shape and lined with spikes.
Suddenly the "log" moves, and it becomes painfully clear that the crescent-shaped part is an enormous claw. It grabs your leg, pulling you under, as another claw grabs your torso. You've just encountered a giant sea scorpion, and your chances of surviving are pretty slim.
Fortunately, you would have to travel back about 400 million years to visit during the Devonian period of the Paleozoic Era for this scenario to play out. This period was a time of gigantism among living creatures prowling among earth and sea. There were dragonflies with two-and-a-half foot wingspans and six-foot-long millipedes scampered about. But the species that dominated them all was pterygotid eurypterid -- the giant sea scorpion.
Eurypterids are an extinct family of arthropods believed to be the ancestors of today's scorpions, and possibly all arachnids -- the class that includes spiders and other eight-legged arthropods. During the 27 million years giant sea scorpions lived, they took their place at the top of the food chain, thriving without any natural predators. Giant sea scorpions were some of the fiercest creatures on Earth, devouring large fish -- as well as one another. Eurypterids were cannibals, fighting and eating one another in competition for resources, prey and mates. They evolved into enormous size, but science's conception of just how enormous has recently changed [source: Braddy et al.].
A few years ago, paleontologist Markus Poschmann was digging for fossils in a quarry in Germany. He and his colleagues were removing slabs of siltstone that had been sediment in a lake or lagoon hundreds of millions of years ago. This ancient lake bed was the home of the largest arthropod ever discovered [source: University of Bristol].
Poschmann noticed "a dark patch of organic matter" on one of the slabs of siltstone, and upon further investigation, discovered it was part of a claw belonging to Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a species of sea scorpion. The claw piece was more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) long, and by calculating the proportion to the rest of the body, it showed that the scorpion it belonged to was more than eight feet long. This is almost a foot and a half longer than anyone estimated the sea scorpion ever grew.
Paleontologists differ in their opinions of how the giant sea scorpions grew to be so large. The atmosphere during the Devonian period featured a higher concentration of oxygen (35 percent, compared to 21 percent today). Some paleontologists believe this accounts for the gigantism that is characteristic of the period.
Others believe that sea scorpions grew to be so big out of necessity. In order to pierce the ever-evolving armor of their fish prey, their claws (and bodies) had to evolve into a gigantic size. The authors of the paper that introduced Poschmann's find discount this explanation and believe that it was a combination of factors -- including the lower gravity found underwater -- which allowed sea scorpions to become gigantic.
Regardless of how they became so large, scientists generally believe that sea scorpions met their match in the form of large fish with strong jaws and teeth. These fish forced most sea scorpions onto land, where they evolved into smaller size, leaving fossils behind as a reminder of the time when they ruled the Earth.
For more information on evolution, arachnids and related topics, visit the next page.
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SourcesHello, My name is Michael Bearfoot and I need your help.
Growing up poor, I never would have imagined I would someday be involved in the process of selecting a U.S. President. Going from living in a car to later living in multiple foster homes, it seems unimaginable that I have this opportunity. I feel extremely grateful and humbled to be able to participate so fully in the democratic process as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for Bernie Sanders!
The convention is July 24-28th.
Costs have been quoted to me as high as the following:
Flight: $700
Hotel: $350/night for 5 nights = $1750
Food and incedentals: 500
Total: $2950
I am asking for $3000 to help pay for these costs. Anything left over will be donated to two charities: The Dorothy Day Center in Saint Paul, MN and Avenues for Homeless Youth in Minneapolis. I chose the Dorothy Day Center because they helped to feed my family when we were poor and they do a lot of good in the community. I chose Avenues because I believe that Homeless Youth is something that isn't on a lot of people's radars.
The policies that Bernie proposes are the same policies that helped me rise from poverty. Everyone deserves this chance and I am going to go to Philadelphia and fight for Bernie and his ideals.
Updates and thanks.
I will be posting updates when milestones happen, such as amount raised, tickets bought, etc. I will also post updates when leaving and arriving and during the convention.
Donations of $50 get a hand written letter of thanks
Donations of $75 get a hand recorded video of thanks
Donations of $100 or more will get a hand knit hat by my super supportive wife Chelsea who has been a great help in all of this and has been the best at cheering me on.
I appreciate your support.
Help spread the word! Share Tweet 217 shares on Facebook shares on FacebookMaking Beautiful Exploits
This week, most of our energy has been spent on making Metasploit modules more beautiful. If you're not aware, we have this long-standing bug, Couple hundred msftidy warnings, which deal mostly with the style and syntax of Metasploit modules. msftidy.rb is a little Ruby script that does some basic sanity checking on new Metasploit modules checking, and hopefully soon, some basic fixing, too. If you plan to commit to Metasploit, I strongly encourage you to see about working this little guy into your pre-commit hooks by using the script pre-commit-hook.rb down in tools/dev land:
https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/blob/master/tools/dev/pre-commit- hook.rb
Setting this up is pretty easy -- the comment docs explain it best:
# To install this script, make this your pre-commit hook your local # metasploit-framework clone. For example, if you have checked out # the Metasploit Framework to: # # /home/mcfakepants/git/metasploit-framework # # then you will copy this script to: # # /home/mcfakepants/git/metasploit-framework/.git/hooks/pre-commit # # You must mark it executable (chmod +x), and do not name it # pre-commit.rb (just pre-commit) # # If you want to keep up on changes with this hook, just: # # ln -sf <this file> <path to commit hook>
That's it! You can now safely commit things to your local feature branch and know that you're not accidentally trying to send us modules that core committers will no doubt bug you about. For a little while, we had msftidy also checking incoming pull requests on Travis-CI, but apparently that's not quite working anymore (still digging into it, probably has to do with commit depth). Soon it'll work again, I promise, so we can auto-fail anything that doesn't pass this minimum bar we've established for acceptability.
Yes, this is all a little bit fascist. But it's fascism with a heart, I promise. Beloved Metasploit contributor Chris John Riley mused on msftidy's ways in a tweet about his joy in using msftidy to clean up his code. That sparked a little bit of a back and forth from a few Metasploit graybeards about the particular virtues of msftidy. Of course, I just happen to have this soap box right here, so I may as well use it.
For me, as a maintainer of a whole lot of people's code (around 200ish direct contributors), msftidy gives me a way to stave off code rot. Remember, we're not writing code for computers -- that's the easy part. We spend an awful lot of time writing code for humans, and as it so often happens, one of those humans is yourself, six months in the future, looking at a bug report.
So, when some simple patterns are recognized and reused, it makes the business of figuring out bugs, adding functionality, and generally maintaining a library of about 2500 Metasploit modules kind of a reasonable task. Otherwise, we'd be spending all our time trying to figure out tabstops and chasing down shadow datastore options and cleaning out old SVN artifacts over and over and over again, leaving no time left over to do useful work like advance the state of the art of security.
To be clear: if you want to write in your own personal idiomatic style, go nuts! I won't stop you. Seriously, there are 1600 forks of Metasploit. Maybe some of them do things a little differently. Sadly, though, we won't be able to accept your nuggets of awesome in our professional (free) product, so if you want to have your stuff in the most popular Metasploit fork, there are some (honestly, not too hard) basic guidelines to follow.
Thanks to William Vu and Christian Mehlmauer for their recent work on making msftidy a better tool for sustainable security development.
New Modules
This week's release features two new modules, including another bit of browser trickery from Joe Vennix, a Firefox shellcode execution wrapper. It's pretty neat, in that you can upgrade your Firefox javascript shells (detailed in Joe's blog post from January, 2014) to proper Meterpreter shells, all without writing anything to disk. Dang!
Exploit modules
If you're new to Metasploit, you can get started by downloading Metasploit for Linux or Windows, either the totally free Metasploit Community Edition, or the 7-day free trial of Metasploit Pro. If you're the sort to track bleeding-edge development code, then these modules are but an msfupdate command away. For readers who are already using Metasploit Community or Metasploit Pro, you'll be able to install the new hotness today via the Administration : Software Updates button.
For additional details on what's changed and what's current, please see Brandont's most excellent release notes.Is It Better to Have Two Cats (or More!)?
His name is Garibaldi ROUS. He's among the world's largest rodents. He loves to snuggle with cats, puppies, rabbits, humans -- see the photos.
The first time I saw a picture of a capybara, I felt like I’d just found out unicorns are real.
It seemed too good to be true: This improbable, shaggy-haired beast, which basically looked like a giant hamster, was hugging — yes, hugging — an elated brown-and-white-spotted tabby cat.
“INTERSPECIES LOVE!” I captioned the picture, which I promptly shared on Facebook. “Does anyone know what the big hairy fella is?” I added.
I learned that the hairy fella was a capybara. These critters have a history of kindness to other animals, including Cheesecake, who adopted a litter of Dachshunds. You can see a video of that love-fest here.
The one I saw was not just any capybara: He was Garabaldi ROUS (rodent of unusual size), the beloved pet of Melanie Typaldos. (Follow him on Facebook here.)
Hailing from South America and weighing more than 100 pounds, capybaras are the world’s largest rodents, and Garibaldi is one of their most prominent ambassadors. He raises capybara awareness through the ROUS Foundation for Capybara Veterinary Medicine, which Melanie founded in conjunction with Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine about three years ago.
According to Melanie, rodents make up more than one fourth of all mammals, but most Americans have never heard of capybaras. When she takes Garibaldi, or Gari, out in public (yes, he goes for walks on a leash like a dog), people’s reactions range from curious to downright hostile.
“Most commonly they’ll call him a giant hamster or a giant guinea pig,” Melanie says. “Those people tend to like him and be interested in learning more. Sometimes people will call him a giant rat. Those people are typically more standoffish or even hostile or afraid.”
But there’s no need for the attitude, because Gari is actually a nice guy. Melanie says capybaras have fur like straw and a voice like a Geiger counter, and they are very smart and affectionate — “somewhere between a dog, a cat, and an otter.” They’ll walk on a leash and they love to swim, but, like a cat, their love doesn’t come easy.
“You have to earn their love,” Melanie says. “The love of a basically wild animal is a special kind of love. It has not been conditioned into them for centuries. If they love you, it is honest, genuine, and intense.”
Gari is also playful, especially in the water. He and Melanie spend long afternoons lounging in the pool together. And like a kid, he likes to make an occasional splash.
“He loves me to spin him or to pull him around by his forepaws or to pick him up and throw him over backward,” Melanie says. “And on warm days, he will sit in my lap for long periods where we both basically float and relax in the water. There is no other animal that I know of that you can have this kind of aquatic relationship with.”
Melanie first discovered capybaras were a thing on a trip to Venezuela with her daughter, Coral, in 2007. On a sightseeing tour, they spotted capybaras in the wild, and their tour guide let Coral hold one of the babies.
That moment, Melanie says, changed their lives. When they got home, Coral researched how to keep capybaras as pets, and soon Melanie had adopted her first capybara, Caplin ROUS. Like Gari, Caplin was a capybara ambassador, visiting schools and interacting with the public. He immediately won Melanie’s heart.
"He became the entire focus of my life," she says.
Unfortunately, Caplin passed away from a liver condition when he was only three years old. Melanie was devastated. She wasn’t sure she was ready for another capybara, but when she heard about 10-month-old Gari, who at the time was soon-to-be homeless in Ohio, she couldn’t say no.
Melanie says Gari has done an excellent job filling Caplin’s shoes, but as with any pet, there have been challenges.
"[Gari] was not socialized much as a baby, so we’ve been working through some issues,” she says. “But he is a very sweet, affectionate capybara who gets along with everyone. Annoyingly for me, he likes my husband better than me, even though I am the one who does everything for him."
So where does the cat come into play? The handsome kitty’s name is Flopsy the Killer Cat, and he lives with Melanie’s daughter, Coral, and comes for regular visits. He showed up at Melanie’s house as a stray in October 2011. She couldn’t adopt him herself because her husband is allergic, but the friendly cat followed Melanie everywhere — even on car rides.
"Garibaldi often leaves the door to the house open, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when Flopsy showed up at my desk one day while I was working on the computer," Melanie says. "Coral often says, ‘That cat is so annoying. I would totally get rid of him if he weren’t the best thing that ever happened to me.’"
It took Gari and Flopsy about a year to become comfortable with each other. At first, Flopsy was not at all sure about Gari, thinking him more weirdo than magical new friend.
"I would see him out in the yard stalking Gari," Melanie says. "He’d make a lunge for him, stop five feet off, and run away. I think there was a bit of a mental conflict going on."
But now Flopsy greets Gari with headbutts each time they see each other. Gari desires more closeness than this — he wants Flopsy to be his snuggle buddy — but Melanie says Flopsy "isn’t that type of cat."
The adventures of the unlikely "cat y ‘bara" duo has inspired Melanie to create a series of children’s books about a cat named Celeste who befriends giant hamsters. This makes perfect sense — as 100-pound rodents that love to snuggle, capybaras do lend themselves rather naturally to fantasy.
"In some ways capybaras are even more magical than unicorns," Melanie says, "because they are real."
About Angela: This not-crazy-at-all cat lady loves to lint-roll her favorite dress and go out dancing. She also frequents the gym, the vegan coffee joint, and the warm patch of sunlight on the living room floor. She enjoys a good cat rescue story about kindness and decency overcoming the odds, and she’s an enthusiastic recipient of headbutts and purrs from her two cats, Bubba Lee Kinsey and Phoenix.
More by Angela Lutz:I started working as a classroom aide in Baltimore 50 years ago. My colleagues and I—mostly black women—were making $2.25 an hour with no benefits. A gallon of milk cost a dollar and a dozen eggs cost 60 cents, and we knew the work we did was worth a lot more than that.
So, we organized. We joined with the Baltimore Teachers Union. And in 1970, when we negotiated our first contract, we won a grievance procedure and salary steps.
That’s the power of a union. Being union members helped me and my colleagues win the respect we deserved as education support professionals.
We all know the statistics: African-American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white, non-Hispanic man.
But here’s a stat you may not have heard: Women covered by a union contract earn 31 percent more than their nonunion peers. Black women earn 34 percent more. And Hispanic women earn 42 percent more.
No matter your job. No matter your community. No matter your race. If you are a woman and you are covered by a union contract, you earn more.
That extra money can help pay for things your family really needs. On average, union women make $212 more each week, $11,000 each year. That’s enough to buy groceries for a family of four. To pay for child care. To put a big dent in tuition at many public colleges and universities.
There’s a reason why union women—and particularly union women of color—are better off. We don’t leave anyone on the sidelines. The whole point of a union is coming together, working together, raising our voices together, bargaining together. Together. That’s the key word. In a country that has too often found itself divided, unions have united working people, across race and across gender.
And together, we have won basic workplace protections like a minimum wage and overtime pay. We fight for policies like paid sick and family leave that are so important to working moms. And we are champions for on-the-job fairness, like transparency around hiring, wages and advancement opportunities that acts as a direct counterweight to discrimination.
When I was at the bargaining table back in 1970, flanked by my union sisters, I told our bosses that we weren’t settling for anything less than a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. And together, we won that raise.
That was a turning point in my life. Yes, it helped me provide for my family, but it also helped me realize my own power, as a person of color, as a woman and, yes, as a trade unionist.
So, if you want to earn more, join a union. If you want better benefits, join a union. If you want to fight the good fight and win, join a union.
Join a union, sisters. I promise, it’ll make a difference.
Lorretta Johnson is the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers. The AFT represents 1.6 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers; paraprofessionals and other school-related personnel; higher education faculty and professional staff; federal, state and local government employees; nurses and healthcare workers; and early childhood educators.Over the past few months, the Netgate® engineering team and our community contributors have delivered the software foundation for a new era of pfSense® technology.
In April we released version 2.3 of pfSense software which features a new, modern webGUI utilizing Bootstrap, as well as converting the underlying system to FreeBSD® pkg. The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past. The webGUI rewrite brings a new responsive look and feel to the pfSense project, which minimizes resizing or scrolling across a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile phones.
Since releasing pfSense 2.3 we have demonstrated both a dual Ethernet ARM device and the new dual Ethernet Minnowboard Turbot, running an experimental version of pfSense software version |
and even their doctrines, our policies are determined by the truths God has identified as unchangeable.”
We’ve heard from Elder Ballard: “Just as a woman cannot conceive a child without a man, so a man cannot fully exercise the power of the priesthood to establish an eternal family without a woman.” This clearly rules out same-sex relationships as any eternal family unit.
Elder Hales, I think, made allusions to it: “Standing obedient and strong on the doctrine of our God, we stand in holy places, for His doctrine is sacred and will not change in the social and political winds of our day.”
We’ve heard from Elder Bednar: “The unique combination of spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional capacities of both males and females was needed to enact the plan of happiness. “Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:11). … The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a single, undeviating standard of sexual morality: intimate relations are proper only between a man and a woman in the marriage relationship prescribed in God’s plan.”
OK, so I don’t know that Elder Scott, Elder Holland, Elder Cook, Elder Christofferson, President Eyring, or President Uchtdorf have talked about this issue this year. But most of them have both done so in the recent past.
Elder Holland, for example, made allusions to this issue in his CES devotional last spring. He published an Ensign article on how to reach out to those who are same-sex attracted, while nonetheless reaffirming the Church’s doctrine on chastity: “While same-gender attraction is real, there must be no physical expression of this attraction. The desire for physical gratification does not authorize immorality by anyone.”
Elder Christofferson recently wrote: “The doctrines that relate to human sexuality and gender are really central to our theology. And marriage between a man and a woman, and the families that come from those marriages – that’s all central to God’s plan and to the opportunities that He offers to us, here and hereafter. So homosexual behavior is contrary to those doctrines – has been, always will be – and can never be anything but transgression.”
Elder Cook was heavily involved in the Proposition 8 movement. I’m sure if I searched, I could find similar doctrinal reaffirmations from him. Elder Scott, and others have made similar remarks in the past upholding the Church’s stance on chastity. Add to that the bold testimony of every other prophet and apostle for the past 40 years, and we’ve move so far beyond “isolated opinions of individual leaders” it’s not even funny.
The idea that the Quorum of the Twelve is in any way divided on the place that same-sex activity will have in the Church is simply false. All evidence suggests that they are unified on this issue, that they all share and support the Church’s definition of chastity. Further, this should forever put to rest the common tactic of referring to these as the personal opinions of an isolated Church leader. We should stop saying, “I disagree with Elder Oaks on chastity.” That statement is misleading, because it implies a disagreement with Elder Oaks and Elder Oaks alone — it implies a disunity among the brethren on this issue that just doesn’t exist. To disagree with Elder Oaks on the issue of chastity — as defined as restricting sexual intimacy to man and woman, married as husband and wife — is to disagree with the Church’s official stance and the entire Quorum of the Twelve. Let’s put to rest the idea that we’re dealing with “isolated statements” of “personal opinion.” We’re dealing with official Church doctrine.
Now, some will probably respond, “Ok, sure, I get it, it’s Church doctrine. But I just wish they would stop focusing on it.” Well, when we have swathes of members denying this doctrine, after the reaction to this past conference, what can we expect? If we want them to stop teaching the doctrine in a straightforward, no holds barred manner, perhaps we should start listening to them and adjusting our opinions to match the doctrine of the Church. They teach it boldly and straightforwardly because members are still agitating against it. They consider it important, and they will probably continue to teach it boldly so long as members are still needing to hear the message. They teach so long as we need to be taught.
Sorry, Folks, Elder Oaks Is Probably Next in Line
The past few days I’m been thoroughly baffled as to why Elder Oaks is the one taking all the flack. After all, didn’t Elder Nelson teach the exact same thing? Nobody has made memes depicting him as a homophobe (that I know of). And I think I know why: Because actuarial predictions (http://imgur.com/1JHZjBT) suggest Elder Oaks is the most likely person to be our next prophet. That will probably bristle the feathers of those who were disappointed in his talk this last conference, but there you go. The adversary is already working hard to discredit him in the eyes of the saints.
We love President Packer and we are praying for him and his health, but I suspect that most of us don’t expect him outlive President Monson. And statistical predictions suggest that Elder Perry and Elder Nelson might not either. But let’s say they all do, and that each, in turn, become the prophet — President Packer, Elder Perry, Elder Nelson, and then Elder Oaks. Based on what we’ve heard the past year, all of them will remain firm on these doctrines. There is a 65% chance that Elder Bednar will eventually become the prophet. In between, we have Elder Holland. So as far as I’m concerned, the entire line of prophetic succession for the next 30+ years have boldly testified that the law of chastity, as presently understood, is God’s law and is not going to change.
Let’s stop imagining to ourselves that Church doctrine and practice will change to accommodate same-sex activity. We all know that it’s probably not going to happen. We all know that it would require a massive revision of core Church doctrines. It isn’t a change of policy, it is a change of core doctrine — it is a rejection of the essentiality of both genders in an eternal family. It would render either gender ultimately expendable. And that is something that our doctrine simply cannot accommodate with any degree of fidelity. On this matter, we already have our answers from God. God’s servants have spoken. Those who continue to claim that the Spirit is telling them that the Church is wrong on matters of chastity will soon have to learn that either (1) whatever voice they are communing with probably isn’t of God, or (2) they don’t really believe in this Church and its teachings. The time for straddling that line is coming to a close.
There will be some who feel as if I’m beating a dead horse. But that’s the point: the Church’s teachings on chastity are so thoroughly established and so often repeated, we shouldn’t have to bring it up. We shouldn’t have to point it out. But given the vocal outcry after this past weekend, apparently we do. There will be others who feel as if I’m using the teachings of the apostles as a club to beat up on those who think differently. I don’t think I am — I’m just trying to put to rest the folk story that the Quorum of the Twelve is at all divided on this topic, and that the Church is going to revise its doctrine once a few cantankerous, obstinate apostles have moved on from this life. I think that any perusal of the Church’s recent teachings will show that these ideas are simply not true.
Concluding thought: This article is not addressed to the many among us who experience same sex attraction and who are trying to live the Church’s standards. To them, I want to say: Hang in there — it gets better. God’s mercy and God’s grace will accompany you. And we will befriend you. This post is addressed to those who claim to be loyal members but who obstinately insist that the Church is going to be revising its doctrines in the near future, and who insist that the Church is wrong on its understanding of the law of chastity — that idea is tiresome and needs to be put to rest. To those enmeshed in these issues who are just trying to make it through the day, who are wanting to believe the Church’s teachings but are just having a hard time, we want to extend our support and our heartfelt love towards you. Please stick with us.White hat hacker Ben Caudill is halfway through his sandwich when he casually reaches over to his iPhone, swipes the screen a few times, then holds it up to me. “Is that you?” he asks.
It is, but nobody was supposed to know. He's showing me one of my posts to Secret, the popular anonymous sharing app that lets you confess your darkest secrets to your friends without anyone knowing it’s you. A few minutes ago I gave Caudill my personal e-mail address, and that was all he needed to discover my secret in the middle of a Palo Alto diner, while eating a BLT.
The author's secret. The author's secret. Screenshot: WIRED
My secret is pretty lame, but Secret’s stream is slurry of flippant posts, Silicon Valley gossip, and genuinely personally confessions like, “He proposed—I had to say no. And it broke my heart to do the right thing.” At this moment, Caudill could type in any Secret user’s e-mail address or phone number and decloak that person’s secrets.
Fortunately for Secret users, Caudill is one of the good guys. He’s the co-founder of the small Seattle security shop Rhino Security Labs. By the time of our Friday lunch, his CTO and co-inventor of the hack, notorious Google Maps manipulator Bryan Seely, already had given Secret’s CEO the outlines of their technique. The hackers hope to qualify for a reward under Secret’s six-month old bug bounty program. Both men say they’ve resisted the urge to pry into anyone’s secrets.
In an interview with WIRED this week, Secret CEO David Byttow confirmed the vulnerability, and said the company has blocked the attack and begun a post-mortem. “As near as we can tell this hasn’t been exploited in any meaningful way,” says Byttow. “But we have to take action to determine that.”
What’s surprising, though, is that this is routine for the company. Since Secret instituted a bug bounty in February, the company has closed 42 security holes identified by 38 white hat hackers. Given the sensitivity of what some people post to Secret, this iterative approach might seem disconcerting. But Byttow says the deluge of bugs proves the system works.
Rhino Security Labs' Benjamin Caudill Courtesy Benjamin Caudill
“As hackers disclose these kinds of vulnerabilities through our HackerOne bounty, we just make more and more advancements,” says Byttow. “We’ve had zero public incidents with respect to security and privacy. Everything has come through our bounty program.”
Caudill and Seely give Secret high marks for responding quickly and amiably to their find. But it’s hard not to see the incident as another warning about every app that tries to weld privacy and anonymity features onto a social networking chassis. They’re apps like Whisper, Yik Yak and the ephemeral photo sharing app Snapchat, which lets you share photos with friends that will vanish as soon as they’re seen. In May, Snapchat settled with the FTC over charges that it exaggerated the security of its disappearing photos. It turns out (as you'd expect) the recipient could save any snap by taking a screenshot or using a third-party client. Snapchat agreed to be more honest about the limits of its service, and to accept 20 years of monitoring by FTC regulators.
Like the Snapchat issues, the Secret hack is obvious once you know the trick.
Secret relies on the anonymity of the crowd to camouflage its users’ identities. When you first install Secret, you can’t see any posts from your social circle until you give the app access to your phone’s contact list. Then the app checks all the e-mail addresses and phone numbers on the list for current Secret users, and you start following them. (You also can give it access to your Facebook profile for the same purpose, though that route was not vulnerable to the hack).
You must be following at least seven friends on the system before you can see your friends’ anonymous posts. Even then, you don’t know who among your contacts are using Secret: If you have 500 people in your contact list, and 30 of them are using Secret, you won’t know which 30 they are. A juicy secret posted by a “friend” could belong to any of those 500 people.
Rhino Labs' Bryan Seely. Courtesy Bryan Seely
The problem is, your address book is under your control. And that’s what Caudill and Seely used to their advantage.
Caudill’s first step was to create a bunch of fake Secret accounts. This is easy, because Secret doesn’t make you verify your e-mail address or phone number. Caudill wrote a simple script to rapidly create a pool of 50 accounts for his experiments, but he only needed seven to meet Secret’s secret-sharing threshold.
Next, he deleted everything from his iPhone’s contact list, and added the seven fake e-mail addresses as contacts. When he was done, he added one more contact: the e-mail address of the person whose secrets he wanted to unmask—me.
Then he signed up for another new Secret account and synced his contacts. He now had a new, blank Secret feed that followed eight accounts: seven bot accounts created and controlled by him, and mine. Anything that appeared as posted by a “friend” logically belonged to me.
After demonstrating on my own secret, Caudill moved on to his next victim: Secret CEO Byttow, who gave the hackers his e-mail address and phone number, then challenged them to access his own Secret post as a proof-of-concept. I watched Caudill go through the steps on his iPhone, and soon Byttow’s secret appeared. It appeared to be about a pet: “Is Lucy the cutest dog?”
Screenshot: WIRED
The attack is purely one way: You can get someone’s secrets if you know their e-mail address, but you can’t start with a secret and unmask the user behind it.
And Byttow says the flavor of the hack demonstrated by Caudill and Seely isn’t new to Secret. In May, Russian hackers performed a similar stunt using cell phones and a pocketful of SIM cards to create the dummy accounts. Since then, Secret has built and continuously refined algorithms to detect bots and other suspicious activity. When an anomaly pops up, the system begins hiding posts, or gets deliberately vague about the source: a “friend” becomes a “friend of a friend,” or simply someone “in your circle”.
But at some point in the last few weeks, as the company expanded its infrastructure, the bot detection system somehow failed, allowing Caudill and Seely to rediscover the hack, Byttow says.
It all gives the impression of a system in a start up mode of experimentation, learning from its mistakes, daring to try new things, screwing up. “The thing we try to help people acknowledge is that anonymous doesn’t mean untraceable,” says Byttow. “Secret is not a place for unlawful activity, or to make bomb threats or share explicit imagery. … We do not say that you will be completely safe at all times and be completely anonymous.”
The question, then, isn’t whether Secret is secure. It demonstrably isn’t. It’s whether it’s secure enough for what it’s being used for. I pick out one of the posts promoted to Secret’s homepage, and read it to Byttow over the phone: “At work I’m being given more and more responsibility. Silently I’m struggling with mental illness.” Does Secret provide enough anonymity for that user?
He turns the question back on me. If there was no Secret, or an app like it, where would this anonymous poster go for catharsis? Where would he share his struggle with mental illness? Facebook? Don’t make him laugh.
“It’s our job to make sure people feel safe and in control,” he says. “People can’t do that on Facebook. That’s our mission, so people can put this stuff out there and not feel alone. That’s so important.”
Caudill, the hacker, is skeptical that the twin goals of sharing and anonymity can ever be resolved.
“I kind of see where they’re going with it. They’re trying to be kind of the everyman’s WikiLeaks. But at the same time it doesn’t really work that way,” says Caudill. “You can’t both try to connect with all your friends and be really social and network with everything, and that same time try to do all that anonymously. I can’t see a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too.”Donald Trump has spent the week trying to convince the American public he’s fit to lead. In covering Donald Trump, Stephen Colbert is sending a similar message: I’ve got this.
Colbert’s incarnation of The Late Show has hardly specialized in the sort of bite-size segments whose digital afterlife increasingly stands in for late night’s cultural currency. In fact, it’s almost developed an identity in opposition to them, announcing itself in September with a heartfelt, two-part Joe Biden interview about grief and governance. The subtext seemed obvious: Keep your lip-syncs. This one is for the grown-ups.
And while it may have been wise not to try to beat America’s Frat Brother at his own game, Colbert’s relative maturity came at a price. Not only does The Late Show have consistently fewer viewers than Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show; it has less favorable buzz than its own follow-up, James Corden’s Late Late Show. Over the past year, Corden’s hosted a record-breaking Tonys, produced exactly the kind of bankable spinoff franchise that demonstrates why playing directly into the viral economy pays, and most cringingly, his show earned an Emmy nomination where its lead-in didn’t. It’s snowballed into a comparison so direct, and so unflattering to Colbert, that Howard Stern asked Corden if he’d take Colbert’s slot if it were offered to him. Corden saying no wasn’t nearly as important as Stern asking the question at all. If it hadn’t occurred to listeners to frame Colbert’s Late Show in such stark and damning terms before, it certainly had now. Grace period officially over.
This week has been an obvious, and successful, attempt to change that. Since Monday, The Late Show has been broadcasting live from the Ed Sullivan Theater, the better to respond to the chaos in Cleveland as it unfolds. (Mere hours after Ted Cruz took a bow after his defiant non-endorsement, Colbert was able to crack that “revenge is a dish best served con queso” in his monologue). Rebranding, if temporarily, as “2016 Trumpublican Donational Conventrump Starring Donald Trump as the Republican Party* (*May Contain Traces of Republican),” Colbert has gone all in on the political circus, airing pretaped segments recorded in and around Quicken Loans Arena between monologues and even guest appearances focused on the election. Next week, they’ll repeat the stunt all over again, this time as “The 2016 Democratic National Convincing, a Technically Historic Event: Death. Taxes. Hillary.”
The result has been a series of wins, both narrative and tangible. First and foremost, Colbert played his He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named card: the return of his Colbert Report character, a one-time-only nuclear option played for maximum impact by pairing it with a cameo from bearded mountain man Jon Stewart. After the Report’s December 2014 finale, “Stephen Colbert” had been put on indefinite ice, partly because his creator was vocally tired of him and partly because the real Colbert needed time to craft an identity of his own. Apparently, that time clocked out at around the year and a half mark.
It’s a great segment, spotlighting both the natural rapport between the longtime friends and a sorely missed perspective on the right-wing delusion “Stephen Colbert” both parodied and predicted. More importantly, it pole-vaulted The Late Show ahead in the ratings. And then there was Melania, another mixed blessing from whatever trickster god handed Trump this nomination. Colbert immediately took advantage, casting Laura Benanti in a vicious takedown that also happens to have more than 5.6 million YouTube hits.
Finally, there’s The Cover. Like everything else about this week in Colbert, The Hollywood Reporter’s profile of a show in semi-distress is precision-timed. It’s clearly designed to head off rumors by confronting them head-on: CBS Entertainment president Glenn Geller goes on the record in calling the show “uneven” … even as he’s affirming the network’s commitment to the host, going so far as to call out the Corden rumors by name. Everyone from Colbert himself to his new, Leslie Moonves–mandated showrunner joins in on the transparency free-for-all. The logic is clear. When generic denials don’t work, and they never do, the best way to magic a PR problem away is to acknowledge it.
Yet there’s an equally apparent reason the cover is dropping this week — not after the upfronts, when it was Corden who got drafted for CBS’s obligatory Hamilton parody. Not next month. Now. Both Colbert and CBS seem to know that the convention coverage is The Late Show’s secret weapon. It’s no coincidence the story opens with reporter Marisa Guthrie observing the Stewart taping. Even before the ratings came in, the network was hopeful the convention coverage would go well enough to serve as the story’s grace note, a signal that Colbert’s rough patch had finally come to an end.
The question remains: Has it? It’s undeniable that this has been a banner week for the show, particularly as much of late night has remained so stubbornly apolitical. Fallon busted out his Trump impression for a mere three minutes; Corden got credit for a vaguely shady lyric in Michelle Obama’s “Carpool Karaoke,” even though those of us who studiously track FLOTUS’ Snapchat know the segment was recorded weeks ago. Against this increasingly, almost irresponsibly bland backdrop, Colbert has leaned directly into the political humor that landed him on the map in the first place, even before the conventions. “Stephen Colbert” may have been a literal return to form, but Colbert himself is enjoying a more figurative one.
But after the conventions — and assuming America survives it, after the election — the challenges that put The Late Show on the defensive remain. They’re even present in the convention coverage itself. Colbert has never been especially willing to put up with, let alone play into, the perfunctory press tour stops that are late night’s bread and butter, particularly compared with Fallon’s revolving-door funhouse of gimmicky party games. And he still isn’t, despite having to do more of them as he’s pivoted away from the scientists, authors, and tech luminaries who populated his early guest roster. Just look at the contrast between two recent Star Trek promotions: In one, Fallon gets Idris Elba to cover Desiigner’s “Panda” in a silly voice; in the other, Colbert awkwardly tries to keep Zoe Saldana on theme by asking her about politics, before giving in to the inevitable anecdotes about her kids.
That obligation isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither is Fallon’s dominance. I’m rooting for Colbert; at his best, I think he’s both sharper and more humane than his competitors. But I’m also aware that the conventions and the ensuing sprint to the finish almost uniquely play to his strengths, as both a political satirist and a deeply empathetic entertainer. It’s a great sign that Colbert is now openly embracing part of his comedy that he seemed prepared to leave behind as he crossed the great cable-network divide. It remains to be seen whether he can hold onto it in the face of challenges both external (a Clinton convention won’t offer the same embarrassment of riches as a Trump one) and internal (keeping up a hot streak is hard!). The Late Show is still a delicate balancing act, even if Colbert has figured out how to tilt that balance in his favor.Flashback – Maxine Waters Complained Obama Didn’t Rid Bush-era U.S. Attorneys Fast Enough (VIDEO)
California Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters complained that Barrack Obama didn’t get rid of Bush-era U.S. attorneys fast enough back in May of 2009.
Maxine Waters: “As we understand it, the protocol has been that U.S. attorneys hand in their resignations and would give the new administration an opportunity to make new appointments, we don’t see that happening quite fast enough.”
The fake news media has been wringing their hands over Sessions’ request for Obama-era attorneys to resign as if it’s something that has never been done before. This was standard operating procedure after Obama became President. They also failed to mention that Bill Clinton fired 93 U.S. attorneys in one day in 1993.
If it weren’t for double standards, the Democrats wouldn’t have any standards at all.
FLASHBACK: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) complained Pres. Obama didn’t rid of Bush-era U.S. attorneys fast enough pic.twitter.com/6315J9eL48 — FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 13, 2017A registered sex offender inappropriately touched a girl who tried to help him outside a drugstore, according to police. (Published Friday, Dec. 20, 2013)
A registered sex offender is accused of inappropriately touching a girl after she stopped to help him use a DVD-rental machine.
The girl and her mother told Gloucester Township Police that the girl was leaving the Walgreens on Black Horse Pike in Glendora, N.J. around 1:15 p.m. on Sept. 29 when an older-looking man asked her to show him how to use the Red Box machine outside the store.
As the girl helped him out, the man reached over and rubbed her midsection while making a comment, according to police.
The girl told police that she pulled away, told the man not to touch her and ran to her vehicle in the parking lot.
Exclusive Teen Girl Fights Back Against Sexual Assault
Police began to investigate the incident and eventually identified the suspect as Vincent Kerr, 46, of Blackwood, N.J.
Police discovered that Kerr was a registered sex offender on the state’s Megan’s Law registry after dragging an underage girl into a wooded area in Ocean County in 1994. He also had a prior incident where he broke into a woman’s home and sexually assaulted her, according to Megan’s Law records.
Police recently arrested Kerr and charged him with harassment for the most recent alleged incident.
Video Arrest Made in South Philly Stabbing
Investigators asked anyone who recently experienced a similar type of incident to contact Gloucester Township Police at 856-228-4500, call the anonymous tip line at 856-842-5560 or send an email to police.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
It's been a year since our local heroes from SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden.
But sadly, others are still stealing SEALs' honor, making up stories that they, too, are decorated Navy commandos.
This is Brian Leonard Creekmur. If you look at his Navy SEAL T-Shirts and tattoos, you'd bet he is just who he says he is, a retired Navy commando who faced terrorists in combat.
Related: How to spot a phony Navy SEAL
The memorabilia at his house in Middlesex County, his frequent Tweets to CNN reporters, his Facebook photos, and military discharge papers, all show a man who fought for the country as part of SEAL Team 2 - and later SEAL Team 6. They show a man who has never run from a confrontation. Until now.
It's not really a question. I've spent a month digging into his claims, and I know it's him behind the wheel of this pickup truck, no matter how quickly he rolled up the windows. He's had a lot to say on the Internet about his career as a Navy SEAL sniper, but not much to say about it to me.
Maybe that's because there no military records - none at all - that support his story. No documents or evidence that Brian Leonard Creekmur of Twiggs Ferry Road in Middlesex County was ever a SEAL.
This house in Middlesex belongs to Creekmur. It is filled with military medals, patriotic plaques and impressive Navy SEAL uniforms amassed, allegedly, from two decades as a Navy Special Operator. He's posted pictures of it all on Facebook. And on a real-estate web site offering his house for sale, you see the same collection. Notice the life-size trident against the wall.
Creekmur's tall tales of Navy SEAL service unraveled when he was wooing a woman through the Internet. He was telling her he loved her and sending her real estate listings for houses they could share. But when she couldn't verify any of his stories, she started searching the Internet for information on fake SEALs.
A guy can get away with that for a long time. But eventually he will trip up. He`ll say something to the wrong person, male or female, just doesn`t make sense, and hell hath no fury. He said it to the wrong woman, and she contacted me.
Chesapeake's Don Shipley is a retired SEAL, a real one. He has a database listing every single man who ever completed SEAL training.
Brian Creekmur. Is he a SEAL?
"No."
Shipley broke the news.
"I did feel betrayed. I, uh, was very upset about that."
To double check Shipley's information, I called Navy Special Warfare Command in California. Likewise, they had no records Creekmur ever graduated SEAL training, and that is the only way to be a Navy SEAL.
But with the woman online, he insisted he was the real deal. This is from their first Facebook exchange.
Woman: Have many medals? LOL, "meateater?"
She's talking about pictures on Creekmur's Facebook page, including this impressive shadowbox calling him "A true meateater of his time," and "One of the most skilled snipers of his era." It also features insignia from SEAL Teams Two and Six.
Man: I did stomp the earth for a while as a Frogman.
Woman: Frogman? Ground troop?
Man: US Navy Frogman equals Navy SEAL.
It's so cool that Creekmur uses it to sign his emails. "Brian Creekmur, United States Navy SEAL Sniper, retired."
"He`s gone above and beyond. He`s a very strange guy."
We found a biography for Creekmur posted online. And we can confirm the SEAL resume is 100 percent authentic. It's just not his.
The bio actually belongs to this guy, retired Master Chief and real Navy SEAL Steven Matulewicz. Let's compare.
Matulewicz enlisted in the Navy in 1983 and then "looked for every opportunity to take on greater leadership roles." So did Creekmur, word for word.
In 1985, Matulewicz reported to BUD/S - basic SEAL training class 134. Then he deployed to Central and South America. Creekmur, ditto. In 1989, Matulewicz "screened for and passed the arduous 6-month training cycle at SEAL Team Six." Creekmur, too. Again, word for word. They had the same assignments, earned the same medals, even went to the same civilian college Excelsior College in Albany, NY. But Excelsior has no records of Creekmur attending.
The retired master chief, who still lives and works in Hampton Roads, told us he's outraged someone just lifted his resume. But he's more angered that someone is pretending to be a SEAL in the first place. That, he says, is a dishonor to all SEALS.
And before you get the idea Creekmur is just bragging to the ladies, you should know this: He routinely corresponds with CNN reporters to offer his opinion and expertise on military stories. Here he tells Soledad O'Brien about all the death he's seen in combat. She resent his message to her more than 140,000 followers. CNN would not comment for our story.
The woman says when she first questioned Creekmur's claims, he sent her his DD-214. That's a military document detailing a service member's assignments. She sent it to us. As to his Navy SEAL assignments on this line, both Don Shipley, and members at Navy Special Warfare Command in California, say it's simply not true. And it turns out the rest of it is also false. Naval Personnel Records Command confirmed to NewsChannel 3 the Creekmur never served in the Navy. Not one day.
Did Brian Creekmur ever serve in the military? The National Personnel Records Center sent us this document. It shows Creekmur enlisted in the Army in 1984. He was at one time promoted to Specialist, but when he was discharged in 1990, his rank was lower, Private First Class. And that's it. Records reveal no other military service.
Shipley doesn't know why Creekmur is doing this, and of course, Creekmur didn't tell us. The most common reasons Shipley says is to gain trust, either of women, or of people with money, or both.
"This is why the story that you are doing is so important. While some of this is amusing at the lengths some clown will go, you are saving a lot of people a lot of trouble."
"He`s up to no good. And to expose that, is a huge deal."When Jonathan Galaviz left his job at a casino consulting firm to go work for the Trump State Department, he didn’t have any concerns about job security. The firm—which consults for at least two Russian state entities, according to its website—proudly announced that Galaviz would be back after his stint at State. Galaviz himself consulted for a Russian government corporation on casino gambling.
It’s a situation that has left ethics experts baffled.
“We look forward to welcoming back Jonathan to GMA after he completes his service with the Trump administration,” Global Market Advisors managing partner Steve Gallaway told a casino trade publication when Galaviz took the State Department job in April.
Until Tuesday afternoon, the company’s website listed Galaviz as its chief strategist.
“Note: Mr. Galaviz is currently on unpaid leave from GMA while serving in the Trump Administration in Washington DC on a full-time basis at the U.S. Department of State,” read his bio page.
The Trump administration hasn’t shied away from ethically dicey situations. But ethics experts say this is one of the strangest.
“I’ve never seen this arrangement, to be honest with you, for somebody who is taking a position in the U.S. government to be on unpaid leave from a for-profit entity,” said Virginia Canter, the executive branch ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“It borders on recklessness. It exposes him to some serious potential for conflicts of interest,” she added. “ This arrangement carries a high degree of risk and he will probably need a lawyer following him around to make sure he understands each and every day what he can and cannot participate in.”
According to his LinkedIn page, he’s an advisor “focused on various high-level strategic initiatives.” A State Department official told The Daily Beast that Galaviz was based as of June 11 at the State Department’s J Bureau, which includes the Office of Global Criminal Justice, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The official also said Galaviz has received guidance on his recusal obligations, and that he was listed as a Transition Team advisor as of Feb. 8, 2017.
Steven Galloway, the managing partner at GMA, told The Daily Beast that there are no conflicts of interest regarding Galaviz and the consulting firm, and that “Jonathan and GMA have completed the necessary paperwork to ensure full compliance with all applicable rules.”
Galloway also gave this explanation for why his bio page said he was on “unpaid leave”: “ In terms of the webpage, that was an old archived webpage created during Jonathan’s professional transition. Due to a technology error, it apparently was still showing. Our IT department has fixed the error.”
The Galaviz bio page was removed shortly after The Daily Beast emailed Galloway asking about it.
Galaviz did not respond to requests for comment.
Before it was taken down, Galaviz’s bio page summarized his extensive corporate experience, including work with Caesar’s Entertainment and Goldman Sachs. A Bloomberg profile of Galaviz said he is known in the casino industry for a 2004 paper “outlining the tourism benefits of casino gaming legalization in Singapore.”
Galaviz’s former firm, GMA, boasts that it consults for foreign governments around the world on public policy issues related to tourism and gaming, including countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. Its current clients, according to the site, include a host of gaming industry powerhouses with interests around the world: Wynn Macau, helmed by RNC Finance Chair and Trump inaugural committee member Steve Wynn; Great Canadian Gaming Corporation; the Marina Bay Sands five-star luxury hotel in Singapore; ASF Consortium, an Australian investment firm that includes Chinese government investors; Nash Dom Primorye, a state-run Russian construction investment firm based in Vladivostok; and the Primorsky Territory government, also in eastern Russia. The firm also consults for the government of the state of Victoria in Australia and for Ontario’s lottery and gaming commission.
A press release from Nash Dom Primorye noted that the entity hired Galaviz’s old consulting firm, Galaviz and Company, as “designated public policy advisors” to provide “guidance on global best practices.”
Shortly after the election, Galaviz wrote an op-ed for TheStreet arguing that Obama was too critical of Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, over his brutal drug war that has left thousands dead. Galaviz described Duterte’s practices as “questionable,” and said Obama’s criticism of them was unnecessary.
Galaviz’s firm consults for businesses that invest in the Philippines, including Bloombery Resorts & Hotels Inc. and Macquarie.
“To put it in context, it would be like if Duterte opined every time America’s Drug Enforcement Agency had a shootout with drug dealers in the U.S.” he wrote. “American policymakers would have a fit.”
All of this raises concerns among ethics watchdogs.
“We have witnessed revolving door examples that cause heartburn, but this example might take the cake,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight. “While I respect Mr. Galaviz’s desire to engage in government service, we need to ensure that he’s promoting the public’s agenda. The potential for conflicts of interest, especially when his employer has his bio online and states that he’s |
John McCain claiming that the "crisis on Wall Street, my friends, started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence-peddling, and [Sen. Barack Obama] was right square in the middle of it." However, Reid did not mention McCain's own ties to the "Washington culture of lobbying." According to a Mother Jones report, "at least 83" McCain aides, policy advisers, or fundraisers "have in recent years lobbied for the financial industry McCain now attacks."
During a report on the September 19 broadcast of the CBS Evening News, correspondent Chip Reid uncritically aired video of Sen. John McCain claiming that the "crisis on Wall Street, my friends, started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence-peddling, and [Sen. Barack Obama] was right square in the middle of it." However, Reid did not mention McCain's own ties to the "Washington culture of lobbying." According to a September 17 Mother Jones report, "at least 83" McCain aides, policy advisers, or fundraisers "have in recent years lobbied for the financial industry McCain now attacks." Those lobbyists include several senior McCain campaign officials, including chief political adviser Charlie Black, national finance co-chairman Wayne Berman, congressional liaison John Green, Arthur Culvahouse, who reportedly headed McCain's vice-presidential search team, and William E. Timmons Sr., who reportedly "has been tapped by the McCain campaign to conduct a study in preparation for the presidential transition." Furthermore, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis previously served as president of the Homeownership Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group whose founding members included Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and which "defended the two companies against increased regulation," according to the Politico.
From Mother Jones' September 17 report:
McCain has been quick with fiery, populist-tinged speeches. But one thing has been missing: any acknowledgment that McCain's own campaign has been loaded with the type of people he's been denouncing. (The McCain campaign did not respond to a request for comment; we will update the post if they do.) As Mother Jones previously reported, former Senator Phil Gramm, McCain's onetime campaign chairman, used a backroom maneuver in late 2000 to slip into law a bill that kept credit default swaps unregulated. These financial instruments greased the way to the subprime meltdown that has led to today's economic crisis. Several of McCain's most senior campaign aides have lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the Democratic National Committee, using publicly available records, has identified 177 lobbyists working for the McCain campaign as either aides, policy advisers, or fundraisers. Of those 177 lobbyists, according to a Mother Jones review of Senate and House records, at least 83 have in recent years lobbied for the financial industry McCain now attacks. These are high-paid influence-peddlers who have been working the corridors of the nation's capital to win favors and special treatment for investment banks, securities firms, hedge funds, accounting outfits, and insurance companies. Their clients have included AIG, the newest symbol of corporate excess; Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy on Monday sending the stock market into a tailspin; Merrill Lynch, which was bought out by Bank of America this week; and Washington Mutual, the banking giant that could be the next to fall. Among these 83 lobbyists are McCain's chief political adviser, Charlie Black (JP Morgan, Washington Mutual Bank, Freddie Mac, Mortgage Bankers Association of America); McCain's national finance co-chairman, Wayne Berman (AIG, Blackstone, Credit Suisse, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac); the campaign's congressional liaison, John Green (Carlyle Group, Citigroup, Icahn Associates, Fannie Mae); McCain's veep vetter, Arthur Culvahouse (Fannie Mae); and McCain's transition planning chief, William Timmons Sr. (Citigroup, Freddie Mac, Vanguard Group).
The Homeownership Alliance announced its formation in a September 29, 2000, press release. The press release listed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as two of its founding members and announced that "Rick Davis, formerly presidential campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain, will serve as president of the Homeownership Alliance, which will be based in Alexandria [Virginia]." From the press release:
Vowing to increase support for America's housing system so that it can expand homeownership opportunities for more Americans, housing, mortgage and community development leaders today announced the formation of the Homeownership Alliance. The Homeownership Alliance is a broad-based public education organization that will promote the American housing system. The group will not lobby members of Congress, but will concentrate on public advocacy, principally through its web site http://www.homeownershipalliance.com. Rick Davis, formerly presidential campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain, will serve as president of the Homeownership Alliance, which will be based in Alexandria. The following organizations have joined as participating members of the Homeownership Alliance: The American League of Financial Institutions
The Enterprise Foundation
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac
Independent Community Bankers Association
Local Initiatives Support Corporation
National Association of Home Builders
National Association of Real Estate Brokers
National Bankers Association
National Urban League [...] Rick Davis said that homeownership in America is a core national priority. "Yet, some critics of the system, particularly those who disagree with the role currently played by the housing Government Sponsored Enterprises, are implicitly calling for policy makers to reconstruct the system so it can be more like that of other industrialized countries. But our current system is much better than theirs. Forty-percent down-payments, like they have in Germany, and huge prepayment penalties that are the norm for refinancing in some European countries are things we did away with decades ago, and we certainly don't want to turn the clock back," Davis said.
In a September 1, 2000, article (retrieved from the Factiva database), Institutional Investor wrote of Davis' involvement with the Homeownership Alliance:
Rick Davis loves an underdog. After serving as Senator John McCain's campaign manager, he recently joined the cause of defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The agencies, which dominate the market for mortgage-backed securities, find themselves under attack from Congress, from the Treasury Department and from Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. All want to tighten regulation and strip the agencies of some of their special privileges as government-sponsored enterprises. "You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap," notes Davis, who will run an advocacy group called the Homeownership Alliance out of his Alexandria, Virginia, lobbying firm. He was recruited by Fannie Mae senior vice president John Buckley, whom he met while working on Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign. Says Davis, "What we tried to do in the McCain campaign parallels what we want to do here -- protect the consumer."
Liz Wolgemuth of U.S. News & World Report noted the Institutional Investor article in a September 19 blog post.
According to the Internet Archive's cache of the Homeownership Alliance website -- which is no longer accessible -- Davis was listed as president of the organization as late as February 2006. At the time, senior vice presidents for both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac served on the Alliance's board as "Senior Advisor[s]." Tribune Media's Andrew Zajac reported on June 11 that the Homeownership Alliance "dissolved about two years ago."
In a July 16 Politico article, Lisa Lerer wrote of Davis' tenure as president of the Homeownership Alliance: "[F]or years, Rick Davis served as president of an advocacy group led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that defended the two companies against increased regulation." The article also stated:
McCain campaign manager Davis headed the Homeownership Alliance, a lobbying association that included Fannie, Freddie, nonprofit groups, real estate agents, homebuilders and consumer advocates. The group's stated goal was to increase affordable housing. But it also worked to oppose congressional efforts to tighten controls on Fannie and Freddie. In July 2003, Davis wrote to the American Banker, taking issue with an opinion piece by Leslie Paige of Citizens Against Government Waste, arguing that Fannie and Freddie should operate with greater transparency. "Several of Ms. Paige's assertions bear correction," Davis wrote, defending Fannie and Freddie on behalf of the group. "The GSEs [government sponsored enterprises] are subject to an innovative and stringent risk-based capital stress test -- the toughest in the financial services industry."
In a letter to The New York Times, which has yet to be published by the Times but was posted on the Politico's website around the time of Reid's September 19 report, former Fannie Mae senior vice president William Maloni wrote:
Yesterday, Senator John McCain released a television commercial attacking Barack Obama for allegedly receiving advice on the economy from former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. From the stump, he has recently tried tying Senator Obama to Fannie Mae, as if there is some guilt in the association with Fannie Mae's former executives. It is an interesting card for Senator McCain to play, given that his campaign manager, Rick Davis, was paid by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac several hundred thousand dollars early in this decade to head up an organization to lobby in their behalf called The Homeownership Alliance.... I worked in government relations for Fannie Mae for more than 20 years, leading the group for most of those years. When I see photographs of Sen. McCain's staff, it looks to me like the team of lobbyists who used to report to me. Senator McCain's attack on Senator Obama is a cheap shot, and hypocritical.
As Media Matters for America documented, a July 11, 2007, Politico article reported that Davis "founded a lobbying firm -- Davis Manafort Inc. -- which has made at least $2.8 million lobbying Congress since 1998." According to disclosure reports filed with Congress, Davis registered to lobby from 1998 to 2005 for Davis Manafort. A February 3, 2007, National Journal article reported that "Davis, a longtime lobbyist and financial consultant," is "on leave" from Davis Manafort to work for McCain's campaign.
Media Matters has noted that several other media outlets recently reported that the McCain campaign attacked Obama for what it says are his ties to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae without noting that several senior McCain campaign aides have lobbied for one or both of those entities.
From the September 19 broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric:Just ahead of one of the biggest fights in boxing history, dozens are taking to Twitter to complain of cable outages and other problems before Saturday’s Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight.
Customers of Time Warner Cable, DirecTV and Charter have been complaining about issues. Charter acknowledged the problems on its Twitter account on Saturday.
“We are aware of the issue impacting the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao feed. We are working to resolve as soon as possible,” it wrote.
DirecTV seemed prepared, tweeting troubleshooting tips on Saturday.
If you’re having any problems ordering or viewing the fight here is some troubleshooting help: http://t.co/RbW5f2QJl4 — DIRECTV Service (@DIRECTVService) May 3, 2015
Customers pay $90-$100 dollars to see the fight, which has been advertised heavily for the past few weeks. A select group of marketers are also reportedly paying about $1 million each to get their wares in front of the crowd.
The audience of the event was always expected to be massive. In 2007, approximately 2.48 million video subscribers paid to watch the similarly hyped Mayweather-Oscar de la Hoya fight.
https://twitter.com/darrenrovell/status/594672386705764352
https://twitter.com/darrenrovell/status/594674719497945088
More to come…Ben Reid is in for his first match of the JLT Community Series
COLLINGWOOD has picked Ben Reid for the first time in 2017 for Saturday's JLT Community Series clash with Richmond at Moe.
The All Australian carried a posterior cruciate ligament for most of last season before having surgery and his return will add plenty to the Magpie backline.
Tim Broomhead will play his first game for the Pies since last May, while they have named ruckman Brodie Grundy despite the corked calf he suffered at training during the week.
Josh Smith has also been named despite an ankle injury.
Richmond defender Bachar Houli will step out for the first time this year. The long-kicking Houli has overcome a hamstring in time to get some much-needed match practice ahead of the season opener against Carlton in a fortnight.
Dion Prestia and Shane Edwards also return to the side after being rested last week, while the Tigers squad also includes youngsters Jayden Short, Connor Menadue, Mabior Chol, Tyson Stengle and Ivan Soldo. Among those to miss include Corey Ellis and Kane Lambert.
Adelaide has regained goalkickers Eddie Betts, Josh Jenkins and Mitch McGovern for the game against the Brisbane Lions at Noarlunga on Saturday.
Betts and Jenkins were rested last week, while McGovern was nursing a minor knee injury. Dean Gore (concussion) will miss.
The Brisbane Lions have lost one gun first-year player with No.3 draft pick Hugh McCluggage sidelined for a month with an ankle injury, but have replaced him with his TAC Cup teammate, No.24 pick Cedric Cox, a skilful and versatile half-back. Otherwise the Lions have picked a strong-looking side.
Port Adelaide star Chad Wingard will be rested from Sunday's hit-out against Hawthorn at Noarlunga. Brad Ebert, Aaron Young, Jake Neade, Brendon Ah Chee and Matt White are among inclusions.
Hawthorn will leave Luke Hodge and Josh Gibson behind, but have brought back Isaac Smith, Paul Puopolo, Shaun Burgoyne, Grant Birchall and Ben McEvoy.
Former Adelaide defender Ricky Henderson is set for his first game in the brown and gold, while the club's first pick at last year's national draft, Harry Morrison and powerful Irish recruit Conor Nash are also in the squad.
Geelong regains veteran defender Andrew Mackie for Sunday's clash with Essendon at Bendigo. Joining him for the trip to skipper Joel Selwood's home town is defender Cam Guthrie, who has overcome a calf complaint. Lincoln McCarthy has been named for now despite a shoulder injury last weekend.
Essendon has picked its strongest squad of the pre-season, with Zach Merrett, David Zaharakis, Mark Baguley, Orazio Fantasia, Dyson Heppell, Patrick Ambrose, James Kelly and Matt Dea all back in.
Josh Green (foot) and Jordan Ridley (back) are out, while Mason Redman, Dylan Clarke, Jake Long, Heath Hocking and Conor McKenna have missed selection.
The Sydney squad for Sunday's clash with St Kilda at Lavington features youngsters Oliver Florent, Will Hayward, Robbie Fox and Darcy Cameron, who may be given one last chance to impress before the season opener in 16 days against Port Adelaide.
New St Kilda skipper Jarryn Geary returns, as do Nick Riewoldt, and defenders Dylan Roberton and Sam Gilbert. The Saints have included both ruckmen Tom Hickey and Billy Longer, but it could be a battle for round one selection with coach Alan Richardson yet to declare whether he can carry both players in his best 22.
The final weekend of the JLT Community Series restricts each club to six players on the bench while interchange rotations are monitored for the first time.
SUNDAY, MARCH 12
Port Adelaide v Hawthorn, Hickinbotham Oval (Noarlunga), 12.40pm ACDT
PORT ADELAIDE
1. Travis Boak, 2. Sam Powell-Pepper, 3. Jake Neade, 4. Patrick Ryder, 7. Brad Ebert, 8. Hamish Hartlett, 9. Robbie Gray, 11. Aaron Young, 12. Jackson Trengove, 15. Karl Amon, 16. Oliver Wines, 17. Tom Clurey, 19. Matthew White, 21. Jared Polec, 22. Charlie Dixon, 23. Matthew Lobbe, 24. Jarman Impey, 26. Riley Bonner, 27. Brett Eddy, 28. Willem Drew, 30. Joe Atley, 33. Darcy Byrne-Jones, 36. Jack Hombsch, 39. Justin Westhoff, 42. Tom Jonas, 43. Dan Houston, 46. Sam Gray
Notable absentees: Jasper Pittard, Chad Wingard, Nathan Krakouer, Jarman Impey, Angus Monfries
HAWTHORN
2. Jarryd Roughead, 3. Tom Mitchell, 4. Billy Hartung, 5. Ryan Burton, 7. Ben McEvoy, 8. Taylor Duryea, 9. Shaun Burgoyne, 10. Jaeger O’Meara, 11. Brendan Whitecross, 12. James Frawley, 14. Grant Birchall, 16. Isaac Smith, 19. Jack Gunston, 21. James Sicily, 22. Luke Breust, 24. Ben Stratton, 25. Ryan Schoenmakers, 26. Liam Shiels, 27. Tyrone Vickery, 28. Paul Puopolo, 29. Will Langford, 31. Ricky Henderson, 33. Cyril Rioli, 35. Harry Morrison, 40. Kade Stewart, 42. Teia Miles, 45. Conor Nash
Notable absentees: Luke Hodge, Josh Gibson, Jonathan O’Rourke, Jon Ceglar, Kieran Lovell, Daniel Howe, Tim O'Brien, Kaiden Brand
Geelong v Essendon, Queen Elizabeth Oval (Bendigo), 4.10pm AEDT
GEELONG
1. Rhys Stanley, 2. Zach Tuohy, 3. Brandan Parfitt, 4. Andrew Mackie, 5. Nakia Cockatoo, 6. Lincoln McCarthy, 7. Harry Taylor, 9. Zac Smith, 10. Daniel Menzel, 11. Darcy Lang, 13. Tom Lonergan, 14. Joel Selwood, 18. Josh Cowan, 21. Jordan Murdoch, 22. Mitch Duncan, 23. Aaron Black, 25. Lachie Henderson, 26. Tom Hawkins, 27. Sam Menegola, 29. Cameron Guthrie, 32, Steven Motlop, 33. George Horlin-Smith, 35. Patrick Dangerfield, 36. Tom Ruggles, 40. Jackson Thurlow, 44. Tom Stewart, 46. Mark Blicavs
Notable absentees: Scott Selwood, Cory Gregson, Zach Guthrie, Jed Bews, Jake Kolodjashnij
ESSENDON
1. Andrew McGrath, 3. Darcy Parish, 4. Jobe Watson, 5. Brent Stanton, 6. Joe Daniher, 7. Zach Merrett, 8. Martin Gleeson, 9. Brendon Goddard, 11. David Zaharakis, 12. Mark Baguley, 13. Orazio Fantasia, 16. Joshua Begley, 17. James Stewart, 18. Michael Hurley, 21. Dyson Heppell, 22. Matthew Leuenberger, 28. Mitch Brown, 29. Patrick Ambrose, 30. Kyle Langford, 32. Travis Colyer, 33. Jayden Laverde, 36. Michael Hartley, 40. Ben Howlett, 43. Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti, 44. Shaun McKernan, 47. James Kelly, 49. Matt Dea
Notable absentees: Tom Bellchambers, Aaron Francis, David Myers, Craig Bird, Cale Hooker, Heath Hocking, Conor McKenna
St Kilda v Sydney, Lavington Sports Ground (Albury), 7.10pm AEDT
ST KILDA
1. Tom Hickey, 2. Jake Carlisle, 3. Jack Steven, 4. Jade Gresham, 5. Shane Savage, 6. Seb Ross, 7. Luke Dunstan, 8. Blake Acres, 9. Jack Steele, 12. Nick Riewoldt, 13. Jack Lonie, 14. Jarryd Geary, 15. Jack Billings, 16. Jack Newnes, 17. Dylan Roberton, 18. Billy Longer, 19. Sam Gilbert, 20. David Armitage, 22. Nathan Brown, 24. Sean Dempster, 25. Koby Stevens, 27. Josh Bruce, 28. Tim Membrey, 29. Jimmy Webster, 32. Paddy McCartin, 34. Nathan Wright, 44. Mav Weller
Notable absentees: Leigh Montagna, Daniel McKenzie, Hugh Goddard, Jack Sinclair, Nathan Freeman
SYDNEY
4. Dan Hannebery, 6. Jordan Foote, 7. Harry Cunningham, 8. Kurt Tippett, 9. Will Hayward, 10. Zak Jones, 11. Jeremy Laidler, 12. Josh Kennedy, 13. Oliver Florent, 14. Callum Mills, 17. Darcy Cameron, 18. Callum Sinclair, 20. Sam Reid, 22. Dean Towers, 23. Lance Franklin, 24. Dane Rampe, 26. Luke Parker, 27. Daniel Robinson, 28. Nic Newman, 29. George Hewett, 31. Harrison Marsh, 35. Sam Naismith, 39. Heath Grundy, 40. Nick Smith, 42. Robbie Fox, 43. Lewis Melican, 44. Jake Lloyd
Notable absentees: Aliir Aliir, Jarrad McVeigh, Isaac Heeney, Tom Papley, Kieren Jack, Gary Rohan
SATURDAY, MARCH 11
Richmond v Collingwood, Ted Summerton Reserve (Moe), 1.10pm AEDT
RICHMOND
1. Nick Vlastuin, 2. Dylan Grimes, 3. Dion Prestia, 4. Dustin Martin, 5. Brandon Ellis, 6. Shaun Grigg, 8. Jack Riewoldt, 9. Trent Cotchin, 10. Shane Edwards, 12. David Astbury, 14. Bachar Houli, 15. Jayden Short, 17. Daniel Rioli, 18. Alex Rance, 22. Josh Caddy, 24. Ben Griffiths, 25. Toby Nankervis, 26. Anthony Miles, 27. Sam Lloyd, 28. Taylor Hunt, 30. Reece Conca, 37. Connor Menadue, 40. Daniel Butler, 41. Mabior Chol, 44. Tyson Stengle, 46. Jason Castagna, 47. Ivan Soldo
Notable absentees: Ben Lennon, Jake Batchelor, Shaun Hampson, Ivan Maric, Corey Ellis
COLLINGWOOD
1. Alex Fasolo, 4. Brodie Grundy, 6. Tyson Goldsack, 7. Adam Treloar, 9. Jesse White, 10. Scott Pendlebury, 11. Jarryd Blair, 12. Matthew Scharenberg, 13. Taylor Adams, 14. James Aish, 15. Lynden Dunn, 16. Chris Mayne, 18. Travis Varcoe, 20. Ben Reid, 21. Tom Phillips, 22. Steele Sidebottom, 24. Josh Thomas, 25. Jack Crisp, 29. Tim Broomhead, 30. Darcy Moore, 31. Jackson Ramsay, 32. Will Hoskin-Elliott, 37. Brayden Maynard, 38. Jeremy Howe, 40. Josh Smith, 41. Henry Schade, 46. Mason Cox
Notable absentees: Jordan De Goey, Daniel Wells, Jamie Elliott, Levi Greenwood
Adelaide v Brisbane Lions, Hickinbotham Oval (Noarlunga), 3.40pm ACDT
ADELAIDE
3. Riley Knight, 4. Josh Jenkins, 7. Jordan Gallucci, 8. Jake Kelly, 10. Harrison Wigg, 12. Daniel Talia, 13. Taylor Walker, 14. David Mackay, 15. Kyle Hartigan, 16. Luke Brown, 17. Curtly Hampton, 18. Eddie Betts, 20. Hugh Greenwood, 21. Rory Atkins, 22. Andy Otten, 23. Charlie Cameron, 24. Sam Jacobs, 26. Richard Douglas, 27. Tom Lynch, 29. Rory Laird, 30. Wayne Milera, 31. Myles Poholke, 32. Troy Menzel, 33. Brodie Smith, 41. Mitch McGovern, 43. Reilly O’Brien, 44. Matt Crouch
Notable absentees: Brad Crouch, Scott Thompson, Jake Lever, Rory Sloane, Paul Seedsman, Kyle Cheney, Cam Ellis-Yolmen, Dean Gore
BRISBANE LIONS
1. Ben Keays, 2. Ryan Harwood, 4. Ryan Bastinac, 5. Mitch Robinson, 7. Tom Bell, 8. Rohan Bewick, 9. Dayne Beams, 10. Daniel Rich, 12. Stefan Martin, 15. Dayne Zorko, 17. Claye Beams, 18. Nick Robertson, 20. Cedric Cox, 25. Daniel McStay, 26. Tom Cutler, 27. Darcy Gardiner, 28. Lewis Taylor, 30. Eric Hipwood, 31. Harris Andrews, 32. Sam Mayes, 33. Michael Close, 35. Ryan Lester, 36. Rhys Mathieson, 38. Tom Rockliff, 40. Matt Hammelmann, 43. Jake Barrett, 44. Archie Smith
Notable absentees: Allen Christensen, Josh Walker, Jack Frost, Josh Schache, Marco Paparone, Hugh McCluggage
FRIDAY, MARCH 10
Greater Western Sydney v North Melbourne, Manuka Oval, 5.50pm AEDT
GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY
1. Phil Davis, 3. Stephen Coniglio, 4. Toby Greene, 5. Dylan Shiel, 8. Callan Ward, 9. Tom Scully, 10. Devon Smith, 12. Jonathon Patton, 14. Tim Taranto, 15. Matthew Kennedy, 16. Nathan Wilson, 17. Steve Johnson, 18. Jeremy Cameron, 19. Nick Haynes, 20. Adam Tomlinson, 21. Matt Buntine, 22. Josh Kelly, 23. Heath Shaw, 25. Tendai Mzungu, 26. Dawson Simpson, 29. Zac Williams, 32. Ryan Griffen, 35. Aidan Corr, 37. Rory Lobb, 40. Adam Kennedy, 41. Shane Mumford, 50. Sam Reid
Notable absentees: Isaac Cumming, Matt de Boer, Brett Deledio, Harrison Himmelberg, Jacob Hopper, Harry Perryman, Will Setterfield, Lachie Whitfield
NORTH MELBOURNE
4. Shaun Higgins, 6. Lachlan Hansen, 7. Jack Ziebell, 8. Nathan Hrovat, 9. Andrew Swallow, 10. Ben Cunnington, 11. Luke McDonald, 12. Lindsay Thomas, 13. Ryan Clarke, 14. Trent Dumont, 16. Scott Thompson, 18. Shaun Atley, 19. Sam Wright, 21. Jy Simpkin, 22. Todd Goldstein, 24. Sam Durdin, 25. Robbie Tarrant, 28. Kayne Turner, 30. Jarrad Waite, 31. Braydon Preuss, 33. Ed Vickers-Willis, 34. Jamie Macmillan, 38. Majak Daw, 39. Mitch Hibberd, 41. Corey Wagner, 42. Declan Mountford, 43. Sam Gibson
Notable absentees: Marley Williams, Jed Anderson, Ben Jacobs, Mason Wood, Ben Brown
Fremantle v Carlton, Domain Stadium, 5.40pm AWST
FREMANTLE
1. Hayden Ballantyne, 2. Griffin Logue, 3. Zac Dawson, 4. Sean Darcy, 5. Garrick Ibbotson, 6. Danyle Pearce, 7. Nat Fyfe, 9. Bradley Hill, 10. Michael Walters, 11. Tommy Sheridan, 12. Jon Griffin, 14. Lachie Weller, 16. David Mundy, 17. Hayden Crozier, 18. Darcy Tucker, 19. Connor Blakely, 21. Joel Hamling, 22. Shane Kersten, 23. Cam McCarthy, 26. Ed Langdon, 27. Lachie Neale, 31. Aaron Sandilands, 32. Stephen Hill, 33. Cam Sutcliffe, 34. Lee Spurr, 36. Brennan Cox, 37. Michael Johnson
Notable absentees: Nick Suban, Harley Bennell, Matt Taberner, Harley Balic, Zac Clarke
CARLTON
1. Jack Silvagni, 3. Marc Murphy, 4. Bryce Gibbs, 6. Kade Simpson, 8. Matthew Kreuzer, 9. Patrick Cripps, 10. Harry McKay, 11. Sam Kerridge, 13. Jed Lamb, 15. Sam Docherty, 16. Billie Smedts, 17. Sam Rowe, 20. Lachie Plowman, 22. Caleb Marchbank, 23. Jacob Weitering, 24. Rhys Palmer, 26. Harrison Macreadie, 27. Dennis Armfield, 28. David Cuningham, 29. Cameron Polson, 33. Jarrod Pickett, 35. Edward Curnow, 39. Dale Thomas, 41. Levi Casboult, 43. Simon White, 44. Alex Silvagni, 46. Matthew Wright
Notable absentees: Blaine Boekhorst, Dylan Buckley, Charlie Curnow, Daniel Gorringe, Nick Graham, Kristian Jaksch, Liam Jones, Sam Petrevski-Setton, Andrew PhillipsA grand jury has indicted a Tulsa County, Oklahoma, sheriff whose office came under intense national scrutiny following the fatal shooting of an unarmed and restrained man by a volunteer deputy who mistook his hand gun for a stun gun.
Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz was indicted Wednesday on two misdemeanor criminal counts. One count for refusing to release an internal report related to an investigation into Robert Bates, the former reserve deputy and longtime friend of Glanz who accidentally fired a single fatal shot into Eric Harris on April 2. The second, unrelated to the Harris killing, was for willful violation of the law over a monthly stipend he received for using his personal vehicle.
The grand jury also recommended that the sheriff be removed from office.
Glanz’s attorney, Scott Wood, told multiple news outlets that the sheriff intends to resign.
Harris, 44, had been targeted in a police sting operation after he allegedly sold a semi-automatic pistol and ammunition to an undercover cop. When officers tried to arrest Harris, he fled, and the sheriff’s office said he reached for his waistband.
In a widely circulated video of the incident, Harris, who is black and was unarmed, is seen running from police before being knocked down and restrained on the ground. Moments later, Bates, 73, who is white and a former insurance executive volunteering in the undercover operation, is heard shouting “Taser, Taser,” before firing his gun at Harris.
“I shot him,” Bates immediately exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”
According to police, Bates was attempting to assist deputies in apprehending Harris. The former reserve officer reached for his Taser, but mistakenly grabbed his gun and fired before recognizing his error.
Toward the end of the brief video, Harris cries out, “He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath.”
“Fuck your breath. Shut the fuck up,” another officer shouts back in response.
Later, Harris was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Bates was charged with second-degree manslaughter involving “culpable negligence.” He has pleaded not guilty.
Two other deputies involved in the incident were reassigned to unspecified duties after receiving threats against them and their families, Glanz announced in an April news conference. Unlike Bates, neither officer was charged with a crime.
The shooting sparked outrage and calls for an investigation into the sheriff’s office, led by We The People, an Oklahoma group advocating for law enforcement reform. The group’s petition seeking Glanz’s removal from office set in motion the convening of the grand jury and, ultimately, the indictment of Glanz.
According to court documents, the grand jury met for a total of 20 days, interviewed 32 witnesses and analyzed 164 exhibits.
The sheriff’s office remains under investigation by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The grand jury, in its report, noted it was aware of the investigation and “is supportive of its continuation.”Is this society blonde the 'Energiser' who's been one of Bill Clinton's secret lovers for 13 years?
Mother-of-three Julie McMahon, who lives just minutes from the Clintons, is suspected of being the 'Energizer'; and her friendship with with Clinton has been the subject of media speculation for years
She always arrives in an SUV, sometimes staying for a few hours, sometimes as long as a week — just so long as the lady of the house is away.
And, thanks to the fact that the house in question — the palatial residence of Bill and Hillary Clinton — is protected by a squad of U.S. Secret Servicemen who are in on the deception, the attractive, busty blonde can time her arrivals and departures to within minutes of those of Mrs Clinton.
The bodyguards claim they don’t know her identity, but say they are under orders neither to stop nor approach her, but to let her in. She does, however, have a codename. Every member of a family protected by the Secret Service, responsible for guarding presidents and ex-presidents, is given a codename starting with the same letter.
Given that Bill Clinton is ‘Eagle’ and Mrs Clinton is ‘Evergreen’, the special visitor was dubbed ‘Energiser’ in a rare moment of levity by the men in the mirror sunglasses.
It’s a tribute, apparently, to the fact that she’s been such a regular visitor over the years, she’s now part of the family, and also a tongue-in-cheek reference to the drumming pink bunny in the Energizer battery adverts that just keeps going.
The claim that the 67-year-old former president has a ‘blonde, buxom mistress’ who frequently visits the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, a wealthy suburb near New York, was made earlier this week when details were leaked of a forthcoming book — The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal The Hidden Lives Of Presidents.
Its author, Ronald Kessler, is known to have impeccable contacts with Secret Servicemen.
Described as ‘charming and friendly’, Energiser will even bring the bodyguards biscuits — a small price for their silence, but a nice thought, particularly as protecting the rude and ‘nasty’ Mrs Clinton is seen as a punishment posting.
Energiser’s appeal doesn’t end with her personality. A Secret Serviceman told Kessler how his dull vigil was enlivened one day by a glimpse of her impressive décolletage as she leaned over — possibly bearing biscuits — wearing a low-cut top.
Her ‘exposed’ breasts were ‘very perky and very full and new’. The trained observer had no doubt they were ‘enhanced’.
So who could the Energiser be? One candidate, I discovered this week, is attractive divorcee, rich socialite and mother-of-three Julie McMahon, who lives just five miles from the Clintons.
Her friendship with Clinton has been the subject of sporadic, if little-noticed, media speculation for years.
The daughter of Joel Tauber, a multi-millionaire backer of the Democratic party and friend of the Clintons, she reportedly met the former president in 1998 when he was still in office, after her father let him use the family’s $25 million Colorado mansion.
They were said to have instantly hit it off, but it was claimed their relationship became intimate shortly after the Clintons left the White House and moved to her neighbourhood in 2001.
Miss McMahon had by then divorced her husband, John McMahon, a director of Goldman Sachs, from whom she had been separated for three years. It was alleged she and a ‘lonely’ Clinton would sneak to each other’s houses, sometimes at night.
They would even meet abroad, it was said, with Miss McMahon conveniently turning up in London or Paris at the same time as Clinton. Miss McMahon, 54, publicly denied they were having an affair in 2008, but her name resurfaced two years later in Game Change, an account of the 2008 presidential election.
The book named her among a long list of women, including a ‘dishy’ Canadian MP and the Hollywood actress Gina Gershon, whose rumoured friendships with Clinton were alarming Democrat grandees.
According to Game Change’s authors, investigations by Mrs Clinton’s aides discovered that the rumours about one particular woman were true and ‘that Bill was indeed having an affair — and not a frivolous one-night stand, but a sustained, romantic relationship’.
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Because the U.S Secret Service guard Bill and Hillary Clinton's home, the 'Energizer' is said to be able to time her arrivals and departures within minutes of those of Mrs Clinton
It was claimed Miss McMahon had ended their affair in 2008, after Clinton refused to leave his wife for her. But this week, another new book, Clinton Inc, related how Clinton had wanted to bring ‘his latest |
: “We have worked hard to be on time. We have completed a lot of test sessions and have stuck to our schedule.
“The addition of a second car helped us to up the pace and diversify the development testing. We want to test in all conditions and on all surfaces so that we are ready for 2017.”
The two Yaris are being used to develop different areas of performance: testing with the first car has focused on engine and transmission, working on gravel roads near the team’s base in Puuppola; the second car is being used in southern European locations, such as Spain and Portugal, to hone the suspension design.
Tom Fowler, the team’s WRC Chief Engineer, added: “We haven’t started testing on Tarmac as yet, but we can already tell that the car’s performance levels are really high. We have been able to work without any major issues so far and that’s very encouraging.”
Mäkinen, himself a four-time WRC champion, was impressed when he took the wheel of the Yaris, commenting: “I just couldn’t resist, so I was first to size up the car. The feeling was great and it was fun to drive as well.”
The test driving team also features Juho Hanninen as principal driver, and Jarkko Nikara. Others are expected to join the line-up soon. Hanninen said: “The first time I drove the Yaris WRC I was very impressed. The handling and balance of the car were perfect; the work done on the design is exceptional.
We are so happy to join you on Twitter! Follow us also on Facebook: https://t.co/FVcPafFIyM & Instagram: @TGR_WRC pic.twitter.com/bJZ1ZSZ7nG — TGR_WRC (@TGR_WRC) July 25, 2016
“We have wasted no time in racking up the miles, because the car has been very reliable from the word go and we’ve not been held up by any major technical issues. In initial tests outside Finland, we have tackled a wide variety of conditions, but the car’s performance has been very consistent.”
Toyota Gazoo Racing’s WRC team is a genuinely international outfit, with seven different nationalities represented, and it continues to expand in size. Mäkinen is proud of the commitment and family atmosphere: “I have been pleasantly surprised to see that, even though our facilities have grown and we are now employing more and more people, this working atmosphere remains largely unchanged. The team is very united and everyone does their best without compromise.”
See also
Toyota announces WRC return in 2017
History of Toyota in world rallying: 1970s
History of Toyota in world rallying: 1980s
History of Toyota in world rallying: 1990sAfter a year of major content updates and gameplay changes, the original sins of No Man’s Sky still permeate the design. There are a lot of little problems, but if you trace the problems back to their roots you’ll see they basically all stem from a couple of really bad ideas: The Inventory System, and Polo.
Polo is certainly the less harmful of the two, but let’s discuss him first.
Seriously, Screw This Guy
I feel the need to point out that there are no windows anywhere on this space station.
Polo is one of the very few named characters in the game. He and his partner Nada appear randomly along your journey. Sometimes you’ll warp to a system and there will be an “Anomaly”, which is what the game calls Nada and Polo’s brutalist styled doom sphere / space station.
In a forum, some internet rando claimed the anomaly is scripted to appear about every two hours. I have no way to confirm that, but it feels about right.
Polo has a series of 16 challenges for you to complete. Although in typical No Man’s Sky style, the game doesn’t tell you what the challenges are, what the rewards will be, or what order they come in. You just show up and talk to Polo. He’ll comment on your journey, and if you’ve completed the latest challenge he’ll give you a reward.
This would be fine if Polo was just dispensing bonus items, but one of the things he gives out is the final tier of Warp reactor. There are four different colors of star systems in the game. In order these are Yellow, Green, Red, Blue. Each tier has new exotic resources to harvest, and each tier requires a warp drive upgrade.
The final warp drive is Polo’s very last reward for his very last challenge. The game has three different overarching goals: The Atlas Quest, the journey to the center of the galaxy, and the (newly added) Artemis storyline. I don’t know about the last one, but to finish either of the first two you will need this warp reactor. Which means Polo is effectively part of the “main quest”.
Thanks dipshit. You know my journey would have been about five thousand percent easier if you'd given this to me forty hours ago.
Each time you randomly encounter Polo, he’ll require you to have reached some milestone on your journey. Kill X spaceships, destroy X robots, save up X galactic space-bucks, survive an accumulated X hours in extreme weather conditions, scan X alien animals, learn X alien vocabulary words, etc. He presents these milestones to you, in order, whenever you stumble onto one of his outposts. You don’t know what his next challenge will be, so you can’t prepare for your next encounter. If you run into him and discover you need to invest a bunch more time to meet the next goal, then you need to continue on your journey, grind out the requisite tasks, and then wait for him to show up againOr you can backtrack, depending on how your travels go. I’m a bit iffy on when his space station disappears and it’s not documented in the wiki..
As icing on the cake, his entire design is really goofy and dissonant. He’s written like he’s this peace and love idealist who hates violence, but literally half of his 16 rewards are weapons. The story is written in this unconventional first person as narrated by the player character, and tells how the player and Polo become fast friends. It feels so disconnected from everything else and the friendship feels so unearned I found it off-putting. The game keeps telling me I’m dear friends with this unhelpful little pain in the ass. I realize that the problems with this game are so profound that complaining about ludonarrative dissonance is really petty, but it really did stand out.
So what’s wrong with Polo?
Polo is wrong.
If this was part of some labor-of-love indie project with a shoestring budget I might call Polo an “interesting experiment” and a “worthy try”. But this is a $60 AAA gameAs of this writing, NMS is STILL $60. For contrast, Doom 2016 came out the same year and was better reviewed, and it’s come down to $30. But NMS is still asking launch-day prices. and this is one of the main characters. I’m less eager to hand-wave shortcomings like this with the excuse of, “It’s an indie effort.” I’ll forgive wonky audio or amateurish lighting if I’m watching a student film on YouTube, but if I just paid $60 to take my family to the movie theater then I expect a certain level of professionalism for my money. Even ignoring the issue of presentation and production values, Polo suffers from a terminal case of needing to, “Show, don’t tell.”
This is a bizarre way of doling out rewards in an open-universe sandbox. “Go anywhere! Do anything! Find things that are fun for you! But in order to make progress you have to jump through these specific hoops, in this specific order.” Just… what? This is the antithesis of everything else the game is trying to do! It’s basically engineered to create frustration and bottleneck your progress on other tasks.
Polo only recognizes one achievement per visit, even if you’ve completed a bunch of them. If I’ve completed challenges 4, 5, 6, and 7 but got stuck on #3, then once I complete #3 I can’t turn in #3 through #7 all at once. I have to turn in #3, then wait a couple of hours for Polo to show up so I can turn in #4, then wait a couple more until another random encounter lets me turn in #5, and so on. And remember, you don’t know have any way of knowing what’s coming (unless you read the wiki) so you’re more likely to “waste” one of these rare visits just figuring out what you need to do.
Right: Polo. Left: Nada. Nada is just as useless, but Nada isn't tangled up in the late-game bottleneck. Nada and I are basically cool.
Many of his early gifts are a waste. He’s hard to find, the story doesn’t tell you he’s important, his challenges are often daunting, and his early rewards are often useless or underwhelming. It’s like the game is teaching you that this guy isn’t important and he’s not worth your time.
His reward doesn’t even make sense! The final warp reactor is obviously not a rare secret super-technology in this universe. Why can’t I just go into the parts shop and buy this warp reactor like all the other technologies in this game? It’s clear there are literally billions of people living in these blue star systems. They come and go as they please. Apparently everyone has this warp reactor but me. So why do I have to jump through all of these hoops for this strange little taskmaster?
His milestones are dissonant. Like I said, he’s written as this lifeform that cherishes life, but he rewards you with guns and his tasks require you go out of your way to shoot down other ships. Alone this is a minor problem, but with everything else it sort of adds to the sensation that the whole thing was slapped together without any thought. For example, he could have given away shields instead of guns, and his ship combat milestones could have been swapped out for any of the other non-murder ones.
Here are the various milestones in the game. Polo eventually requires you to get most of these to high level.
So the game inadvertently teaches you that Polo is a waste or that his rewards are optional and not very good, which means you might not spend time doing them. Which means you’ll run into a wall later when the game casually gives you a goal that can only be completed with a maxed-out hyperdrive. Maybe you’ll shop around for hours before giving up and looking at the wiki, only to discover you’ve got dozens of hours of Polo-grinding before you can return to the task at hand.
Polo is a microcosm of everything wrong with the overall design of No Man’s Sky. An undocumented linear progression of arbitrary tasks that bottleneck progress, glazed in a layer of earnest but sophomoric writing.
As bad as all of this is, you can deal with Polo by just keeping the Wiki open in the background and making sure you plan your activities so you don’t get stuck on any of his tasks for too long. That’s annoying, but it’s not enough to ruin the game. The task of ruining the game falls to…
The Stupid Inventory System (Again.)
This is your starting inventory. The three items in the upper-left are devices that can't be moved. The rest of the slots are for storing stuff.
You might remember my long tirades last year about the No Man’s Sky inventory system. The inventory wasn’t just annoying, it actively inhibited the one good thing the game had going for it. But in case you missed it, here’s a quickBy the overly verbose standards of this site, anyway. overview…
Imagine you’re playing Skyrim or Fallout 4. You leave town, hike across an empty wilderness, and plunge into a dungeon. Halfway through looting the first room, your inventory is already full. Your first instinct is, “I’ll take what’s valuable.” Except, it’s all valuable. Every dungeon has a couple of rare resources that are hard to find. You know you’ll need them later. You can ignore them now, but ten hours from now you’ll be able to forge yourself a sweet new weapon except you’ll need the thousand units of the Unobtainium that’s currently right in front of you. You won’t be able to find this particular dungeon again. You’ll have to voyage around for three hours to find the next batch of it, and the whole time you’ll be thinking back to the thousands of units you left on the floor of this dungeon because you couldn’t carry it.
Your inability to plan for the future aside, you also really need money. Which means you need to take some of this other loot with you. But your gear (and the materials to keep you going) take up 90% of your carry capacity. So what do you do? Excavate this dungeon a spoonful at a time, running between here and town to make some trivial amount each trip? If you do that, you will spend a vast majority of your time hiking back and forth (boring) and not exploring the dungeons, which is the one thing this game does right.
This was a game about exploring and collecting resources on vast worlds where your pockets were full two minutes after leaving your spaceship.
“No problem for me! I don’t have the reflexive hoarding instinct. I’ll just ignore the loot and do the dungeon anyway. I’ll still level up.”
That might work in a Bethesda game, except in No Man’s Sky building upgrades is how you level up. Imagine doing the dungeon, except all the “loot” you’re leaving behind is actually piles of XP.
This is what made the game so maddening at launch. Almost every single system of the game tied into the inventory: Materials to build upgrades, items to sell for money, items to grind reputation with factions, quest items for the main storyline, and the half dozen or so materials needed just to fuel your suit, your tools, and your ship. They all took inventory space. It was the one thing everyone hated about the game at launch, and the one thing that needed to be fixed.
Well the designer addressed this problem, and the result is perfectly indicative of the weird-ass approach No Man’s Sky has always used with regards to game mechanics. The solution is awkward, convoluted, frustrating, and doesn’t actually solve the problem.
Originally you had two and a half inventories: Your exosuitYour pockets., your starship, and your multi-toolWhich held upgrades, but not items.. My original complaint was that all of your upgrades used inventory slots. So if I wanted to upgrade my exosuit with a radiation shield so I can explore an irradiated world, then I need to give up one of my too-few inventory slots to do it. The same thing applied to the spaceship. To solve this, Hello Games didn’t just give us more inventory. Instead they gave us more kinds of inventory.
Now, I’m going to suggest that you NOT read this next bit. This is long and it’s not totally required to understand what’s wrong. But I’m leaving it here for the curious. If you find yourself thinking, “It can’t be as silly as Shamus is making it sound”, then come back and read this. If you’re willing to take my word for it, then just jump down to the section titled What a Mess.
An Explanation of the Five Different Kinds of Inventory, Their Sub-Inventories, How They Differ, How They’re Connected, and Holy Shit This is Already So Stupid.
When people demanded “more inventory space!” I think Hello Games misunderstood. HG seems to think that what we really wanted was more different kinds of inventory. The updates have added new inventory groups and sub-screens. Here is what they are and how they workOr don’t, in a few cases..
Exosuit
This is your inventory near the end of the game. I would say this is basically playable and would make a good STARTING inventory, and should get bigger from here.
As before, this is your general storage. It can hold technology (shields, jetpack, life support, etc.) or inventory. You “build” technology into the grid, so it can’t be moved without disassembling to and re-assembling it elsewhere, which wastes resources. There’s a system where you can get bonuses by building related components next to each other. So building a toxin shield next to your life support system will make both of them work better. At launch, I complained that the jetpack technology was trapped in the corner by other non-moveable items, which means you can’t get the jetpack bonuses. After a year of updates, this small annoyance has still not been fixed, even though it should be trivial and people have actually done so in third-party mods. Which means the jetpack is trapped there on purpose, for some unfathomable reason. Single items still don’t stack. Materials are stored in stacks of 250. You can transfer items from here to your starship from anywhere in the game, but if you’re far away from your starship you can’t transfer them the other way. In the wilderness you’ll sometimes find a single-use upgrade station that will let you buy one additional slot of space. The cost to do this increases every time.
Exosuit Cargo
This is an expansion to your personal inventory, but it gets its own screen. Here items can be stacked in groups of 5 and materials can be stacked in groups of 500. You can’t install technology upgrades here at all. As far as I can tell, stuff in this container doesn’t show up when selling stuff in a shop, but it does show up when choosing materials for crafting. You start off the game with no cargo slots. Then, thanks to a known bug, it stays that way. You walk up to an inventory upgrade machine, pay a huge pile of money, and then nothing happens. According to the forums, most people do this twice. The first time they assume they clicked on something wrong or selected the wrong kind of upgrade. The second time they realize they’ve been ripped off. Like the exosuit, you can add one additional slot to this for an ever-increasing fee. (Assuming you’re not suffering from the ripoff bug.)
Exosuit Technology
Or maybe they do? I’m not sure how to interpret these vague numbers. but they won’t eat up cargo space. This is for tech upgrades only. You can’t use this grid to store items. Here you can put shields for heat, cold, toxins, and radiation. You can put upgrades for your combat shield and jetpack. They won’t give the adjacency bonusesbut they won’t eat up cargo space. Like the exosuit, you can add new slots to this, one at a time, for an ever-increasing fee.
Multi-Tool
This LOOKS like an inventory screen, but you don't keep items here. Instead this is where you install upgrades to make your gun / mining beam do more murder / mining.
This is the grid for your weapon / mining tool / tricorder. It holds upgrades for the tool but no items. This grid is upgraded by finding new tools at random in the wild and “trading up” when you can afford it.
Starship Cargo
This is the default inventory for your starter ship. It is MUCH too small to facilitate exploration and gathering style gameplay, which is what I ASSUMED the game is supposed to be?!?
Items store in groups of 5 and materials in groups of 500. This grid holds a mix of technology and inventory. The grid itself is different for every ship. Some ships have annoying blocks missing from the grids and others have the technology placed in annoying spots where you can’t get the adjacency bonuses you might want. You can’t upgrade or change this inventory except to get a different ship.
Starship Technology
Like the Exosuit Technology, this is for upgrades only. You can’t store items here. This space comes with the ship and can’t be changed or upgraded except to get a new ship.
Exocraft Inventory
You can get three different ground vehicles in the game: A rover, a tank, and a hovercraft. Each of them has a slightly different (although very small) inventory grid, which is used for both storage and upgrades. This space can never be changed or upgraded. In all other cases, the player’s main inventory is considered the “hub” of all inventories. If you hit “transfer items” in any other inventory, then the items move to the player’s pockets. However, the Exocraft deviates from this. If you transfer away from the craft, it goes to the ship.
Storage Containers
At your base, you can built these things that look like massive storage vaults. Despite their size, they can only hold a measly five items. However, the stack sizes are larger than other containers. Single items stack 10, and materials can stack to 1,000. There’s an odd bug with these where you can’t transfer an entire stack of 1,000 items into your main inventory, even if you’ve got enough room for the resulting four stacks. You have to manually transfer it in groups of 250. This space can’t be upgraded, but you can build more vaults. (Up to 10.)
What a Mess
This is the grid where you install upgrades to your suit. On the right, the three options are how you switch between the KINDS of personal inventory.
Suit, multi-tool, ship, exocraft, vault. That’s five different kinds of inventoryThere’s also a freighter you can buy, but as of this writing I haven’t messed with it., three different stack sizes, multiple different ways of managing upgrades, several different behaviors when transferring items, and a couple of interface bugs. Some inventories you can’t sell from, some you can only access when you’re close to the container, some you can access at limited range in one direction and unlimited range in the other, some can’t stack items, and some share space with upgrades. You can move between the four main inventory types with the top menu but then move through the sub-inventories with a control on the side.
Let me tell you a story about this new inventory system…
The game now has quests. Some quests give you trade items as a reward. Typically you get either 3 or 5 items. These are automatically dumped into your main inventory, where they cannot stack, instead of going into your starship where they would stack nicely in groups of 5. If you don’t have enough free slotsBECAUSE YOU NEVER HAVE ENOUGH FREE SLOTS. then the “extra” items vanish forever. If you’re turning in several quests at once then you need to talk to the agent by holding the interact button for 2 seconds, then click through his useless three dialog boxes of blather, then click on the completed mission, then click to get your reward. Then you have to exit the entire dialog, open your inventory, and shift all of those single items over to your starship where they will take just 1 slot instead of 5. Then you can talk to the agent again, skip his dialog again, and turn in the next quest, and so on, until all your quests are accounted for and everything is packed in your starship.
This is a preposterous amount of hassle and clicking for what should be a completely trivial transaction. I assumed these trade goods were important, because otherwise why would the developer make them such a pain? If you’re supposed to sell them for money, then why not just pay the player in money? Indeed, some quests do exactly this.
I had a vault where’ I’d stored a bunch of these trade goods, anticipating the moment in the game where they would become useful or important. Then I looked on the wiki and saw they were basically just vendor trash.
So I had a vault with five stacks of ten items. All I needed to do was get them out of storage, walk downstairs, and sell them on the galactic trade network. Here is what I had to do:
The Interface Shuffle
I'm tired of posting pictures on inventory grids, so here's a picture of a planet I named "Willy Wonka".
Because they don’t stack in my main inventory, I couldn’t hold all 50 items from the vault at the same time. And I couldn’t just dump a single stack of 10 into my main inventory. No, I had to click on a single free space in my personal inventory, request a single item from the vault, then move to another free slot and repeat, again and again, until my inventory was full. Then I closed the vault, opened my inventory, and sent all the trade goods over to my starship so they would stack. Then I closed that and re-opened the vault (opening the vault requires you to hold the interact button for two seconds) and filled my inventory again. I did this several times, until I’d fully vacated the contents of the vault into my starship.
Then I walked downstairs to the trade interface and discovered that this trade kiosk – unlike all the other trade kiosks in the game – wouldn’t let me sell directly from my starship. So then I had to open the inventory, move a handful of items from my starship to my backpack, then open the trade interface (opening the kiosk requires you to hold the interact button for two seconds) then click through the splash text, then select “sell”, then sell those items. Then exit out of the trade interface, re-open the inventory, and transfer the next batch. I had to do that over and over again, until I’d successfully cleaned out my starship.
All told, it took me several minutes and easily over a hundred mouse clicks. I probably spent over a minute just holding down the “interact” button and waiting for the stupid interface animations to complete. All of this hassle, just to sell five stacks of items!
In a Bethesda game, you would simply take in the excess inventory and then slow-walk to the shop. It’s silly, but at least it wouldn’t require several minutes of interface shuffle. And let’s be clear, if your interface is being compared unfavorably to a Bethesda game you have made a mistake of epic proportions.
What is any of this for? What does any of this senseless bullshit and hassle add to the game? The developer heard the fanbase cry for “more inventory space” and they “obliged” them in the most insane, wrong-headed, sadistic way possible. They gave you more total space to store stuff, but then also multiplied the number of items you had to carry and made a byzantine set of rules and behaviors for dealing with it all. People wanted more inventory space because they wanted to spend less time shuffling items around and more time playing the game. So Hello Games granted their request in a literal sense while making the actual problem much worse. This is griefing disguised as game design.
Let’s go back to that first E3 reveal trailer that set the world on fire:
Did anyone watch that trailer and think it was going to be a game about sorting items, managing stack sizes, and juggling items between different storage containers? Why was inventory management given such focus? Why, after a year of updates, has it been expanded into the most complex system in the game?
The crazy thing is that the fix for the inventory problem is pretty simple. There was no need to mess around with cargo screens. All they had to do was make the inventory bigger.
Since the update I’ve played through in regular mode, and then I played in survival difficulty. After two days of slamming my head against the inventory screen in survival mode I downloaded a save editor and cheated myself the largest ship possible. The result was I was suddenly playing a completely different game. I could adventure around on a planet for more than five minutes without feeling like I was wasting my time because my inventory was full. I could gather loot, fill up, and then go back to “town” and unload. The interface was still an abomination, but at least the lack of inventory was no longer preventing me from engaging with the best parts of the game.
It wasn’t like this trivialized the game, either. Even with this massive cheat in place, NMS is still a long, long game. This didn’t let me take any major shortcuts or skip large parts of the game. All it did was cut down on the hours I spent opening my inventory to fuss with things so I could focus on the exploration.
Despite my egregious cheating, inventory space was still a bit too tight! I think what I gave myself would make for a pretty good starting inventory, with more space being added as the game progressed. But still, this massive improvement didn’t require doubling the number of inventory systems and making them all operate under slightly different rules.
It really is shocking how hard Hello Games worked to do things the wrongest and least satisfying way possible.Jojoba oil for hair – What is jojoba oil?
Jojoba oil is a golden liquid extracted from seeds of the jojoba plant, Simmondsia chinensis, which was originally grown in United States and northern Mexico. Pure jojoba oil has a golden, lucent colour. Actually, jojoba oil is not oil at all; it is a mixture of long chain monounsaturated liquid wax esters. Jojoba liquid wax is called an oil only because it is a liquid. That’s why jojoba oil has no scent or greasy feel like other oils. Jojoba oil for hair is been used in most of the shampoos and different cosmetics because of its nurturant qualities. The benefits of jojoba oil for hair is exceptional.
There are many benefits of jojoba oil for hair; Jojoba oil is an antibacterial and antifungal, tt’s also rich in vitamin E, B and C and is full of different minerals. Because of its deeply moisturizing qualities, jojoba oil is great for dry and damaged hair. What differs jojoba oil from other oils is that jojoba oil is structurally and chemically very similar to the human sebum. Therefore it’s a perfect oil for skin and scalp preventing skin from dryness.
Continue reading and learn why you should take jojoba oil for hair to your daily beauty routines! I have also tested the best jojoba oil products – check them here.
Benefits of jojoba oil for hair
Jojoba oil is fully rich in vitamins and minerals such as E, B-complex, zinc, chromium, selenium, iodine, and copper. All of these are needed for growing healthy hair. Jojoba oil can be used by even those who are having sensitive skin without worrying for any allergic reaction. It is also only oil that resembles human sebum which gives it great value as hair and skin oil.
There are multiple benefits of jojoba oil for hair. Here are the most common hair problems in which jojoba oil is an excellent answer. Get the best benefits of jojoba oil for hair with these tips.
HAIR LOSS and THINNING HAIR: Dry and damaged scalp leads most likely to extensive hair loss and thinning hair. The lack of nutrition and vitamins prevents hair to grow and damage to hair follicles prevents hair to grow fast. With its great amount of vitamins and minerals jojoba oil helps follicles to grow more new hair. Jojoba oil helps your hair to stay healthy and moisturized and you get rid of these unwanted problems.
FRIZZY and DRY HAIR: Jojoba oil helps controlling the frizziness of hair. Applying jojoba oil to damp hair after a shower makes your hair moisturized and shiny.
SCALP PSORIASIS: Jojoba oil makes washing off the debris easy. It penetrates into the hair follicles and lifts up the debris which leads up to clear sebum. With vitamins and antioxidants jojoba oil also helps with redness and itching of the scalp.
JOJOBA OIL AS A LEAVE-IN-CONDITIONER: Use jojoba oil as a leave-in conditioner after a shower to get shiny and healthy hair. Jojoba oil forms a waxy coating to hair which protects it from outside threaths like sun and dust. Best result comes when oil is applyed to damp hair but it can be used during the day several times to control frizzyness and to make hair fresh and moisturized. You should, however, never use natural oils as a heat protectant! So if you are going to use a blowdryer or a hair straightener, apply jojoba oil only after!
THIN HAIR: If you have thin hair you can add volume to your hair with jojoba oil by giving appearance thickness.
Read more: Find out more benefits of jojoba oil and what jojoba oil product would suit for you the best!
My research has shown that Leven Rose Organic Jojoba Oil is the number one jojoba oil for hair. With this product you get the best benefits of jojoba oil. MY RECOMMENDATION:
How to use jojoba oil for hair?
Take these easy steps towards to healthy and beautiful hair! Here are the instructions for jojoba oil hair mask and how to use jojoba oil for hair.
Jojoba oil hair mask
Applying jojoba oil to hair is very simple. Here is a recipe of jojoba oil hair mask and how to use it. Using jojoba oil at least two times a week, you get the best benefits of jojoba oil for hair.
Add jojoba oil to damp hair. Jojoba oil soaks in to hair better if your hair is damp. Apply jojoba oil to your scalp also. Brush your hair with a soft hairbrush so jojoba oil spreads all over your hair and to make your hair tangle-free. Braid your hair or make a bun. Put your hair under a shower cap and warm beanie. This part is optional but you get better result when your hair stays warm. Let jojoba oil effect overnight or couple of hours.
How to remove jojoba oil from hair?
No one wants to look greasy-haired after this treatment. Luckily jojoba oil usually removes from hair quite easily with shampoo and conditioner. Here are a few tips how to remove jojoba oil from hair!
Tip 1. If you want to be 100% sure that all of the jojoba oil leaves your hair, you should add hair conditioner before shower. Add conditioner all over your hair and let it effect for 15 minutes before going to shower. Use only non-silicone conditioner!
Tip 2. Wash your hair normally with non-silicone shampoo and use conditioner after shampooing.
Tip 3. Rinse your hair with cold water before you leave a shower. Cold water makes your hair look shiny and smooth.
Tip 4. You can add a few drops of jojoba oil to damp hair after a shower. Use oil only to lengths to avoid flat hair. This after-treatment makes your hair smooth and moisturized. Don’t apply jojoba oil too much, you don’t want to read this how to remove jojoba oil from hair advice again!
I have tested the most popular jojoba oil products; check them here and find out which one you like the best!Hutton Peter Gibson (born August 26, 1918) is an American writer on Sedevacantism, a World War II veteran, the 1968 Jeopardy! grand champion and the father of 11 children, one of whom is the actor and director Mel Gibson.
Gibson is an outspoken critic, both of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church and of those Traditionalist Catholics, like the Society of Saint Pius X, who reject Sedevacantism. In a 2003 interview he questioned how the Nazis could have disposed of six million bodies during the Holocaust and claimed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control.[1] He has also been quoted as saying the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews".[2]
Early life and family [ edit ]
Gibson was born in Peekskill, New York,[3] the son of businessman John Hutton Gibson (1884–1933) and Australian opera singer Eva Mylott (1875–1920). His maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants to Australia, while his father, from a wealthy tobacco-producing family from the American South, had Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry.[4][5][6][7] He was raised in Chicago. His mother died when he was two years old and his father died when he was fifteen. Gibson supported his younger brother, Alexis, who died in his early twenties.[8] He graduated from high school early, at age 15, and ranked third in his class.[9]
According to Wensley Clarkson's biography of Mel Gibson, Hutton Gibson studied for the priesthood in a Chicago seminary of the Society of the Divine Word but left disgusted with the modernist theological doctrines taught there. However, in 2003 Gibson stated that his actual reason for leaving was because he did not want to be sent to New Guinea or the Philippines as a missionary.[9] Instead, he found work with Western Union and with the Civilian Conservation Corps.[9] He also contributed to and edited the newsletter "The Pointer" while he worked in Wisconsin for the CCC from 1938–39.[10]
Gibson married Irish-born Anne Patricia Reilly on May 1, 1944, at the Catholic parish church of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Brooklyn, New York. They had ten children and adopted another one after their arrival in Australia. As of 2003, Gibson had 48 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.[9] His wife died in December 1990. In January 2002, he married Teddy Joye Hicks, but in 2012 Gibson filed for divorce due to irreconcilable differences.[9][11] Since early 2006, he resides in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh[12] after moving from Australia to Houston, Texas in 1999,[10] and to Summersville, West Virginia in 2003.[13]
Railroad lawsuit and move to Australia [ edit ]
In the 1960s Gibson worked for New York Central Railroad. In the early morning hours of December 11, 1964, he slipped off a steel platform covered in oil and snow[9] and injured his back. A work injury lawsuit followed and it finally went to court on February 7, 1968. Seven days later, Gibson was awarded $145,000 by the jury. Gibson paid his debts and attorney's fees and that year relocated his family, first to Ireland, then to Australia.[14]
Hutton Gibson said in 2003 that the move to his mother's native country was undertaken because he believed the Australian military would reject his oldest son for the Australian Vietnam War draft, unlike the American military.[9] Because of his back injuries, Gibson sought retraining in a new career. He was encouraged to become a computer programmer after IQ testing placed him in the genius range.[14][15]
Gib |
by big-inch engines just fine.
General Motors' fifth-generation V-6 and V-8 engines may just seem like an evolution of a decades-old design, but incorporate state-of-the-art materials, engine management, and direct fuel injection, enabling them to remain competitive with competitors' multi-valve, turbocharged offerings.Note: In 2018, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche became the subject of a number of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct and stepped back from the community he led, Shambhala. While Lion's Roar does not endorse him as a Buddhist teacher, we understand that some may want to access his past teachings in light of recent events, and so we are continuing to make this article from our archive of past issues available for those who wish to do so.
Meditating and running go hand in hand, says Sakyong Mipham. Exercise can be a support for meditation, and meditation can be a support for exercise.
I began to run simply as a way to get some exercise. Soon enough, however, I found myself applying certain principles I have learned in a lifetime of meditating.
To me, the relationship between meditation and running is natural, for one is a training of the mind and one is a training of the body. In the ancient world, it was understood that people are happier when their minds are flexible and their bodies are strong. In the modern world, we are faced with conditions that challenge this mental and physical balance.
To handle the load, we need to attend to our well-being. Because the mind and the body are intimately connected, relieving the stress of the body through exercise has an immediate effect on the mind: the mind is no longer dealing with the discomfort of the body. If the body is relaxed and flexible, that is one less thing for the mind to think about. Physical exercise thus provides some mental relief. Conversely, training the mind helps us be focused in our physical activity.
Thus, to lead a balanced life, we need to engage and be active, and to deepen and rest. When we are on the go—running, talking, working—the mind is engaged in a sympathetic nervous system process. If we don’t balance the sympathetic with the parasympathetic nervous system process, in which we deepen and rest, we eventually become wired, edgy, and emotionally sensitive. Long periods of overstimulation—too much activity—begin to affect our organs and blood flow. Mentally we may become dull or jaded. Most important, we are not able to have deeper, more contemplative thoughts. Keeping our body still and relaxing the mind while staying focused, as we do in meditation, is tremendously beneficial. But because we aren’t accustomed to such a contemplative state, it may make us feel uncomfortable. We have difficulty changing our habits.
Exercise can be a support for meditation, and meditation can be a support for exercise. Running is a natural form of exercise, for it is simply an extension of walking. When we run, we strengthen our heart, remove stagnant air, revitalize our nervous system, and increase our aerobic capacity. It helps us develop a positive attitude. It creates exertion and stamina and gives us a way to deal with pain. It helps us relax. For many of us, it offers a feeling of freedom. Likewise, meditation is a natural exercise of the mind— an opportunity to strengthen, reinvigorate, and cleanse. Through meditation we can connect with that long-forgotten goodness we all have. It is very powerful to feel that sense of goodness: having confidence and bravery in our innermost being.
Just as in running, in meditation we leave behind our daily concerns—the daydreaming, stress, and planning. We become very present. We enter into the now. By doing that, our mind builds strength. Our nervous system begins to relax. We develop appreciation and awareness. Our intelligence and memory become sharper. We are able to see the world from multiple perspectives. We are no longer imprisoned by emotional highs and lows. Love, compassion, and other positive qualities become more easily accessible. Just like running, when we finish meditating, we feel refreshed, and much for the same reason: meditation is a natural, healthy activity.
Developing a relationship with the breath is a key to meditation— and to running. If we develop a relationship with our breathing, we do not have to struggle with it as much. Intuitively, runners know this—we are essentially developing a relationship with the most elemental aspects of being alive. In meditation, placing our attention on the breathing takes the mind from daydreaming, worrying, thinking, and fantasizing. It gives our mind something healthy to do.
In running and in meditation, one of the biggest obstacles is laziness. One kind of laziness is basic slothfulness, in which we are unable to extract ourselves from the television or couch. In this case, just a little bit of exercise can send a message to the body that it is time to move forward. Even putting on workout clothes and beginning to stretch helps bring us out of our sloth. By the same token, sitting down to follow the breath for even five minutes has the power to move us out of laziness.
Although the process of meditating is different from running, the tools are the same: we need to be determined and exert ourselves. Obviously we will have challenges throughout our journey, but discipline, perspective, and perseverance lead to big rewards.
People sometimes say, “Running is my meditation.” Even though I know what they mean, in reality, running is running and meditation is meditation. That’s why they have different names. It would be just as inaccurate to say, “Meditation is my exercise.” I have known some advanced meditators who have been able to bring their meditative mind—that strength and relaxation—into their body with its channels, nervous system, and muscles. They become strong, radiant, and resilient. In Tibet there is even a type of practice called heat meditation, in which yogis who are able to use their mind to control their body heat meditate in subzero conditions for months, wearing only a cotton shawl. However, it is unlikely that they would be able to run a marathon.
Likewise, it is unlikely that we are going to attain enlightenment by running, even though some have tried. It is not a matter of choosing what is better—exercising the mind or exercising the body. Rather, these activities go hand in hand. We need to exercise both our body and our mind. The nature of the body is form and substance. The nature of the mind is consciousness. Because the body and mind are different by nature, what benefits them is different in nature as well. The body benefits from movement, and the mind benefits from stillness. When we give our mind and body what benefits them, we experience a natural harmony and balance. With this unified approach, we are happy, healthy, and wise.
Like many who run, I run for health as well as joy. There is a deeper meaning, which has to do with my intention. I believe that with pure intention, you can bring almost any activity onto your spiritual path. My intention in running is to benefit others. Thus running is a continuation of my spiritual journey. With a powerful mind, if we intend our run to be for the welfare of others, then it is. Conversely, if we turn our meditation into a completely selfish pursuit, that is exactly what it will be. In either activity it is our own intention that determines whether the result is ordinary or extraordinary.
Ideally, our daily routine will include both exercise and meditation. Mind training can help us be undistracted during physical activity. At the same time, it allows us to develop the skill of being gentle and firm with ourselves. For meditators — or anyone pursuing knowledge — exercise helps keep the body from becoming a nuisance. When we’re not feeling pain or discomfort, our intellectual work takes less effort. Ultimately, both the mind and the body are something we should cherish. The body is the magical horse, and the mind is the magical jewel.Where will the major stories of 2013 be? If your country begins with an I, the chances are it is having elections. Otherwise you can look forward to the year of the snake, the start of Barack Obama's second term and a grand Irish homecoming. Oh, and the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle.
Iran
Iran's presidential election in June will come at a delicate time as the country faces down acute international pressure over its nuclear ambitions and internal discontent over a tailspinning economy. The hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who once grabbed headlines across the world for his controversial statements, will finally have to step down after two consecutive terms in office.
The election will be closely watched for any hint that the new administration would compromise on the nuclear issue and open up a way out of the current stalemate. In reality though, the new president will have little power to change course. The fate of Iran's nuclear programme rests in the hands of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all state matters and enjoys a job for life.
That said, a new president may still be instrumental in easing tensions, as the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who served between 1997 and 2005, showed.
Khatami is once again being touted as a possible candidate in 2013, but conservatives are signalling that he would only be allowed to run if he distanced himself from the opposition Green movement, which stunned the world with a bloody revolt during the last presidential election in 2009.
Ahmadinejad is believed to be grooming his controversial chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, as his successor, but the president has lost a great deal of his influence in the past two years and Mashaei is seen by his conservative opponents as the head of a "deviant current" attempting to undermine clerical power. Other names mentioned include Tehran's mayor, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf; the speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani; the former speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel; and the former foreign minister and current adviser to the supreme leader, Ali Akbar Velayati. SKD
Israel
Israel goes to the polls in a general election on 22 January, but no one is expecting a fundamental change in the next coalition government. A rightwing alliance between the Likud party of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and hardline foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu is on course to emerge with the biggest number of seats – about 40 – in the 120-member parliament. Smaller religious and ultra-orthodox parties will give the rightwing a majority.
Assuming Netanyahu heads another coalition after the election, there are two key questions for his next term. First, whether he orders a unilateral Israeli military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities; and second, whether he makes a serious effort to address the calcified peace process with the Palestinians or continues his strategy of talking about talks while expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. HS
Ireland
Ireland's big plan for 2013 is to get as many as possible of the diaspora to return to the republic on holiday this year, hoping that the influx might help jump-start consumer spending. Dubbed The Gathering, the aim is to bring in an extra 325,000 tourists by encouraging some of the 70 million people who claim Irish heritage to visit. The Gathering is offering €500 (£410) to groups and individuals who enlist a minimum of 10 extra overseas visitors, but not everyone is buying into the idea. The actor Gabriel Byrne has labelled it a "shakedown" of the Irish diaspora. HM
Kenya
Opportunist politicians, seething ethnic rivalries, two candidates indicted by the international criminal court (ICC) … it's election year in Kenya.
The country is still scarred by violence that followed the disputed 2007 poll. More than 1,200 people were killed by police or in ethnic attacks which, according to human rights groups, were planned and financed by leading politicians. These allegedly included Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, who have not allowed the prospect of appearing at The Hague just weeks after the March 2013 election to deter them from running again.
"They have turned this election into a referendum on the ICC," said Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, a Horn of Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group. "They have cultivated and choreographed a narrative that the ICC is a creation of the west. If they win, Kenya will have to chart a new course and effectively become a pariah state."
Once bitter rivals, Kenyatta and Ruto recently announced an alliance which, it is hoped, will reduce the chances of a violent replay of 2007-08 between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin communities in the Rift Valley. Kenyatta takes on Raila Odinga in the race to succeed president Mwai Kibaki, who is stepping down after two terms.
Localised conflict remains a distinct possibility. In recent months dozens of young police recruits were shot dead in the remote northern Samburu region, more than a hundred people were killed in tribal clashes on the coast and deadly riots rocked Mombasa. Politicians are known to rely on their ethnic communities for support and to manipulate and stoke tensions at election time. A national conflagration, however, seems less likely this time. DS
Zimbabwe
He turns 89 in February and is still spoiling for a fight. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's love of electioneering is matched only by his hatred of losing. He has declared that elections will be held in March 2013, though June seems a likelier date after a new national constitution is approved. Once again he will take on Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and once again there are omens of violence, intimidation and rigging – officials admit the electoral roll is likely to contain the names of dead people.
Last time, in 2008, more than 200 Zimbabweans were killed and many tortured, forcing Tsvangirai to withdraw and enter a power-sharing agreement with Mugabe's Zanu-PF. Since then, the parties have fought like ferrets in a sack while the economy has made a wobbly recovery, but activists still face persecution.
It may be harder for the MDC this time. Some feel its ministers have failed to live up to their promises and become too accustomed to their Mercedes-Benzes and other perks. Tsvangirai himself has been battered by revelations about his love life.Recent opinion polls show Zanu-PF moving ahead of the MDC, although most people were unwilling to express a preference.
Trevor Maisiri, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, said: "It will be a very tightly contested election. It will be a close call and that might lead to a dispute. We might then see another round of negotations and continued power sharing."
Maisiri predicted there will not be a bloodbath on the same scale as last time. "Zanu-PF and the state institutions are very careful not to drive the political violence we saw in 2008. Their biggest fear is illegitimacy around another election. So they have been working to create an environment of intimidation on the ground [http://allafrica.com/stories/201211291000.html] so people are cowed into voting for Zanu-PF."
Other analysts suggest there will be one major winner: apathy. Miles Tendi, author of Making History in Mugabe's Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media, said voters do not have the appetite for another turbulent campaign. "Turnout has been declining since 1980.
The last elections in 2008 had the lowest ever turnout.
"Between 2000 and 2008 there were eight elections in Zimbabwe. Too many elections in a short period diminishes their value. The problem is deepened by the fact that each of these elections produced a contested result. The electorate has lost trust in election institutions and processes. Turnout will also be low because none of the competing political parties have a workable vision for addressing Zimbabwe's problems." DS
US
Polls show Americans think Barack Obama will have a better second term than first, though there is no shortage of potential pitfalls. Gun control will feature early on, with legislation planned for early in the new year. Immigration reform is another aspiration, though this could get squeezed by the battle over gun rights. Overseas, Syria and Iran look like dominating the agenda for the entire second term, with few easy wins likely on either.
Iceland
Iceland may have a population of only 320,000, but as a showcase for radical democratic reform it is undoubtedly the country to watch in 2013. In April it will hold parliamentary elections, and a entirely new party is hoping to make an impact. Reykjavik mayor Jón Gnarr – formerly a stand-up comedian – has confirmed that he will stand for Bright Future, a new party that has grown out of the Best party, which stormed to victory in the municipal elections in 2010. Its comical campaign video – to the tune of Tina Turner's Simply the Best – promised a polar bear for Reykjavik zoo and free towels in all public swimming pools, and attracted many protest votes in the wake of Iceland's financial crash. But since taking power the party has taken difficult decisions and won plaudits for its "new politics", which includes deciding policy through online debates and communicating with residents via Facebook. Now several members have formed Bright Future and hope they can revive an interest in national politics in a similar way. On his own Facebook page Gnarr recently wrote: "I think Iceland could be the perfect laboratory for the future of democracy, direct democracy, participatory budgeting and other ideas." Or, as he promised in 2010, he may just want to ensure "a drug free parliament by 2020". AT
Germany
Few people predict anything other than re-election for Angela Merkel in Germany's autumn vote. The speculation is focused more on who will make up the new government than who will lead it.
Gerd Languth, professor of political science at the University of Bonn and a veteran observer of German politics, says it will not become clear until election night at the earliest, but he sees the possibility of three different coalition constellations. First is "a new grand coalition" made up of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD), "though the SPD would fight tooth and nail for this not to happen, only seeing this as a last resort". Another option is a CDU-Green party grouping, a once unthinkable scenario. "If we assume that the SPD and Greens don't get enough to govern, which is likely to be the case, the Greens – who are so keen to get into government – could well imagine becoming bedfellows with the CDU," he said. "They'd be better placed with the CDU, in terms of the influence they'd have, and the number of ministerial positions they might expect. The Greens are realists."
A return to the current coalition between the CDU and liberal Free Democratic party (FDP) is also a possibility, Languth said, but only if the FDP manages to secure the minimum 5% necessary to get into parliament, which has frequently seemed doubtful.
Is there any reason then why Merkel would not manage a third term? A complete economic collapse perhaps, which, with recent gloomy predictions for next year, cannot be completely ruled out – though even then, most analysts agree that Germans would tend to want to keep the tried and trusted Merkel at the helm. KC
Italy
Mario Monti is aiming to stay on as Italian prime minister and Silvio Berlusconi has bounced back from his resignation in 2011 to seek another term, but Italy's centre-left Democratic party is still the favourite to win the February election.
"I believe there will be a Democratic party government with Monti asked to come on board as finance minister or as president," said Claudio Cerasa, assistant editor of the Italian daily Il Foglio.Italy's electoral law means Bersani can feel relatively confident of a working majority in the lower house, but the regional basis for representation in the senate means the swing regions of Sicily, Veneto, Campania and Lombardy – where Berlusconi could perform well – could stop Bersani from forming a functioning government, said Cerasa. "It may be up to Monti to help out Bersani in the senate by taking votes from Berlusconi."
A broad alliance between Bersani and Monti could prove unwieldy, given that the centrists backing Monti include the heirs to the Christian Democrat party, who take their cues on family policy from the Vatican. Allied with Bersani to his left is Nichi Vendola, the gay governor of Puglia, who is already growling at the prospect of teaming up with the centrists. The concoction recalls Romano Prodi's coalition, which took office in 2006 before coming off the rails in 2008 amid infighting, allowing Berlusconi back in for his third term. TK
China
2013 is the year of the snake, a polarising creature in China – repulsive to some, auspicious to others – and predictions for the country's coming year are appropriately contradictory and complex. Internet users will probably exceed 600 million as the authorities expand their surveillance and control over the web. The economy will expand rapidly – at a rate of 8.4%, according to the World Bank – while environmental concerns and local government debts continue to snowball. Authorities will crack down on corruption while maintaining a characteristically hard line on dissent.
Xi Jinping will formally become China's president in March. Xi presents himself as a strikingly human counterpoint to his stone-faced predecessor, Hu Jintao, but his oft-repeated calls for a "great renewal of the Chinese nation" could portend increasingly assertive actions abroad, especially in disputed areas of the South and East China seas. JKUpdate: Lions Recovered
Vancouver Police have received a report of two stolen lions and are asking the public to help find them.
Sometime between 6:00 p.m. on September 6th and 8:00 a.m. on September 7th, two large rose quartz lion statues were stolen from the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden located at 578 Carrall Street.
The rose quartz lions are one of the treasures at the Garden in Vancouver. They are extremely heavy, are roughly 18″ tall by 24″ wide, and have been a fixture of the popular tourist spot for about 30 years.
Investigators are following the usual investigative steps, but due to the unique nature of the stolen items are asking for the public’s help to find them.
Police are hoping that someone with knowledge about who took the property, or the location of the stolen lions, will do the right thing and share that information with the VPD, or anonymously through Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- One of the main things taken away from Bill Belichick's Monday news conference was that with all the numbers currently along the defensive line, the Patriots have flexibility to play different schemes and plan to do so.
When factoring in "edge" players who might be outside linebackers in a 3-4 defense but could be ends in a 4-3, the Patriots currently have 21 linemen on the 90-man roster. That's a lot.
So unlike 2010, when the Patriots were in their base 3-4 alignment about 40 percent of the time and might have been easier to game-plan against, this currently has the makings of a much more "multiple" defense, one that is being set-up to morph into a different look at any time. They have personnel to play 3-4. But they're also set up to go 4-3.
Known for his defensive wizardry over the years, Belichick is clearly experimenting with different things, trying to find the right mix.
"I don't think our defensive philosophy will change, but how we align and how we handle the responsibilities, that could definitely change by game-plan or by what we feel are our strengths and weaknesses and how to best deploy our players," Belichick said Monday. "How strategically we want to move guys around, and put them in certain alignments... I think there is flexibility there."
The goal now for Belichick is to evaluate which players fit best in different roles, then there could be some tough decisions on the final 53-man roster.
But for now it's a loaded roster, which opens up a number of possibilities.
"I would say that we have an assortment of things to choose from that we've used throughout my time here," Belichick said. "Depending on how our team shapes up, and what our players can do -- some of these players I've never coached before so I'm not sure exactly how they'll fit in or exact roles they'll play in this defense -- we'll just have to wait and see how that turns out. But I think we'll have enough defense to be able to do things to put players in a position where they can be productive."A note warning people about snitches led police to discover that the owner of the residence was dealing drugs.
Deputies for the Fayette County Sheriff's Department responded to a joyriding complaint at a residence in Oak Hill, West Virginia at approximately 10:15 a.m. on Thursday. When the deputies approached the residence, they spotted a bright pink sign posted on the front door, warning that everyone entering the home is subject to arrest "due to snitches."
"Due to snitches everyone entering my home is subject to being searched," the note reads. "All cell phones and drinks will be left outside!! If you're not a snitch, it won't offend you if I search you!"
The note led deputies to believe drugs were being sold at the residence.
"In addition to conducting their investigation into the joyriding complaint, deputies questioned the occupants about drug sales and obtained consent to search the residence," the department wrote on Facebook. "This search resulted in the seizure of quantities of both heroin and methamphetamine, as well as various other unknown substances that were believed to be narcotics."
SEE ALSO: Marijuana-filled porta potty stumps naive cops and enrages public
The homeowner, April Lynn Lavender, 38, was arrested and charged with the felony offense of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Lavender was remanded to the Southern Regional Jail in lieu of $10,000 bond.
Kristie Weis, 22, was arrested and charged with the misdemeanor offense of joyriding, and was also booked at the Southern Regional Jail in lieu of $1,500 bond.
"While drug investigations often require a great deal of time and effort, sometimes the criminals make our job pretty easy," said Sheriff Kessler. "If someone posts a sign on their front door about searching'snitches,' it's a pretty safe bet that there are illegal drugs being sold out of that location."
Bonus: If 'Stranger Things' was made with hamstersPico, Azores Tres Hombres, is now sailing back to Europe from the Dominican Republic. Another successful round-trip voyage from The Netherlands to the Caribbean is coming to a close. The star example of zero-carbon shipping, the 32-meter brigantine Tres Hombres cargo sailing ship has made good progress across the Atlantic, and has left the Azores going northeast. Depending on weather, it will call at UK and then return to home port in Den Helder in a matter of days. Falmouth plans a celebration May 1-4 when the ship is to arrive. As of April 16, the Tres Hombres, three days out from the gorgeous Portuguese archipelago, was moving along at an average of nine knots which is good. Tres Hombres left the Dominican Republic on March 13, laden with rum, cacao beans, and wine taken on months before in Brittany for the aging effect on board. From Hispañola, in 24 days the ship reached the island of Faial, Azores. Four thousand cans of sustainably caught tuna were then taken on at Sao Jorge and found room in the cargo hold, satisfying some northern European demand. The ships remainder cargo tonnage is 22 barrels of rum (180 liters each), plus 108 bags of cacao beans at 70 kilos each, for a total of over 7 tons. Also, ten large barrels of molasses are on board, topped off with a whole pickup-truck of cacao butter. The Tres Hombres was loaded by hand over 3 days on Hispañola to reach a total of 30 tons of goods. Sail Transport Network reported on December 3 of last year: Tres Hombres Sails across the Atlantic Again, with Some New Twists. In the six years voyages, variations have come into play. For the current voyage the tall ship left her home port of Den Helder on Oct. 9 and first sailed to Stavanger, Norway to pick up a load of salt fish. From there she sailed to Brixham, UK, where she took on ale, for French health-food store customers. Excerpt from the ships recent logs DATE: 16-04-2015 Arquipelago Dos Açores!
It has been one month since we left the Republica Dominica on the thirteenth with a new moon. After being twenty four days at sea with only waves and wind, sometimes dolphins or a whale, we saw an island appearing out of the ocean surface. Looking at her beauty we all agreed.
Green is a nice colour! After staying six days on the beautiful island Faial and a short visit to Sao Jorge, we departed again with a new moon and again on the thirteenth of the month. This time with a scenery which filled all of us with awe. The volcanic islands, especially the top of Pico, rising out of the ocean like gods of fertility. Enormous monsters of beauty exploded from underneath the ocean floor, to meet the bright rays of sunlight from above And when time passed by, they have become a real paradise of life.
Everybody of the crew and trainees did enjoy our time on this natural treasure in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The people living here are friendly and helpful. There is a good interaction between the visitors and the local people.
In the old days a lot of sailing ships made a stop at the Açores for provisioning, this tradition is still very alive today
For our food supplies we went directly to the organic farmers. It is very nice to do shopping by walking on the land instead of being in the supermarket.
With the farmers we talked about possible precious products which can be shipped from or to the islands by sailing ship.
The soil on the Açores is very fertile and capable of producing abundant vegetation and crops. The islands could be able to produce their own food supplyWe brought also some other products in small amounts; Pico wine, Cha, Nêveda (green) Tea and Honey. ( It´s not only cows, but there are also an overwhelming amount of bees on the islands, and so flowers).
Captain Lammert EU-funded research and promotion grant to SAIL consortium The news is on a high note As we reported in December, Fair Transport (whose first ship was the Tres Hombres) is now pursuing the construction of its biggest ship, a clipper, and intends to make a voyage of the renovated Nordlys ketch in 2016 to the Mediterranean, bringing salt fish. SAIL MED will be on hand. This reporter writes from Delft, The Netherlands, where the MARIN group in conjunction with the SAIL consortium is holding a seminar on wind power for shipping. The Ecoliner, a high-tech cargo ship-design, is nearing its study-completion under a European Union grant. Participants will also get an update on the future of Hybrid Shipping. Mrs Netelenbos, former Minister of Transport, and now president of the Royal Association of Netherlands Ship owners, will open the SAIL conference. To attend this conference please send an email to info at nsrsail.eu. This SAIL conference is integrated in the BlueWeek 2015, from 20 to 22 April 2015. The BlueWeek is hosted by Deltares in Delft and co-organized by MARIN. It provides a platform to discuss sustainable energy in shipping and offshore. Falmouth port o' call for the Tres Hombres Pictured is the poster publicizing the arrival of Tres Hombres in Falmouth. New Dawn Traders are organizing a great event, welcoming the sailing cargo vessel Tres Hombres on her arrival in Falmouth on the 1st May. Follow sail transport news, developments, and commentary on the Sail Transport Network's Facebook page.The Orioles have acquired Alex Liddi from the Mariners, according to Larry Stone of the Seattle Times (via Twitter). In the swap, the M’s also sent their No. 3 international slot to Orioles and received the O’s international signing slot No. 2. To make room for Liddi on the 40-man roster, Baltimore announced that they have designated Russ Canzler for assignment.
Baltimore’s No. 2 international slot is $351,200 and Seattle’s No. 3 slot is $277,500 and the swap adds an extra $73,700 to Seattle’s pool, according to Ben Badler of Baseball America (on Twitter).
Seattle designated Liddi for assignment towards the end of June in order to promote shortstop Brad Miller. The infielder posted a.263/.322/.454 slash line over his 262 plate appearances in Triple-A this year but wasn’t as strong in 188 major league plate appearances.
Canzler, 27, has 29 big league games to his credit between 2011 and 2012. In 86 games for Triple-A Norfolk this season, the infielder/outfielder has slashed.276/.369/.430.GENEVA (Reuters) - Islamic State’s remaining Syrian strongholds are likely to fall by the end of October, which must be the trigger for the international community to push for free and fair elections, U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Friday.
A sign which reads 'Islamic State in Iraq and Syria' is pictured at the entrance of a damaged brickyard as fighting continues between the Syrian Democratic Forces and Islamic State militants in Raqqa, Syria, August 20, 2017. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
“What we are seeing is in my opinion the beginning of the end of this war… what we need to make sure is that this becomes also the beginning of peace. And that is where the challenge starts at this very moment,” he said in a BBC radio interview.
Three places were still far from stabilized, de Mistura said: Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Idlib.
“After Raqqa and Deir al-Zor, and that is a matter of a few months, there will be a moment of truth. If the international community will be helping both the opposition and the government by pushing the government to accept a real negotiation, then within a year it would be a possibility of having a truly credible election.”
The city of Deir al-Zor has been under siege by Islamic State fighters for years, forcing the U.N. to conduct an unprecedented and expensive high-altitude airdrop campaign to supply the population.
“The Syrian government and the Russians are very likely between now and the end of this month or perhaps early October, latest, to actually liberate it,” de Mistura said.
The United States and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces “will probably liberate Raqqa by the end of October”.
The third area, Idlib, is “full of al Nusra, which is al Qaeda,” de Mistura said, referring to the Nusra Front, a one-time al Qaeda affiliate. It has been renamed and merged with other groups, but remains the only force in Syria’s war, apart from IS, that is designated by the U.N. as “terrorists”.
The lesson from the Iraqi city of Mosul, taken over by IS a decade after the United States declared “mission accomplished” in the war in Iraq, was that Syria’s war needed to be followed by a fair U.N.-managed election, without neglecting minorities.
Syria’s war has largely pitted Sunni muslims, backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, an ethnic Alawite, who is backed by Shi’a allies, including Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah militias.
An unrepresentative peace deal would leave the door open to a resurgence of Islamic State, Sunni extremists also known by the Arabic name Daesh.
“Even those who believe they won the war – that is the government – they will need to make a gesture, otherwise Daesh will come back in a month or two months’ time.”
Nobody had an interest in a resurgence of IS in Syria, de Mistura said. Assad’s allies in Moscow, recalling the Soviet experience of war in Afghanistan, “certainly want an exit strategy.”
“We are getting close to some kind of understanding even among those who have been involved in the conflict that the priority is to close it. What we need to do is wrap it up in a way that is stabilized, not just close the conflict.”A former San Antonio nurse appointed by the Veterans Affairs Department to administer the finances of veterans who were deemed incompetent or incapacitated was sentenced Thursday to 14 months in federal prison for stealing more than $140,000 of their benefits over five years.
Cornelia V. Hurling, 58, admitted she spent much of it on personal expenses, including meals, movie rentals and lawn services. The VA claims she stole $141,734 directly or by taking excessive fiduciary fees.
Hurling apologized, saying she took full responsibility and regrets her actions.
As her lawyer sought probation for her, Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra instead gave her 14 months in prison, ordered her to serve three years of federal supervision once released and to pay $141,734 in restitution.
Hurling pleaded guilty in September to one count of misappropriating or embezzling the funds she was supposed to manage as a VA fiduciary. A separate charge of embezzling from the government was dismissed as part of her plea deal.
Her lawyer, Christian F. Capitaine of Houston, argued there were mitigating factors that should affect Hurling’s sentence, including that she suffered a stroke during the period in question and her house burned down, though he said that doesn’t excuse her conduct.
“She’s certainly remorseful and is taking responsibility for what she’s done,” Capitaine said.
Hurling was previously a licensed vocational nurse but hasn’t been practicing for a number of years, Capitaine said.
Between Jan. 1, 2008, and Sept. 20, 2013, Hurling served as a fiduciary appointed by the VA to administer the financial affairs of at least 22 veterans who were deemed incompetent or who were otherwise incapable of handling their financial affairs, her plea deal said.
In July 2013, the VA’s Office of Inspector General found that Hurling had not |
where does the “hostility” come from?The average concert-going Toronto rock fan has a story or two about the Horseshoe, which opened in 1947 and has hosted everyone from Etta James to the Stones to the Talking Heads to Stompin’ Tom Connors to the Pixies on its stage.
Local author David McPherson has gathered many of those stories for his forthcoming book, The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern: A Complete History, set for publication by Dundurn Press on September 23.
“When it comes to live music in North America, there are few places that can match the storied building at 370 Queen West,” McPherson tells NOW. “The Horseshoe is a beacon for music lovers, a pilgrimage place for those who love and understand its significance as part of Toronto’s rich musical landscape.”
McPherson caught his first show there – the Old 97s – over 20 years ago, and taken in many more since. Two of his favourites? Seeing Serena Ryder silence a room with an a cappella version of Etta James’s At Last, and drinking Jack Daniel’s from the bottle with the Drive-By Truckers.
The book traces the bar’s history, from its first owner, Jack Starr, who introduced music in the 50s – “It was known as Nashville North with Grand Ole Opry stars packing the place weekly,” McPherson says – to its current rock- and alt-country-focused era led by Jeff Cohen and Craig Laskey.
“I’ve tried to dig deep in my research to uncover what has led to the bar’s longevity and legacy, and what makes the Shoe so legendary,” he says.
“I came to the venue later than most, but like all the musicians I interviewed, I felt its soul, its historical significance, and its pull from the first time I walked through those doors. There’s no doubt a spirit lives there. The musicians feel it. So do the regulars. Even first-timers catch a whiff of these ghosts.”
carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillisGetty Images
A bizarre, surreal, and tragic NFL weekend carried with it a very unexpected silver lining.
From this point forward, I have new respect for Chiefs quarterback Brady Quinn.
I don’t care about Quinn’s performance or the fact that the Chiefs won. Quinn’s post-game remarks were eloquent and heartfelt and they captured perfectly one of the things we risk losing as a society that communicates primarily in snippets of misspelled words and emoticons.
“The one thing people can hopefully try to take away, I guess, is the relationships they have with people,” Quinn told reporters after the game. “I know when it happened, I was sitting and, in my head, thinking what I could have done differently. When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?
“We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”
These are words that we should all study, and heed. I’ll be printing them out, keeping a copy on my desk, and reminding my son of Quinn’s thoughts whenever I can.
It’s impossible to know whether greater sensitivity by those around Jovan Belcher could have prevented Saturday’s events. Chances are it wouldn’t have mattered. But the lesson is that we should all be more attentive to the people whose lives are intertwined with ours, through our families or our friends or our places of work. We enter and exit this world alone, but we are in between those moments part of a broad and complex fabric that both provides us with support and commands it from us.
Let’s remember that the next time — and every time — we’re more worried about interacting with someone who isn’t in the room than someone who is.2014 INDIVIDUAL TICKETS
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A select number of fan information handouts will have stickers affixed to them highlighting the opportunity to purchase a limited number of Opening Day tickets. Those with a sticker will be asked to check in at the Lot P ticket booths during FanFest to purchase up to 4 seats to Opening Day which is April 4, 2014. Offer is only valid on February 1. Ticket booths in lot P will be also be open during FanFest for individual ticket sales
Can't wait? Click on one of the following links to view your 2014 Ticket Options. To guarantee tickets to Opening Day, purchase a 30-game or Full Season plan!
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View PromotionsThose hungry for an understanding of the human world find some tools, in elementary logic and critical thinking, and will practise taking care to say what they mean. Simon Blackburn writes
I have always had a sneaking sympathy with parents who react with despair and horror, as mine did, when their beloved offspring announce that they want to read philosophy at university. Bang go dreams of social prestige (medicine! law!), wealth (economics! maths!) or, indeed, anything that is easy to explain to the neighbours. And it has to be admitted that philosophers have done little to help dispel the shock: for much of the 20th century, many in German and French traditions actually prided themselves on being incomprehensible, while those in so-called Anglo-American philosophy took an equally lordly attitude to anyone philistine enough to ask what we do, or to find the answers opaque.
Times have changed. Some of us were trying to rectify this situation even before governments, civil servants, accountants and managers insisted that we replace the architecture of the ivory tower with that of Bentham’s panopticon, so that all our activities are visible, quantifiable and accountable. We pointed out how our ideas shape our identities, our self-conceptions, our understandings of the world and ourselves. We pointed out how history has witnessed a long line of changing conceptions of these things, marked by shifting and puzzling terms such as knowledge, reason, truth, authority, equality, liberty, justice, law, sovereignty, responsibility, democracy, race, gender and many others. These abstractions do not exist in Plato’s heaven, but in the minds of men and women, and sometimes on their banners and in their manifestos.
We found it relatively easy to indicate how quickly things go wrong when our understandings of these things are deficient, and to claim a certain value to philosophy as a firefighting enterprise, quick to look for signs of such deficiency. A belief, philosophers have told us, is a preparation for action, and ideas are the inflammable elements in beliefs. We also pointed out that a literate, intelligent, informed and imaginative ability to think about these ideas is itself empowering. It might be judged not only to be a valuable component in a good life, but also a valuable asset for any citizen in a democracy where these things are bound to be endlessly discussed and contested. And, truth to tell, it might actually command some respect in that ultimate scale of human value, employability in the modern economy. There is excellent evidence that it does so: surveys of graduate school entries in the US, (including entries to law, medical and management schools) consistently put philosophy at, or near to, the most successful and desirable of majors for young people to have taken (see ‘Profile of a discipline: popularity, future prospects and pay’ box, below).
Fortunately, many of the young have heard the message, even if their parents remained unconvinced. In spite of the constant drizzle of propaganda on behalf of the science subjects, young people remain hungry not only for technological mastery of the natural world, but also for a modicum of understanding of the human world (including human interactions with nature). We can only dream of an ideal education that infuses science or mathematics with an understanding of its own history and philosophy. But given a stark choice between one or the other, enough young people are curious enough, thoughtful enough and brave enough to opt for the latter. Some may be lucky enough to be directed there, as I was, by a particularly sympathetic admissions tutor who thought that my disenchantment with A-level science, as it was then, might have had as much to do with the course’s deficiencies as with my own shortcomings.
What do the young find, if they enter a philosophy course? Not bearded ancients silently stroking their chins or offering enigmatic mantras. They find some tools, in elementary logic and critical thinking, and they are given intense practice in taking care to say what they mean. They will find that their first thoughts about the kinds of ideas I mentioned are not likely to be the best, so they find a whole world opening up as they learn how their apprentice stabs at showing that they know what they are talking about can nearly always be improved (a remarkably valuable lesson, forgotten or unknown in Westminster and Washington DC). They learn modesty and caution. They may then specialise, learning more about the philosophy of science (observation, induction, explanation, falsification, the empirical method) or theory of knowledge (perception, inference, classification, reason, evidence, language) or ethics (values, obligation, justice, punishment, decency, motivation, desire) or the philosophies of politics or art or history or indeed any area where there is value in reflecting on the way that concepts get used and abused.
Do the practices of philosophy change, and do they improve? One of the most potent causes of mistrust of philosophy is that it provides no answers, only questions, so that to many it does not seem to have progressed since its very beginnings in Plato, or even in pre-Socratic Greece (or China or India). Of course, one might similarly ask whether other human pursuits, such as music, literature, drama, architecture, painting or politics, have “improved” (and by what measure this judgement is supposed to be made), and if the answer is at best indeterminate we might query whether this reflects badly on those practices, or whether perhaps it indicates a problem with the question. It may be enough that their practitioners improve as they get their musical, literary and other educations, and that, having improved, they can help to keep some of humanity’s most important flames alive.
Nevertheless there is another answer, which is that philosophy has indeed both changed and improved. It has always changed, because the social and historical matrix in which it is practised changes, and it is that matrix that throws up the questions that seem most urgent at particular times. And it has improved first because there is a constant input of improved scientific knowledge that feeds it, and second because sometimes improved moral and political sensibilities filter into it. An example of the latter is the way that the improving status of women, and their increased representation in the philosophy classroom, has both thrown up new and interesting issues and generally altered for the better the way discussions are conducted. Examples of the former influence are legion: from Copernicus through Newton to Darwin, Einstein and today’s neurophysiologists, philosophers have absorbed and then tried to interpret advances in scientific knowledge. Nineteenth-century advances in mathematics helped to propel logic to its enormous 20th-century leaps forward (and that in turn helped the computer age to get started). In recent years, there has been much valuable collaboration between philosophy and learning theory, neurophysiology, economics and cognitive science.
But just as scientists are seldom immune to physics‑envy, so philosophers are not immune to science‑envy, and there are energetic contemporary movements that counsel that the subject move even closer to empirical psychology or sociology. “Experimental philosophy” has its own momentum, especially in moral philosophy, where large-scale online questionnaires can be used to elicit people’s intuitions about dilemmas and choices, such as the infamous “trolley problem”, which, roughly, obliges you to decide whether to pull a lever to divert a runaway train from a track to which five people are tied, on to one to which just one person is tied.
It is wise, though, to maintain some distinction between obtaining results and interpreting them. There is a division of labour between acquiring, testing and replicating empirical results, and thinking about what they mean. By training and practice, experimentalists are better at the first, whereas philosophers have some claim to expertise at the second. And even distinguished scientists do not always do distinguished philosophy when they undertake interpretative tasks. Biology has a particularly bleak record in this respect, although its greatest practitioners, including Darwin himself, have been a good deal more cautious than some of their apostles. The interpretation of neuroscience is a difficult and fraught matter, while economics has hardly distinguished itself since it split from philosophy and political science in the 19th century.
And if it comes to that, perhaps the civil servants, accountants and managers could benefit from better interpretations of their activities and words. An ironic example is the demand in the UK that university departments demonstrate the “impact” of particular pieces of research over a relatively short timescale and excluding effects on students, or even sales of books. “Impact” is a term drawn from mechanics, where it implies a particular kind of causation, a definite event giving some other identifiable thing a shove or a biff. Its magnitude can be quantified and, of course, if quantitative methods are all you are allowed to use, there is a temptation to suppose that everything else can be quantified as well: to him whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But improved understandings do not work by shoving or biffing. They can seldom be traced back to one particular essay or one moment in time. Ideas work by osmosis, filtering into people’s minds over long periods, manifested in innumerable subtle changes of thought and behaviour seldom attributable to just one antecedent event. A better model would be Don Basilio’s excellent understanding of the cumulative effect of gossip in his great encomium to the power of calumny in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Perhaps we might hope that even if they do not care to wrap their minds around issues in the philosophy of causation, our masters might be encouraged to attend an evening of opera buffa.
Simon Blackburn was Bertrand Russell professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge and remains a fellow of Trinity College. He is visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and is currently a visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa.
Source: Alamy montage
Philosophy is useful, yet its chief value for students lies not in making them better professionals, but in helping them live better lives. Mariana Alessandri and John Kaag write
Rumours of philosophy’s demise have always been greatly exaggerated. When Socrates was condemned, he expressed real concern that the discipline would not live on. But it did – through the Dark Ages, through wars that destroyed most of the world – into the 20th century. But the rumours endured: Martin Heidegger said that philosophy actually perished in the 1890s, and Richard Rorty – a thinker who abhorred the term “philosopher” – echoed this eulogy in the 1980s. They were wrong: philosophy lives on, albeit in a form that Socrates might not have recognised.
Like Socrates, philosophy has spent much of its history defending itself against the charges of irreverence, sophistry and corrupting the youth. But the most trenchant criticism of the discipline has turned on its supposed uselessness: philosophers don’t do anything except think, and thinking, at least in our modern day, takes a back seat to acting. Philosophy bakes no bread. The stereotype of a philosopher remains a picture of the ancient Greek mendicant-Cynic, Diogenes, sleeping in the streets, his clothes in rags, begging for food while he jeers at the townspeople. Socrates embraced his own self-imposed penury and spent the bulk of his Apology – the speech he delivered in response to the charges against him – chastising his fellow Athenians instead of catering to them. But times have changed, and, today, professional philosophers tend to capitulate to their critics and, for better and for worse, take care to locate and then photograph philosophy’s most profitable side.
The truth is that philosophy is useful. The analytical skills that US philosophy majors foster are reflected in Graduate Record Examination scores that, in verbal reasoning and analytical writing, outstrip all other undergraduate majors at US universities. This means that young philosophers are particularly well positioned to apply to graduate programmes outside their specific major. This includes practical subjects such as business and law; philosophy is regarded as the humanities major for students aspiring to attend law school. While parents continue to wring their hands over the potential unemployment that haunts many majors in the humanities, and especially philosophy, there are signs that their worries are unjustified. In 2013, in a survey carried out by PayScale.com of mid-career professionals, philosophy majors ranked in the top 25 per cent of salaries, ahead of biology, nursing and business.
The economic drivers that stand to keep philosophy alive are buttressed by growing institutional forces in many US universities. Philosophers are especially good at asking the “big questions” that underpin a variety of other academic fields – hence the rise of the philosophies of biology, physics, mathematics, race and mind. When you want to know what science is, the last person you should ask is a scientist. Additionally, the accreditation standards for professional degrees such as engineering, business and nursing have begun to insist that students take at least one class in professional ethics before graduation. Frequently, these classes are taught by non-philosophers, but this is beginning to change as philosophy departments take note of the way that professional schools, with steady income streams, might be the way to provide stability for a discipline that has always teetered on the brink of total poverty. This will, in the coming decades, drive philosophical research towards professional ethics.
These financial machinations would drive Socrates – and many of our philosophical colleagues – to distraction. And for good reason: “Money”, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “often costs too much.” Philosophy ought to be the last stronghold against the corporatisation of the university. Students fall in love with it not because it provides a gateway to professional success but, rather, because it offers one to existential meaning. When we emphasise to students how useful philosophy is, and enumerate the skills it will provide to help them compete in today’s global economy, we have already lost sight of what makes it worth doing. Philosophy’s chief value for students lies not in making them better professionals – although it will do that – but in helping them live better lives.
Philosophy might not have a reputation for baking bread, but it tells us what kind of bread to make and how much, and lets each of us ask the most important question of all: “Is this – or any – bread worth eating?” Students spend most of their early lives consuming particular beliefs about what constitutes success, beliefs that are alarmingly similar to those held by Socrates’ contemporaries. These beliefs were recently implied in US senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s comment that since welders make more money than philosophers, we should have more welders and fewer philosophers. Critical thinking – arguably philosophy’s chief skill – can teach us that money should not drive our career choices and that success means more than a pay cheque. But when philosophers tout philosophical skills such as critical thinking, reading comprehension, ethical reasoning and written and oral articulation as profitable, we have turned philosophy into a commodity.
Philosophy was never meant to be sold on the market; it is meant to stand outside it, to question and criticise it, like Socrates did. Philosophy gives students a chance to question values that other people take for granted. Too often we forget that even “paragraph gobblers”, as Kierkegaard called professional philosophers, think critically about the meaning of life. Or they should. At its best, philosophy revives the ancient Greek aphorism “know thyself” – even and especially in a modern culture that perpetually ignores this most personal of mandates.
Pitching philosophy’s tent outside the market does not, however, mean that we should tolerate or pride ourselves on being called “useless”. Self-knowledge is not the same as navel-gazing. When John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, he signalled a slow turn in mainstream contemporary philosophy – a turn back towards philosophy’s political and ethical origins. Before Rawls, 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy was dominated by what was known as “analytic philosophy”, which modelled itself on mathematics and logic and prided itself on clean, rigorous argumentation. Unsurprisingly, the messiness of ethics, politics and religion dropped out of much of the mainstream conversation. But after Rawls, analytic philosophers were, once again, expected to join continental philosophers (primarily phenomenologists and existentialists) and pragmatists in serving as social and political critics. Even though philosophy’s demographics have changed only slightly in terms of women and ethnic minorities, its orienting questions have begun to focus more explicitly on the implications of inequality and oppression. Philosophy can, and often does, serve as an articulate call to action. There is a real “use” in this philosophical articulation, but one that does not (thankfully) have a particular price tag.
As long as we are positioned to defend or sell our usefulness (which amount to the same thing in American society), or even our so-called uselessness, philosophers, in our more humanistic capacity, may be doomed. And perhaps we deserve our fate: we should, like Socrates, refuse to repent for giving our students the space to ask forbidden questions, such as “Am I a good person?”, “Do I live in a just society?”, “What are the origins of my most cherished beliefs?” and “Is my life worth living?” From Seneca’s letters to Montaigne’s essays to the recent writings of Stanley Cavell, Cornel West and Martha Nussbaum – philosophy hits its stride when it thinks about how we might live better, and when it responds to important questions such as the one implied in Rubio’s concern for welders: why does the US privilege white-collar work over blue-collar work? If our subject really is in jeopardy, we philosophers should spend these last moments trying to persuade our society to attach greater importance to thinking in hard and sustained ways about values that have little to do with wealth and reputation and bare utility.
While we might choose to live more like Seneca, whose home was surrounded by expansive gardens, than Diogenes, who threw away his bowl and spoon because they signalled a decadent life, our classrooms ought to be a space for students to reflect on their lives, their values, their actions and their future. They want a reason to return lost money to its owner, to avoid cheating in a test, to believe or not to believe in God. They are looking for a better reason than grades to turn off their television and read Schopenhauer (who swiftly reprimands them for wanting to think as little as possible). They want the chance to think for its own sake – to pretend, for just a minute, that no strings or grades are attached. Philosophy’s job is to give them that chance. When asked why there is no “after-party” to celebrate his class’ yearly Shakespeare plays, award-winning fifth-grade schoolteacher Rafe Esquith said: “the play’s the thing”; even young students know that taking a year to practise and perform Shakespeare is its own reward. His students are intrinsically motivated; they don’t need an after-party.
The primary reason to study philosophy is not because it will get you into law school or help you ace your Medical College Admission Test: it is because philosophy’s the thing. After one of us gave our students a PowerPoint presentation enumerating the social and financial benefits of majoring in philosophy, one student asked: “But doesn’t this go against everything you have been saying in class: that we shouldn’t be driven by money?” She was right. Perhaps we should stop trying to market philosophy, because doing so demeans it. If Socrates and his hemlock teach us nothing else, it is that philosophy is most enduring when it is not trying to be popular.
Mariana Alessandri is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. John Kaag is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Profile of a discipline: popularity, future prospects and pay
Student numbers in philosophy are holding up relatively well.
In the US, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the subject has held steady at about 12,000 for the past 10 years, according to the US’ National Center for Education Statistics (see graph, top).
Meanwhile, in the UK, numbers bounced back in 2013-14, after a drop in 2012-13, when £9,000 tuition fees were introduced, according to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
On employability, a relatively low 55 per cent of UK graduates of “historical and philosophical studies” were in full-time UK employment six months after graduating (2011-12 to 2013-14), according to Hesa’s Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey. Only law, mathematics and physical sciences graduates – recorded a lower percentage. By contrast, graduates of historical and philosophical studies were the fourth most likely to progress to further study, with 22 per cent doing so after law, physical sciences, and mathematics graduates (see graph, bottom). Only 7 per cent were unemployed – the same figure as the overall 2013‑14 average.
Philosophy graduates are also in demand in US graduate schools, reportedly scoring some of the highest scores in Graduate Record Examinations – especially in the verbal reasoning and analytical writing sections. The picture is similar in the entrance exams for vocational postgraduate degrees, such as business, law and even medicine.
And while US philosophy graduates start on relatively low salaries, according to figures from The Wall Street Journal, their salaries more than double by the middle of their careers, putting them among the highest-salaried graduate groups.On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that the Clinton Foundation is “a kind of a racket. It’s a place, it’s a holding pen for Clinton Inc. It’s a way to bring money in to launder it” that needs to be shut down.
Krauthammer said, [relevant remarks begin around 3:15] “The fact that the Clintons are announcing that they would not take this or that donation is irrelevant. They need to shut it down. They should have been shut down at the beginning. It really is a kind of a racket. It’s a place, it’s a holding pen for Clinton Inc. It’s a way to bring money in to launder it and to push it out into the hands of their hangers-oners. That’s what it’s done. It’s been extremely effective. But, you know, how many times do you have to occupy the White House? If you do it twice, you know you’re going to have a comfortable retirement. You don’t need this.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchettCardiff boss Neil Warnock initially wanted to sell Kenneth Zohore when he joined the club
Cardiff City have turned down an enquiry from Everton for Danish under-21 striker Kenneth Zohore.
Zohore has also been a target for newly promoted Brighton and Hove Albion and was subject of a bid from Hull City.
The Bluebirds say they are determined to hold onto the player.
Manager Neil Warnock said last week that it would take a bid of £30m to prise Zohore away from the club with the 23-year old Cardiff's top scorer last season with 12 goals.
It is understood Cardiff will not welcome further interest and are keen not to undermine their excellent start to the Championship campaign, having won their opening five matches.
Warnock has said he is looking to sign a midfield player before Thursday's transfer deadline.
However, winger Craig Noone and striker Anthony Pilkington could leave the Cardiff City Stadium along with defender Declan John.Play me AND Torres up front... we'll blast Chelsea back into the Champions League, insists Ba
Demba Ba has told Chelsea boss Rafa Benitez that he and Fernando Torres are ready to start up front together in Sunday's Barclays Premier League clash against Liverpool.
Benitez has rotated the two strikers in a 4-2-3-1 formation since Ba joined from Newcastle in January but the pair combined effectively in the second half of last weekend's 2-1 FA Cup semi-final defeat by Manchester City.
Benitez faces a selection dilemma with Torres desperate to start at his former club and Ba's form in front of goal making him hard to ignore - but the Senegal star insists they can play together.
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Partners in crime? Demba Ba (left) has said he wants to play with Fernando Torres up front for Chelsea
He told the Evening Standard: 'When he came on the pitch against City he helped me a lot. We caused them problems so I think we could play together. 'We combined against Brentford earlier in the competition, too, so I don’t believe it would be a problem for us. Most of the time we have to fight against the two central defenders on our own. If you have an extra body there, it makes it easier. 'This is also very important in football, to be able to control the game. I would understand if Fernando wants to start against Liverpool. We’re not making the decision but I would understand if he does.
One or the other: Ba (left) has rarely played with Torres, the two usually used as like-for-like replacements
Meanwhile, Benitez insists he is focused only on the immediate future and not his past with Liverpool as he prepares to take his Chelsea side to Anfield.
In a press conference on Friday the Spaniard declined to assess Liverpool since his departure in June 2010 or to talk about events at Anfield ahead of his first return as an opposing manager.
'I have a lot of respect, but I have to concentrate on my team,' Benitez said.
'I don't want any misunderstanding, so I will concentrate just on Chelsea and the game and try to enjoy it, especially if we can win.'
Job at hand: Rafa Benitez insists he is only focused on Chelsea ahead of his return to Liverpool
Benitez is expected to receive a warm welcome in the week which marked both his 53rd birthday and the 24th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster.
He spent six years at Anfield, helping Liverpool to the 2005 Champions League in his first season, the FA Cup, the Community Shield and European Super Cup, while they finished second in the Premier League in 2008-09.
His family home remains on Merseyside and he supports the campaigners in their fight for justice for the 96 supporters killed at Hillsborough in 1989.
His is a lasting bond with Liverpool but Benitez's aim is to defeat his former club.
'I'm a professional and I am committed with Chelsea until the end of the season, to win, to achieve our targets,' said Benitez, who is out of contract at the end of the campaign.
Flying the flag: Benitez is still a hugely popular figure at Anfield, having won them the Champions League in 2005
'I was there for six years, winning a lot of things together.
'They (Liverpool supporters) will appreciate that, but at the same time they will try to support their team and they will understand that I have to try to do my best and win.'
Benitez recently was quoted as saying he wanted to return 'home' to Liverpool and that his wish was to move to a top club, possibly in England next season.
That was interpreted by some as a possible return to Liverpool, but Benitez meant his family home.
For reasons of clarity, the Spaniard declined the opportunity to appraise Anfield incumbent Brendan Rodgers.
'I have a lot of respect for Liverpool Football Club and all their managers,' he said.Indigenous members of the Canadian military face "systemic racism," according to a draft report obtained by CBC News that calls for an external review.
"We strongly believe there is a systemic issue within the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) that is rampant throughout all ranks and elements of Land, Air Force and Navy and this issue is serious enough that an external review is imminent," reads the document prepared by the Defence Aboriginal Advisory Group and handed to the former commander of the Canadian Army, Lt.-Gen. Marquis Hainse, in the spring.
Of the 230 Indigenous military members canvassed by the advisory group, only 16 responded, reporting 40 incidents.
Despite the low response rate, the group said the problem is widespread and many incidents go unreported over fear of reprisal.
The advisory group is calling for an independent investigation similar to the one retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps conducted on allegations of sexual misconduct in the military.
Lt.-Gen. Marquis Hainse salutes after taking command of the Canadian Army during a change of command parade on Parliament Hill in July 2013 in Ottawa. He was succeeded in command by Lt.-Gen. Paul Wynnyk in July 2016. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Deschamps released a scathing report in April 2015 that found sexual misconduct to be "endemic" across the Forces. The military has since launched Operation Honour to eliminate inappropriate behaviour in the military.
"There have been examples of abuse of authority," according to the Aboriginal advisory group's latest report.
"This is not the military our Aboriginal members signed up for and this is not the military they dedicated their lives to. Victims are being forced out of the military, yet the aggressors continue on — some excelling at their careers."
This is not the military our Aboriginal members signed up for and this is not the military they dedicated their lives to. - excerpt from draft report by Defence Aboriginal Advisory Group
Hainse was briefed on the draft report, and on May 10 members of the advisory group met with the former commander to talk about issues raised in the document, the Canadian Armed Forces confirmed.
"The CAF does not tolerate discrimination and any instance of discrimination is one too many," wrote a Forces spokesperson in a statement to CBC News.
Military ombudsman offers help
"Any case of [discrimination] is extremely serious," said military ombudsman Gary Walbourne.
"If this is actually as rampant as that report would lead you to believe, it needs to be stomped out of the organization."
Walbourne said his office stands ready to help Indigenous military members and could launch its own investigation if any of them file an official complaint.
Walbourne noted. Canada's military ombudsman, Gary Walbourne, says his office is willing and able to launch an external review of racism against Indigenous members if the community comes to him directly. (Ashley Burke/CBC) News of the draft report comes at a time when the military is actively trying to recruit and retain Indigenous members. These allegations of racism won't help,
Report contains 'disturbing' allegations
The draft report includes anecdotes and allegations branded "rather disturbing and undoubtedly inexcusable" by its author.
In one case, a man alleged he missed his son's birth when the military denied his request to attend a sacred naming ceremony.
"I was told by the course director that my religion is not recognized by the military," he wrote. "I was furious. I missed the birth of my only son."
I had several guys call me a dirty wagon burner and a squaw, another called me Tonto. I told staff and nothing was done. - Military member quoted in draft report
Others reported encountering the worst racism they'd ever faced, and described being regularly singled out, harassed and called derogatory names.
"I was on a military … course and I had several guys call me a dirty wagon burner and a squaw, another called me Tonto. I told staff and nothing was done," one Indigenous member told the advisory group.
Abuse came from 'higher-ups'
A former Inuk soldier told CBC News about the racial abuse she endured before leaving the military in 2015. Esther Wolki said she was treated like "trash" by her superiors during her career at CFB Shilo in Manitoba.
Esther Wolki left the Forces in 2015 after she attempted to take her own life. (CBC) "Words like redskin, or brownie or savage," said Wolki by phone from Paulatuk, N.W.T. "I was mostly stunned because it was higher-ups that were saying stuff like that."
When Wolki reported the harassment she was told to toughen up. The military did investigate her allegations of racism, harassment and a sexual assault, but she said nothing was ever done about it.
"It did almost cause a successful suicide," said Wolki. "It felt really bad. I felt because it's been said to me so many times, I actually believed it, that I'm a worthless, horrible person and that I don't deserve to be in the military."
Since leaving the military her life has "gone downhill," Wolki said.
I get angry, that I have a member of the Canadian Armed Forces who has signed a contract to lay his life on the line on our behalf and to experience this type of behaviour. - Military ombudsman Gary Walbourne
"I don't see a reason to get out of bed. It's been really bad," said Wolki, who claimed she's not getting the help she needs for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from Veterans Affairs.
The military ombudsman said he has investigated three cases of discrimination against Indigenous members over the last year. In two of the cases, the military acted swiftly and corrected the problem, he said. The third investigation is continuing.
"I get angry, that I have a member of the Canadian Armed Forces who has signed a contract to lay his life on the line on our behalf and to experience this type of behaviour," Walbourne said.
He said he hopes members of the Aboriginal advisory group or the Indigenous community will come forward to his office with these new findings and evidence to support it.
CBC requested an interview with the Canadian Armed Forces, but no one was made available to discuss the draft report.
The advisory group's civilian co-chair who authored the report said she's unable to speak to the media.I love me. I’m fat. I’m black. I’m beautiful, and I don’t look my age. My |
, this is really dangerous.
If we tried to use function template specializations rather than function (template) overloads:
#include <cstdio> namespace framework // library 1 { template <typename T> void f(T) { puts("master"); } template <typename T> void process(T v) { f(v); } } namespace boost // library 2 { template <typename T> struct optional {}; } namespace framework // some glue between 1 and 2 { template <> void f<boost::optional<bool>>(boost::optional<bool>) { puts("optional<bool>"); } } int main() // our program logic { int i = 0; boost::optional<bool> ob; framework::process(i); framework::process(ob); }
It works:
master optional<bool>
That is, process sees only one function template, but the process of looking up specializations of f takes place not upon parsing the body of process but later: upon instantiating process (when generating a real function from a template).
But as we already know, there are no partial function template specializations, so this also does not solve our problem.
Argument dependent lookup
Interestingly, there is a way to make out 2-library example work. And if you are not familiar with argument dependent lookup (or ADL), you might be surprised at why and how it works. Let me first give you a solution first, and then try to explain:
#include <cstdio> namespace framework // library 1 { template <typename T> void f(T) { puts("master"); } template <typename T> void process(T v) { f(v); } } namespace boost // library 2 { template <typename T> struct optional {}; } namespace boost // some glue between 1 and 2 { template <typename T> void f(optional<T>) { puts("optional<T>"); } inline void f(optional<bool>) { puts("optional<bool>"); } } int main() // our program logic { int i = 0; boost::optional<int> oi; boost::optional<bool> ob; framework::process(i); framework::process(oi); framework::process(ob); }
The only difference is in the ‘glue’ part: I still provide two overloads, but I changed the namespace from framework to boost. And all of a sudden the program works as intended:
master optional<T> optional<bool>
So, function template process cannot see overloads (defined subsequently) from namespace framework, but can see similar overloads from namespace boost?
Yes. The way function overloads are resolved inside templates is (as you can see) quite funny. I will not be able to tell you how it works in every detail, but hopefully the explanation will be sufficient to enable you to do some useful things with it.
First, note that inside function process we call function f without any namespace- or class-scope qualification:
template <typename T> void process(T v) { f(v); }
If we called it like this:
template <typename T> void process(T v) { ::framework::f(v); }
It would break the solution, an none of what I am about to describe would apply.
So, in the case when you call a function without any scope qualification, overloads are resolved in two stages. The first stage happens at the point of parsing the template function ( process ) body. In this stage, we consider the overloads from our namespace, enclosing namespaces, and namespaces imported with using -directive. This is why we see the ‘master’ template function.
The second stage takes place at the point when the template function ( process ) is instantiated (when a real function is produced from the template). In this stage, we add to the overload set functions from the namespaces that enclose arguments in the function ( f ) call, provided that these arguments’ types are template ( process ) parameters or are dependent on the template parameters. In our case, when process is instantiated with type boost::optional<int>, class template boost::optional is defined in namespace boost, because an object of this type (more precisely: of the type instantiated from the class template) is one of the arguments (in fact, the only argument) to the call of function f, namespace boost is searched for matching function overloads f. We find some, so they are added to the overload set, and are no worse than the candidates found in the first phase.
In our example, the instantiation of process happens inside function main, so by that time the other two overloads have been defined.
Bizarre as it may seem, the ADL is essential to allow us to define the operators in the same namespace as the types they operate on:
namespace my_lib { class tool { /*...*/ }; std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream&, const tool& t); } int main() { my_lib::tool t; std::cout << t; // works due to ADL }
The ADL is also used by the swap functionality in the Standard Library. The typical advice for correctly swapping objects is to employ the following pattern:
template <typename T> void test(T& a, T& b) { using std::swap; // consider overloads from std swap(a, b); // consider overloads via ADL }
If we wrote it like this:
template <typename T> void test(T& a, T& b) { std::swap(a, b); // disable ADL }
The call to swap is scope-qualified, so ADL is disabled, and if the swap overload is provided in the namespace of T (and T happens to be my_lib::tool ) it is ignored.
If we wrote it like this:
template <typename T> void test(T& a, T& b) { // no namespace std (unless via ADL) swap(a, b); // consider overloads via ADL }
This would not pick the std::swap for types without custom swap as well as for built-in types.
This is why the STL advice for swap is the way it is.
So, that’s it for today. In the next post we will try to make use of this knowledge.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Piotr Bartosik and Tomasz Kamiński for inspiring this post and their useful feedback.
AdvertisementsMore than 1,000 people rallied in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 30 to protest President Donald Trump's first travel ban. Challenges to the revised version of the ban are expected to end up before the high court. Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The Trump administration filed notice Friday that it plans to appeal a preliminary injunction issued this week in Maryland, and it's widely expected to do the same in Hawaii. But no matter the outcome before the federal appeals courts, experts agree that the matter will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
"It's a matter of extreme national importance and implicates the scope of executive authority and important constitutional principles," says Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School specializing in constitutional and immigration law. "Even if the courts are all uniform, the Supreme Court will want to hear it."
There are some variables along the way – most notably, whether Congress confirms Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court before the justices hear arguments in the case.
Here's what's happened so far and what lies ahead:
What happened in the rulings this week?
The executive order was scheduled to take effect on Thursday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time. Hours before it did, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order halting two of its core provisions: a 120-day suspension of the U.S. refugee program and a 90-day halt on entries by most citizens of six majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction that also stopped the 90-day provision.
Other aspects of the executive order, such as a sharp reduction in the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S., were allowed to take effect.
What are the main arguments?
Hawaii, which brought the case that won the temporary restraining order, has argued that the executive order amounts to religious discrimination against Muslims, particularly in light of statements by the president and his advisers about seeking at least a temporary ban on allowing Muslims into the U.S.
It has also contended that the travel restrictions harm its universities, its business and tourist economy, and its local residents. A local imam, who's mother-in-law lives in Syria and would appear to be affected by the travel ban, also joined the state's lawsuit.
The case in Maryland was brought by two refugee support and advocacy groups, as well as a handful of individuals. They, too, argued that the executive order discriminates against Muslims. They also contended that it would harm people who live in the U.S. – even if they themselves are not directly affected by the restrictions – because it would prevent family members from visiting.
The Trump administration, by contrast, has contended that the order amounts to no more than a pause to review immigration security screening procedures, an act they argue is well within the scope of the president's authority. Justice Department lawyers vigorously argued that the order is not discriminatory and that it was motivated by national security concerns.
What's the government going to do?
With the restraining order and preliminary injunction in place, the Trump administration had three options: File an immediate appeal in the 4th and 9th circuits and seek hearings on an emergency basis as early as possible; decide not to appeal, let the restraining order and injunction remain, and eventually go to trial on the merits of whether the executive order is legal; or withdraw and either start over or give up.
No one expected the third option. And after Trump's fiery rhetoric at a rally in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday night, few, if any, expected the second. And with the filing Friday in the case in Maryland, the Justice Department is signaling it plans to fight on.
The Justice Department subsequently filed a request for clarification in the Hawaii case, asking Judge Watson whether his temporary restraining order applied to every facet of sections 2 and 6 of the executive order – the sections containing the 120-day suspension of refugee resettlement and 90-day restriction on entry by citizens of certain nations – or only certain parts of those sections.
An appeal to a circuit would be heard by a panel of three judges, as was the Justice Department appeal of the Trump administration's original order restricting travel. In that case, the 9th Circuit upheld the district court judge's ruling and the administration opted to rewrite its order. If this order is similarly decided in the appeals courts, the administration could ask the circuits for "en banc" hearings – rehearings of the cases before the full complement of circuit court judges – or appeal directly to the Supreme Court.
Will Gorsuch be nominated before either case reaches the Supreme Court?
Probably. Confirmation hearings begin next week, and Gorsuch is expected to be confirmed, meaning he will likely be on the bench in as soon as a month – more than enough time for the arguments over the restraining order and preliminary injunction to wind their way to the Supreme Court.
That said, there is a chance that the appeals – if sought and granted on an emergency basis by the appeals court and then the Supreme Court – could arrive at the high court earlier, but it's not likely. And even if it did, the justices might not be eager to take up a case of this magnitude with the potential of a deadlock.
"If the justices split 4-4, that could have negative repercussions for the court and its credibility, or for the nation for it to be seen as unresolved," Rodriguez says.
So if Gorsuch gets confirmed in time and the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, what is expected to happen?
It could be a nail-biter, but opponents of the travel ban face some hurdles.
For one, the Supreme Court has often been reluctant to second-guess the president's decisions in immigration.
"Traditionally courts have been deferential to presidents and Congress on immigration matters because immigration involves national sovereignty and foreign relations and terrorism concerns," even when there are First Amendment concerns like religious discrimination, says Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School.
In the 1972 case in Kleindienst v. Mandel, for example, the Supreme Court rejected arguments that the government's decision to bar a Belgian Marxist from entering the U.S. for a speaking tour violated the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens who would have met and spoken with him. The court in that case concluded that the executive branch had the authority to refuse an individual's entry to the U.S.
Trump's executive order, however, is far larger in scope. And while Gorsuch's expected confirmation will add another conservative vote to the court, that doesn't make the case an easy win for the administration.
"This is such new territory and such broad use of that power," says Phil Torrey, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who specializes in criminal and immigration law.
There's also the issue of standing – essentially, whether the groups and individuals who brought the challenges are eligible to do so based on how they'd be affected by the executive order. For instance, Hawaii's argument that its economy would be harmed by the travel restrictions could be seen as speculative by a higher court, and many of the claims brought by individuals relate not to their ability to travel but their family members' admissibility to the U.S.
"The standing issue is really interesting and a potential land mine," Rodriguez says. "That's a way the court could get rid of the case without addressing the trickier constitutional question."
Finally, the decisions by Judges Watson and Chuang in Hawaii and Maryland drew heavily from remarks that Trump and his associates made both before and after the election about Muslims and whether the revised travel ban would be substantially different from the first. The justices could decide to give those statements less weight, seeing them less as policy statements than off-the-cuff remarks.
For example, a dissent written by members of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over whether a full en banc panel of the court should rehear arguments on Trump's original travel ban – frozen since Feb. 3 – argued that the statements were not relevant.
"Context really matters, and these statements are really relevant to what the government's intent was with the order, but it would worry me that speech made in the political arena in a fashion could constrain the executive, because hyperbolic things get said, so holding the president to too tight a standard in relation to his speech could potentially be problematic in the future," Rodriguez says.BLACKBURN Rovers boss Paul Lambert has been given the green light by owners Venky’s to bring in the New Year targets he has identified to give his squad the help he feels it needs.
Lambert has been working closely with his coaching team and head of recruitment Tommy Johnson to pinpoint the players he believes could make a difference.
But after watching Rovers go down to their second straight defeat at Bolton Wanderers on Monday he insisted he will not make signings for signings sake.
“The group needs help, there’s no two ways about it,” said Lambert.
“They need a bit of help in a few areas in the team so that’s what we’ll try to do. Whether it can happen, we’ll have to wait and see.
“The January market is a dangerous market and the other teams have got to want to let the players go.
“But we have been told we can go and try and make things happen.
“But what I don’t want to do is bring in someone who isn’t going to contribute or is going to find it hard to get into the side.
“We have to get players who are going to get into the team.”
Lambert will be able to pay fees for permanent and loan signings next month after Rovers’ Financial Fair Play embargo was lifted.
But with the club determined to avoid going back under the embargo he will work almost entirely in the loan market during the January transfer window.
Lambert knows that will make his attempts to bolster his ranks a little harder.
But he has confirmed that he has already drawn up a shortlist of potential new recruits.
“We’ve spoken about certain guys,” said Lambert, speaking before the loss to Bolton which left Rovers 16th in the Championship.
“But the loan market is never an easy market to work in, especially January, because let’s be honest, nobody wants to lose their best players in January. That’s the reality of it.
“And I don’t want to bring people in who can’t make an impact in our team. I want to bring people who can make an impact. I don’t want someone who is just going to come in and sit around and not really have a chance to stake a claim.
“But there are names that we have discussed and if we can get one or two in here it will certainly help us.”
Lambert won the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund and, after leaving Aston Villa in February, spent time watching a number of managers in the country where he enjoyed his greatest success as a player.
But for now he will not be returning to Germany to make signings.
Lambert said: “Not many German players come overseas. One or two do and I know QPR have got the lad from Union Berlin (Sebastian Polter) but there’s not many who come over because the league they have over there is that strong.
“It’s a market that I know pretty well but it’s unlikely in January. But summer time you never know.
“One thing can help is that the mentality between German and British players is pretty similar.
“We’ll have to wait and see what transpires.”This article is over 4 years old
Liu Han convicted as leader of murderous crime syndicate in case with links to Communist party elite
A Chinese mining tycoon has been sentenced to death for leading a crime gang that killed rivals, a state news agency reported, in a case that revealed ties between organised crime and politicians.
Liu Han is former chairman of energy conglomerate Sichuan Hanlong Group in the south-western province of Sichuan, which owns stakes in Australian and US mines. He disappeared in March 2013, temporarily disrupting deals to finance mine development in Nevada and Australia, before police announced he had been detained.
The death sentences for Liu Han and his brother Liu Wei were the first in trials of their 36-member gang by a court in the central province of Hubei, the Xinhua News Agency said.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has launched an anti-corruption crackdown that has ensnared senior politicians and influential businessmen.
Many of the Sichuan cases are believed linked to Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Communist party's standing committee, the country's ruling inner circle. He is now believed to be a target of the wide-ranging graft investigation.
The Liu brothers and their associates have been charged with 15 crimes including murder, assault, illegal detention, blackmail and operating casinos.
Prosecutors say their criminal activities, dating back to 1993, helped them amass 40 billion yuan (US$6.4bn) in assets with businesses in finance, energy, real estate and mining.
The gang is accused in the deaths of nine people, five of whom were shot, according to earlier reports. Police seized hand grenades, half a dozen submachine guns, 20 pistols and other firearms.
Liu Han ranked 148th in 2012 on Forbes magazine's list of the richest Chinese businesspeople, with a fortune estimated at $855m. He told The Wall Street Journal in 2010 that an investor once shot up his car after suffering losses in a deal.
The group is accused of fostering ties with politicians in Sichuan that helped Liu Han win appointment as a delegate of the provincial advisory body for three terms, according to earlier Xinhua reports.
Among the accused are three officials in city-level police and prosecutors' offices in Sichuan, Xinhua said. It said Liu Wei's testimony showed the officials received money and gifts as well as weekly parties with illicit drugs.A rock with zebra mussels attached was found by the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District during a sampling in Minnehaha Creek in July 2012.
Zebra mussels have been found in White Bear Lake and Lake Waconia. Those popular Twin Cities lakes are now considered infested.
Biologists found three zebra mussels in Lake Waconia in Carver County and three in White Bear Lake, which straddles Ramsey and Washington counties, following reports from the public, the state Department of Natural Resources said Friday.
"In both Waconia and White Bear, the size and location of the zebra mussels found may suggest natural reproduction could be occurring," the DNR said. "In such cases, control efforts such as the chemical treatment recently tried on Christmas Lake in Shorewood would likely be ineffective."
The DNR will post signs about the infestation at both Lake Waconia and White Bear Lake.
• Map: See where zebra mussels have spread in Minnesota
It's been a bad year for Zebra mussel discoveries.
The DNR this summer confirmed zebra mussels in northwest Minnesota lakes, including popular Lake Melissa, near Detroit Lakes.
A few weeks ago, the DNR said it found the mussels in Cass Lake, one of the state's largest. It was the first time the invasive species has been confirmed in the Bemidji area. The DNR also designated connecting lakes and rivers around Cass Lake as infested.
More than 175 Minnesota lakes and rivers are now infested with zebra mussels, an invasive species that can push out native mussels. They can also cause more algae and weed growth — they filter the lake water, allowing sunlight to penetrate more deeply.
• Topic: Environment coverage
Zebra mussels attach to boats, making it easy for them to travel and contaminate other waters.
Boaters are required to clean their boats after leaving a lake to keep from transporting mussels that might attach to the boat hulls.
The DNR and county officials across Minnesota have been working this summer to beef up boat inspection and enforcement. Gov. Mark Dayton earlier this year signed legislation to distribute $10 million a year to local governments to fight the mussels and other aquatic invasive species.The auto industry has been one of the few truly bright spots in the US economy since the financial crisis.
After a terrifying crater during the worst of the panic—albeit with a brief spike induced by the “cash-for-clunkers” program — car sales have crawled back to something like normal. And updates on auto sales from the big car makers Oct. 2 showed Ford Motor and Chrysler Group expect to sell cars at the fastest pace since the financial crisis struck. Good news, right?
FactSet Crawling back. Auto sales (blue) and monthly percentage change (yellow).
Besides the general fear induced by the crisis, which prompted many to hold off on purchases of cars, a big reason why car sales collapsed was because the pipeline of cash to would-be car buyers was completely broken. Important players in channeling the money US consumers needed to buy cars, like GMAC—which had its roots as the in-house credit arm of General Motors but later got into mortgage-making and other lending—were tottering. Eventually, the US government launched an unprecedented intervention in the market, propping up both Chrysler and General Motors as well as their financing arms to the tune of $81 billion.
We’re in a much better position now. And thanks, in part, to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to keep interest rates low, rates for new car loans from banks are down to record lows. More good news, right?
FactSet / Federal Reserve
And in an interesting development, cash is starting to flow from investors to car buyers with lower credit scores. More good news… right…?
If the idea of buyers with poor credit scores getting loans easily sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Yes, we’re talking about “subprime” again.
Global investors are desperate to find investments that pays them a decent rate of interest, or “yield.” Because subprime borrowers are riskier, the investments built around their loans do supply that higher yield. Increasingly, investors are liking the sound of that. And subprime auto bond deals have been picking up steam. Analysts at S&P think that some $15-17 billion could flow into new subprime auto bonds this year, up from $11.9 billion in 2011 and not too far off from the $15.3 billion seen in 2007, before the crisis struck.
Standard & Poor's Cash is flowing into fresh subprime auto bond deals.
Part of the reason that investors are willing to buy subprime auto bonds—effectively lending money to higher-risk borrowers—is because the risk doesn’t seem too bad. The loss rate on these loans is down a lot from the pain investors felt back at the peak of the crisis.
Moody's Losses on subprime auto bonds don’t look so bad, at least compared to the worst of 2008.
Still, historically the pattern is that complacency about losses and competition between lenders leads them to make loans at interest rates that are too low to borrowers that are too risky. We’re already seeing the average credit scores and interest rates on subprime auto deals fall. And Barclays analysts have noticed that recently subprime auto loans have seen an uptick in loans going bad—although so far, at least, they don’t think it’s anything major to worry about.
Barclays Losses on subprime auto bonds ticked up in September.
Given that a significant chunk of the US car-buying public has credit scores that would put it in the subprime bucket — through mid-September it was 24.4% of used car sales and 11.5% of new vehicle sales went to subprime buyers—the fact that more and more cash is flowing through to those buyers is a good thing—at least for the short term.
But the auto industry is kind of like a microcosm of the US economy as a whole. Just getting the system moving again is the goal for now. But in the longer term the US has to do some real soul-searching about whether offering easy credit to riskier borrowers creates more problems than it is worth.President Donald Trump is ending a program that allowed many unauthorized immigrants to work and live in the US — the most aggressive move of his immigration crackdown so far, and a decision that will ultimately put nearly 800,000 immigrants who came to the US as children or young teenagers at risk of deportation.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that the government will stop granting protections from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, instituted by President Barack Obama in 2012.
According to an official Department of Homeland Security memo, people who have already applied for DACA protection will have their applications processed normally, but the government won’t accept any new applications after Tuesday.
Those currently covered under the program — which grants protections for two years — will be able to retain their protections and work permits until they expire.
If their DACA protections are set to expire before March 5, they will have a month — until October 5 — to apply for one last renewal. And those who are set to lose their protections on March 6 or later will simply fall back into unauthorized status.
The catch: All of this will happen only if Congress fails to pass a bill in the next six months that protects DACA recipients, either by continuing to offer them temporary protection or granting them a path to legalization.
Trump’s decision is an attempt to shift pressure from the White House (after several months of back and forth within the Trump administration about the fate of a program associated with Obama, and which its critics see as an unconstitutional amnesty) and onto Congress to find a way to keep DACA recipients living safely and working in the US.
But after Congress’s failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act earlier this year, it’s not clear whether Congress will be able to get its act together to pass an immigration bill — or what a bill that could satisfy both 60 senators and the president would look like.
In the meantime, the Trump administration is acting as if Congress won’t pass a bill — slowly winding down DACA now, in anticipation of sunsetting the program entirely starting on March 5. It isn’t punting on DACA; it’s preparing to end it, albeit gradually.
Tuesday marks the beginning of the end for the DACA era: a half-decade period during which a generation of young immigrants, now predominantly in their 20s and 30s, were able to put down roots and advance careers in the US without the constant threat of deportation.
It marks the beginning of six months of existential anxiety, as hundreds of thousands of immigrants struggle to go on with their lives without knowing whether they’ll be accepted as inhabitants of the United States by April — or whether the only certainty they’ll get at the end of six months is knowing the date on which they’ll lose their ability to work in the US legally and gain the constant threat of deportation.
Beyond the risk of deportation, immigrants currently protected by DACA now face the loss of their ability to work legally in the US; of their driver’s licenses in many states; and of the assurance that they are fundamentally wanted in the country where they grew up.
For the next six months, DACA recipients will live under crushing uncertainty. After that time, if Congress doesn’t pass a bill, DACA recipients — one by one — will face an impossible choice.
They can resign themselves to the lives they lived five years ago. They can try to retain the gains they made over the past five years, even without the protections that made it possible. Or they can try to find a more welcoming place in which to live.
Related 9 things you need to know to understand DACA and the DREAMers
DACA transformed hundreds of thousands of lives
The question of what to do with unauthorized immigrants who’d come to the US as children has been a subject of political debate for the past 16 years — ever since the first version of the DREAM Act (which would allow those immigrants to apply for legal status and eventually allow them to seek US citizenship) was introduced in 2001.
But the DREAM Act never passed Congress. In the most recent attempt, in December 2010, the bill failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster. Meanwhile, although the Obama administration said it was changing the way immigration enforcement operated, agents continued to arrest and deport some “low-priority” immigrants — including those who would have qualified for the DREAM Act.
DACA, announced by President Obama in June 2012 and rolled out that August, was a solution to that policy problem: It allowed immigrants to apply for protection proactively; if granted protection, they were allowed to work legally in the US.
It was always temporary. The executive branch can’t create new ways for immigrants to get legal status in the US, it can just temporarily “defer” their deportation and allow them to work legally.
But for DREAMers, the ability to work legally and live without deportation threat — even for just a couple of years at a time — was appealing enough that nearly 800,000 immigrants, over half of those estimated to qualify, ultimately sought protection under the program.
And for those immigrants, for five years, their lives changed.
Research on the effects of DACA consistently shows that it’s opened up educational and economic opportunities. The most recent survey, conducted in early August 2017 by UC San Diego professor Tom Wong, under the auspices of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, found that annual earnings had increased 80 percent under DACA — from an average of $20,000 to an average of $36,000. (This includes immigrants who are working part time, or who are working while enrolled in school, as well as those with full-time jobs.) Sixty-five percent had bought their first car; 16 percent had become homeowners.
Five percent of DACA recipients had started their own businesses. Sixty percent of DACA recipients above the age of 25 — in other words, those most likely to have been in the workforce before DACA was rolled out in 2012 — said that with DACA they’d been able to find jobs that better suited the education and training they already had; 61 percent said they’d been able to find jobs that suited the careers they wanted to have.
These changes can’t be totally explained by the simple fact that good jobs aren’t often available to people without legal work papers.
The truth of DACA is that despite the stereotype of the high-achieving, highly educated DREAMer, many unauthorized immigrants growing up in the US didn’t achieve their academic or professional potential simply because they couldn’t see what good it would do them to succeed. As DREAMers hit their mid- to late teens, and their peers started to be able to do things they couldn’t — get driver’s licenses, apply for financial aid — many of them “transitioned to illegality,” suffering mental-health crises and often losing a desire to achieve in school because they realized the country they thought of as their own didn’t actually have opportunities for them.
There’s evidence that DACA prevented those crises. Immigrants protected by it felt American, welcomed, normal. Their mental health was better than the mental health of immigrants who didn’t qualify for DACA. They were able to help their parents and families. They were able to put down roots.
And starting on March 6 — unless Congress disrupts the Trump administration’s current plans — those roots are going to be, immigrant by immigrant, tugged at and torn up.
Trump’s attempting to use Congress to avoid responsibility either for ending DACA or protecting it in court
DACA wasn’t originally a hot-button wedge issue. The Obama administration took up the idea of a “deferred action” program under sustained pressure from immigrant-rights organizations, often led by DREAMers themselves; it announced DACA in hopes of mobilizing Latino voters in the 2012 presidential election.
It protected a population that members of the public across the political spectrum found “deserving” — and that few politicians were willing to say they wanted to see deported.
But it was President Obama’s attempt to expand deferred action to the parents of American citizens in 2014, eventually thwarted by the courts, that put the existing DACA program in the crosshairs. At the same time, immigration reformers in the Republican Party were losing power. The party’s immigration hawks were gaining strength, and Donald Trump was rising to the top of the presidential primary on a hardline immigration platform.
Trump promised in the first 100 days of his presidency to revoke all of Obama’s unconstitutional executive actions — which was widely assumed to include DACA. Immediately after the election, DACA recipients understood that they could be at risk as soon as January 20.
But Trump appeared to develop a belated understanding of just how emotionally and politically touchy a subject it was to revoke protections for people who grew up in the US. He praised the DREAMers to Time magazine in December, and acknowledged that the problem was “very tough.” He assured the public that he had a “big heart” and would come up with a solution that would have “a lot of heart.”
Ultimately, though, no compromise was forthcoming — Trump ended the program in exactly the way an executive order drafted, but not signed, in January would have done.
The timing of the decision was likely provoked by a threat from a group of Republican state officials, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to sue the federal government if it didn’t end DACA before September 5. Several powerful Trump policy advisers — including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who would have to defend DACA in court in the event of a lawsuit — have pushed for an end to DACA, as well.
Trump’s decision to announce an end to DACA now, but delay its implementation for six months, is something of an attempt to have his cake and eat it too: The White House appears to hope that the states will back down from their threat to sue (though it’s not clear that the states will comply), while trying to avoid the president getting blamed for targeting a politically popular group of immigrants.
Several bills that would offer some protection to DACA recipients have already been introduced in Congress, and many Republicans — including many Democrats, as well as Republicans who’ve long defended DREAMers like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and vulnerable Republicans in swing districts — have joined Democrats in calling for Congress to pass one of them before DACA ends.
But Congress’s agenda is already extremely tight for the next six months — with a key government-funding deadline to meet at the end of the month, one last potential chance to repeal Obamacare, and a desire to pass tax reform.
Furthermore, it’s not clear what conservatives (including the president) would demand in exchange for protecting DACA recipients in a bill. In August, the administration floated the idea of a “grand bargain” that would legalize DACA recipients in return for a conservative wish list on immigration enforcement and future restrictions on legal immigration. That idea appears to have little support among Democrats or pro-DACA Republicans. But if there aren’t enough pro-DACA Republicans to pass a bill without enforcement “tradeoffs,” it might be hard to find something Democrats will be willing to give up.
If Congress succeeds, DACA recipients could end up able to get full legal status in the US — more than DACA provided them. If Congress fails, the White House will try to blame them for not having acted — while Congress will be able to blame the White House for actually ending the program.
To DACA recipients themselves, though, the distinction won’t matter.
A “delay” isn’t much comfort to immigrants themselves
In practice, the end of DACA will be immediate for many people: Anyone who hasn’t yet applied for DACA protections, either because they aren’t yet 15 years old or because they haven’t managed to pull together the $495 application fee, will be barred from the program.
Anyone whose DACA protections are set to expire before March 5, but isn’t able to pull their application for renewal together in the next month — as many as two months before they’ve been planning to renew — will lose protections even before the official March 5 “end date.”
And the government will stop processing any requests from DACA recipients to leave the country (what’s called “advance parole”) immediately. People who already have advance parole can keep it, but any applications still pending will be denied.
In other words, what the Trump administration is doing isn’t punting on DACA for six months. It’s slowly winding down DACA, in anticipation of ending it entirely. It’s saying that Congress should act, but acting as if it won’t.
That’s a commitment that DACA recipients themselves have every reason to take seriously. They’ve been living under the threat of DACA revocation since Trump’s election in November. They’ve seen Trump’s administration attempt to deport a few DACA recipients who were supposed to be protected. And now, they have a deadline over which they have no control — but which will determine the course of the rest of their lives.
What it will mean to lose DACA varies from immigrant to immigrant. Immigrants working full-time jobs will have to leave them to comply with the law, or continue working at legal risk to themselves and their employers. Immigrants in school will be able to remain enrolled, in nearly all cases, but some might have trouble retaining their financial aid for the rest of their educations (in addition to not knowing what jobs they could get in the US with the degrees they’re working to obtain).
And then there’s the threat of deportation.
Because DACA recipients gave extensive personal information to the government when they applied, many of them could easily be tracked down, arrested, and placed in deportation proceedings if the Trump administration chose to do so. Under Obama, DACA |
Top Topham, they performed at Kingston Art School in late May 1963 as a backup band for Cyril Davies. Following a couple of gigs in September 1963 as the Blue-Sounds, they changed their name to The Yardbirds, either an expression for hobos hanging around rail yards or prisoners hanging around a prison yard or a reference to seminal jazz saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker.[citation needed]
The quintet achieved notice on the burgeoning British rhythm and blues scene when they took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, succeeding the Rolling Stones. Their repertoire drew from the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Elmore James, including "Smokestack Lightning", "Good Morning Little School Girl", "Boom Boom", "I Wish You Would", "Rollin' and Tumblin'", "Got Love if You Want It" and "I'm a Man".
Original lead guitarist Topham left and was replaced by Eric Clapton in October 1963. Crawdaddy Club impresario Giorgio Gomelsky became the Yardbirds manager and first record producer. Under Gomelsky's guidance the Yardbirds toured Britain as the back-up band for blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II in December 1963 and early 1964, recording live tracks on 8 December and other dates. The recordings would be released two years later during the height of the Yardbirds popularity on the album Sonny Boy Williamson and The Yardbirds.[12]
After the tours with Williamson, the Yardbirds signed to EMI's Columbia label in February 1964, and recorded more live tracks March 20 at the legendary Marquee Club in London. The resulting album of mostly rhythm and blues covers, Five Live Yardbirds, would not be released by Columbia for another nine months, and it failed to enter the UK albums charts.[13] Over time Five Live gained stature as one of the few quality live recordings of the era, and as a historical document of both the British "rock and roll boom" in the 1960s and Clapton's time in the band.[14]
"Got Love If You Want It" 20 second sample of the Yardbirds cover "Got Love if You Want It" by Slim Harpo, from Five Live Yardbirds Problems playing this file? See media help.
Breakthrough success and Clapton departure [ edit ]
The Clapton line-up recorded two singles, the blues "I Wish You Would" and "Good Morning, School Girl", before the band scored its first major hit with the overtly pop "For Your Love", a Beatles-influenced Graham Gouldman composition built around a four-chord progression (Em-G-A-Amin)[15] played on a harpsichord by Brian Auger. "For Your Love" hit the top of the charts in the UK and Canada and reached No. 6 in the United States, but it displeased Clapton, a blues purist whose vision extended beyond three-minute singles. Frustrated by the commercial approach, he abruptly left the band on 25 March 1965, the day the single was released.[16] Soon Clapton joined John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, but not before he recommended Jimmy Page, a prominent young session guitarist, to replace him. Content with his lucrative sessions work, and worried about both his health and the politics of Clapton's departure, Page in turn recommended his friend Jeff Beck.[17] Beck played his first gig with the Yardbirds only two days after Clapton's departure.
Jeff Beck's tenure; pioneers of British psychedelia [ edit ]
Beck's explorations of fuzz tone, reverb, feedback, sustain, distortion and hammer-on soloing fitted well into the increasingly raw style of British beat music. The Yardbirds began to experiment with eclectic arrangements reminiscent of Gregorian chants and various European and Asian styles while Beck infused a pervasive Middle Eastern influence into the mix. Beck was voted No. 1 lead guitarist of 1966 in the British music magazine Beat Instrumental.
The Beck-era Yardbirds produced a number of groundbreaking recordings. These included the hit singles "Heart Full of Soul", "Evil Hearted You"/"Still I'm Sad", a cover of Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man" (US only), "Shapes of Things" and "Over Under Sideways Down",[18] and the Yardbirds album (known popularly as Roger the Engineer).
Beck's fuzz-tone guitar riff on "Heart Full of Soul" introduced Indian raga-style guitar to the pop charts in the summer of 1965.[citation needed] The follow-up, the reverb-laden "Evil Hearted You", furthered the Eastern influence, while its B-side, "Still I'm Sad", featured the band chanting like Gregorian monks. The Diddley cover, "I'm a Man", was hard blues rock, featured the Yardbirds' signature "rave-up", where the tempo shifted to double time and Relf's harmonica and Beck's scratching guitar raced to a climax before falling back into the original beat.
The band embarked on their first US tour in late August 1965. A pair of albums were put together for the US market: For Your Love and Having a Rave Up, half of which came from the earlier Five Live Yardbirds album, combined with new tracks such as "Mister, You're a Better Man Than I"[19] and "Train Kept A-Rollin", both recorded with legendary producer Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, during the first U.S. tour.[20] There were three more US tours during Beck's time with the band, and a brief European tour in April 1966.
1966 German picture sleeve cover for The Yardbirds 45 single "Shapes of Things", 5-9910, copyright by Epic Records, 1966.
The single "Shapes of Things", released in February 1966, "can justifiably be classified as the first psychedelic rock classic", according to AllMusic.com writer Ritchie Unterberger[21] and heralded the coming of British psychedelia[22] three months before the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" B-side "Rain".[23] Reaching No. 3 on the UK charts[22] and 11 in the U.S,[24] "Shapes" was also the Yardbirds' first self-penned hit, the previous three UK A-sides having been written by Gouldman. Relf's vague anti-war protest lyrics and Beck's feedback-driven, Middle Eastern-influenced solo reflected the band's increasing embrace of psychedelia,[21] as did the B-side "You're A Better Man Than I" and the follow-up single, "Over Under Sideways Down". The latter was released in May and featuring more quixotic lyrics by Relf and another raga-inspired guitar line by Beck.
The "Over Under Sideways Down" sessions were held in April 1966 and produced the album Yardbirds. It was commonly referred to as "Roger the Engineer", which were the words scrawled under a cartoon by Dreja of engineer Roger Cameron that appears on the cover of the UK release.[25] In the US, an abridged version of the album, minus the cartoon cover art, was released as Over Under Sideways Down. The recording session marked the Yardbirds' split with their manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, as writer Simon Napier-Bell took over management and shared production credit with Samwell-Smith.
The band, led by Relf and McCarty, eschewed cover material, writing the entire album themselves. They were allotted "a whole week" to record the album, according to Dreja,[26] resulting in a "crammed" albeit eclectic mix of blues, hard rock, monkish chanting ("Turn into Earth", "Ever Since the World Began") and African tribal rhythms ("Hot House of Omagararshid"). Beck's guitar lines were a unifying constant throughout. Roger the Engineer was ranked at No. 350 on Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[27]
The Beck/Page line-up [ edit ]
Roger the Engineer was released in June 1966. Soon afterwards, Samwell-Smith quit the band at a drunken gig at Queen's College in Oxford[28] and embarked on a career as a record producer. Jimmy Page, who was at the show, agreed that night to play bass until rhythm guitarist Dreja could rehearse on the instrument.[28] The band toured with Page on bass, and Beck and Dreja on guitars, playing dates in Paris, the UK, the Midwestern US and the California coast.[29] Beck fell ill late in the latter tour, and was hospitalised in San Francisco. Page took over as lead guitarist at the Carousel Ballroom (San Francisco) on 25 August and Dreja switched to bass. Beck stayed in San Francisco to recuperate[7] with his girlfriend Mary Hughes,[30] while the rest of the band completed the tour. After the Yardbirds reunited in London, Dreja remained on bass and the group's dual lead guitar attack was born.[7]
The Beck–Page lead guitar tandem created the avant garde psychedelic rock single "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" (with future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones on bass instead of Dreja), which the band recorded in July and September 1966. The single's UK B-side was "Psycho Daisies", two minutes of embryonic garage punk sludge[31] featuring Beck on vocals and lead guitar, and Page on bass. The single's B-side in the US, "The Nazz Are Blue", also features a rare lead vocal by Beck.
The Yardbirds also recorded "Stroll On", a reworking of Tiny Bradshaw's "Train Kept A-Rollin'", recorded for Michelangelo Antonioni's critically acclaimed film Blow-Up. Relf changed the song's lyrics and title to avoid having to seek permission from the copyright holder. Their appearance in the film, about a hip fashion photographer (played by David Hemmings) undergoing an existential crisis in Swinging London, came after the Who declined and the In-Crowd were unable to attend the filming. Andy Warhol "Factory" band The Velvet Underground were also considered for the part but were unable to acquire UK work permits.[32] Director Antonioni instructed Beck to smash his guitar in emulation of the Who's Pete Townshend.[33] The guitar that Beck destroys in the film was a cheap German-made Höfner instrument.
The Beck–Page line-up recorded little else in the studio. No live recordings of the dual-lead guitar lineup have surfaced, except for "Great Shakes",[34] a commercial recorded for Great Shakes milkshakes using the opening riff of "Over Under Sideways Down", included on the 1992 Little Games Sessions & More compilation.
One recording made by Beck and Page in May 1966, just weeks before Page joined the Yardbirds, was "Beck's Bolero". This piece was inspired by Ravel's "Bolero" and credited to Page (although Beck also claims to have written the song), with John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon on drums and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Around the time of this session, the idea of a "supergroup" involving Beck, Page, Moon and Who bassist John Entwistle originated, with Entwistle suggesting it would "go over like a lead balloon" and Moon quipping that they could call the band "Lead Zeppelin".[35] Although all the musicians remained with their respective bands, Page recalled the conversation in 1968 when deciding on the name for Led Zeppelin. "Beck's Bolero" was first released in 1967 as the B-side of Beck's first solo single, "Hi Ho Silver Lining", and was included the following year on the Jeff Beck Group's debut album, Truth.
The "swinging London" scene depicted in Blow-Up was evolving towards psychedelic London[36] but the Yardbirds kept up a frenetic touring schedule upon their return. They opened for the Rolling Stones' 1966 UK tour[37] (with Ike & Tina Turner, Peter Jay and Long John Baldry also on the bill), released the "Happenings" single,[38] shot their scenes in Blow-Up,[39] and then headed back to the US for a show at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and a slot on American Bandstand host Dick Clark's "Caravan of Stars" tour, which they joined in Texas.[40] After a few shows with the Caravan, Beck stormed out and headed back to San Francisco and Mary Hughes. The band, still in Texas, continued on the Dick Clark tour as a quartet, with Page as sole lead guitarist. They caught up with Beck in late November, at which point Beck officially left the band. Beck's lack of professionalism, his temper, Relf's drunkenness, the gruelling and unrewarding Dick Clark Caravan, and other pressures were cited, none of which involved Beck actually being fired.[7] Beck's official departure was announced on 30 November in the US.[7] The Yardbirds finished their remaining US dates with Page as sole lead guitarist and headed back to the UK for more shows scheduled by Napier-Bell. Beck continued as a solo artist.
Final days: the Page era [ edit ]
Page subsequently introduced playing the instrument with a cello bow (suggested to him by violinist David McCallum, Sr.)[41] and the combination of a wah-wah pedal in addition to a distortion fuzzbox. Other innovations included the use of a taped noise loop in live settings (on the psychedelic dirge "Glimpses") and open-tuned guitar to enhance the sitar-like sounds the Yardbirds were known for.
Meanwhile, the act's commercial fortunes were declining. "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" had only reached No. 30 on the US Hot 100 and had fared worse in Britain. The band dropped Napier-Bell and entered into a partnership with Columbia Records hit-making producer, Mickie Most, known for his work with the Animals, Herman's Hermits and Scottish singer Donovan, yet this move failed to reignite their chart success. After the disappointing sales of "Happenings", the single "Little Games" released in March 1967 flopped so badly in the UK (where it was backed by "Puzzles") that EMI did not release another Yardbirds record there until after the band broke up. A 1968 UK release of the "Goodnight Sweet Josephine" single was planned but cancelled. A version of Tony Hazzard's "Ha Ha Said the Clown" – on which only Relf performed – backed by the Relf–McCarty original "Tinker Tailor, Soldier Sailor", was the band's last single to enter the US top 50, peaking at No. 44 on the Billboard charts in the summer of 1967.
Epic compiled the six earlier A-side hits and B-sides ("New York City Blues", "Still I'm Sad") with the heaviest material from For Your Love ("I'm Not Talking") and Having a Rave Up ("Smokestack Lightning"), and released The Yardbirds Greatest Hits in the US in March 1967. The album featured the first appearance of "Happenings" and "Shapes of Things" on an album. Although it omitted "Psycho Daisies", which had only been released in the UK as a B-side, Greatest Hits described to the Yardbirds' growing American audience an almost complete picture of "what made the Yardbirds a great band", according to AllMusic critic Bruce Eder.[42] In the description of author Greg Russo, the compilation also presented young garage rock musicians of the psychedelic era with a handy textbook of the band's work during 1965–66.[43] Greatest Hits was the Yardbirds' best-selling US album release, peaking at No. 28 on the Billboard charts.
The band spent the first half of 1967 touring Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and France (including a stop in Cannes to help promote Blow-Up). They also played a handful of shows in the UK in June, before heading to Vancouver to begin their fourth tour of North America with Page.[43]
Their final album, Little Games, was released in July 1967, again only in the US. It was a commercial and critical non-entity. A cover of Harry Nilsson's "Ten Little Indians" charted briefly in the United States.
The Yardbirds spent much of the rest of that year touring in the US with new manager Peter Grant, their live shows becoming heavier and more experimental. The band rarely played their 1967 Most-produced singles on stage, preferring to mix the Beck-era hits with blues standards and experimental psychedelia such as "Glimpses", a Page-written piece from Little Games featuring bowed guitars, pre-recorded noise loops and a hypnotic wah-wah guitar groove. They also covered the Velvet Underground ("I'm Waiting for the Man") and Bob Dylan ("Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine") and American folk singer Jake Holmes, whose "Dazed and Confused", with overhauled arrangement by Page and lyrics modified by Relf, was shaped in fall of 1967 and a live fixture of the final American tour in 1968. "Dazed and Confused" went down so well that Page selected it for the first Led Zeppelin record, on which it appears with further revised lyrics and Page credited as writer. (Page and Holmes would settle on an "Inspired by" credit for Holmes in 2011).[44]
By 1968, the psychedelic blues rock of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was enormously popular, yet Relf and McCarty wished to pursue a style influenced by folk and classical music. Page wanted to continue with the kind of "heavy" music for which Led Zeppelin would become iconic. Dreja was developing an interest in photography. By March, Relf and McCarty had decided to leave but were persuaded by the other two to stay at least for one more American tour.
The band's final single was recorded in January and released two months later. Reflecting the divergences of the band members and their producer, the A-side, "Goodnight Sweet Josephine", was another Mickie Most-produced pop single, while the B-side, "Think About It", featured a proto-Zeppelin Page riff and snippets of the "Dazed and Confused" guitar solo. It failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
A concert and some album tracks were recorded in New York City in March and early April (including the unreleased song "Knowing That I'm Losing You", an early version of a track that would be re-recorded by Led Zeppelin as "Tangerine").[45] All were shelved at the band's request, but after Led Zeppelin became successful Epic tried to release the concert material as Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page. The album was quickly withdrawn after Page's lawyers filed an injunction.
The Yardbirds played their final shows on 31 May and 1 June at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and on 4 and 5 June at the Spring Fair at the Montgomery International Speedway in Alabama. The Los Angeles shows were documented in the bootleg release Last Rave-Up in L.A. The Yardbirds announced the departure of Relf and McCarty in a press release on 12 June ("Two Yardbirds Fly")[46] and returned home to play one last show, on 7 July 1968, at the College of Technology in Luton, Bedfordshire,[47][43] supported by the Linton Grae Sound.[48] Rolling Stone magazine announced the break-up by saying that Page "intends to go into solo recording work".[49]
The Yardbirds, The New Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin [ edit ]
Page and Dreja, with a tour of Scandinavia scheduled for late summer 1968,[46] saw the break-up as an opportunity to put a new lineup together with Page as producer and Grant as manager. Page initially described his vision for the new band as "a new sort of collage of sound" that would include mellotron keyboard while still featuring the guitar.[50] Procol Harum's B.J. Wilson, Paul Francis and session man Clem Cattini, who had guested on more than a few Yardbirds tracks under Most's supervision, were considered as drummers.[43] Young vocalist and composer Terry Reid was asked to replace Relf but declined because of a new recording contract with Most and recommended the then-unknown Robert Plant.[51][52] Plant, in turn, recommended his childhood friend John Bonham as a drummer.[53] Bassist/keyboardist/arranger John Paul Jones – who had worked with Page on countless sessions, including several with the Yardbirds – approached Page and offered his services;[54] Dreja bowed out to pursue a career as a rock photographer.[43] Rehearsals began in mid-August; in early September, Page's revised Yardbirds embarked as the New Yardbirds on the Scandinavian tour, after which the band returned to the UK to produce the debut Led Zeppelin album.
While Page's new roster still played a few songs from the Yardbirds' canon – usually "Train Kept a-Rollin'," "Dazed and Confused" or "For Your Love" and snatches of Beck's "Shapes of Things" solo – a name (and identity) change was in order in October 1968. They appeared on contracts, promotional material, ticket stubs[55] and other collateral as "The Yardbirds" or "The New Yardbirds" for three shows in October 1968, with the Marquee Club date reported as the Yardbirds' "farewell London appearance"[56] and the Liverpool University show 19 Oct. announced as the Yardbirds' "last ever appearance".[57] This may have been motivated, at least in part, by a cease-and-desist order from Dreja, who claimed that he maintained legal rights to "The Yardbirds" name,[58] although most sources indicate that Page and Grant fully intended to change the name after they returned from Scandinavia with or without the nudge from Dreja.[59] From 19 October 1968 onwards, they were Led Zeppelin, the name taken from The Who bandmembers Moon and Entwistle's "lead balloon" discussion of the "supergroup" that had played on the "Beck's Bolero" sessions in May 1966.[35] The spelling of "lead" was changed to avoid confusion over the pronunciation. This effectively marked the end of the Yardbirds for the next 24 years.[60]
After the Yardbirds [ edit ]
Jim McCarty, drums, the Yardbirds, 1963–68, 1992–present
Relf and McCarty formed an acoustic rock band called Together and then Renaissance, which recorded two albums for Island Records over a two-year period. McCarty formed the band Shoot in 1973. Relf, after producing albums for Medicine Head (with whom he also played bass) and Saturnalia, resurfaced in 1975 with a new quartet, Armageddon; a hybrid of heavy metal, hard rock and folk influences, which now included former Renaissance bandmate Louis Cennamo, drummer Bobby Caldwell (previously a member of Captain Beyond and Johnny Winter), and guitarist Martin Pugh (from Steamhammer, Rod Stewart's An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down, and most recently in 7th Order). They recorded one promising album before Relf died in an electrical accident in his home studio on 14 May 1976. In 1977, Illusion was formed, featuring a reunited lineup of the original Renaissance, including McCarty and Keith's sister Jane Relf.
In the 1980s McCarty, Dreja and Samwell-Smith formed a short-lived but fun Yardbirds semi-reunion called Box of Frogs, which occasionally included Beck and Page plus various friends with whom they had all recorded over the years. They recorded two albums for Epic, the self-titled "Box of Frogs" (1984) and "Strange Land" (1986). McCarty was also part of 'The British Invasion All-Stars' with members of Procol Harum, The Creation, the Nashville Teens, the Downliners Sect and The Pretty Things.[61] Phil May and Dick Taylor of the Pretty Things, together with McCarty, recorded two albums in Chicago as the Pretty Things-Yardbirds Blues Band – The Chicago Blues Tapes 1991 and Wine, Women, Whiskey, both produced by George Paulus.
The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Nearly all the original surviving musicians who had been part of the band's heyday, including Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, appeared at the ceremony. (Original lead guitarist Top Topham was not included.[62]) Eric Clapton, whose Hall of Fame induction was the first of three, was unable to attend because of his obligations while recording and working on a show for the MTV Unplugged series. Accepting the induction on behalf of the late Keith Relf were his wife April and son Danny.
Reformation [ edit ]
In 1992, Peter Barton from Rock Artist Management contacted Jim McCarty about the prospect of reforming the Yardbirds. McCarty was interested but only if Chris Dreja would agree, but at the time he thought it highly unlikely that Dreja would want to tour again. Barton then contacted Dreja, who agreed to give it a try. Their debut gig was booked at the Marquee Club in London along with the newly reformed Animals. It was a great success. The lineup featured John Idan handling bass and lead vocals. Barton managed the band and booked all their dates for over a decade; he still works with the band on occasion.
The Yardbirds at Langueux (France) 9 September 2006, left to right: John Idan, Jim McCarty (behind the drums) and Chris Dreja. Photo: Corentin Lamy.
In 2003, a new album, Birdland, was released under the Yardbirds name on the Favored Nations label by a lineup including Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty and new members Gypie Mayo (lead guitar, backing vocals), John Idan (bass, lead vocals) and Alan Glen (harmonica, backing vocals), which consisted of a mixture of new material mostly penned by McCarty and re-recordings of some of their greatest hits, with guest appearances by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Slash, Brian May, Steve Lukather, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, John Rzeznik, Martin Ditchum and Simon McCarty. Also, Jeff Beck reunited with his former bandmates on the song "My Blind Life". And then there was the rare and improbable guest appearance on stage in 2005 by their first guitarist from the 1960s, Top Topham.
Since the release of Birdland, Mayo was replaced briefly by Jerry Donahue, and subsequently in 2005 by the then 20-year-old Ben King, while Glen has been replaced by Billy Boy Miskimmin from Nine Below Zero fame. In 2007 the Yardbirds released a live CD, recorded on 19 July 2006, entitled Live at B.B. King Blues Club (Favored Nations), featuring the McCarty, Dreja, Idan, King and Miskimmin line-up. The first episode of the 2007/08 season for The Simpsons featured the Yardbirds' "I'm A Man" from the CD Live at B.B. King Blues Club (Favored Nations).
According to his website, Idan resigned from the Yardbirds in August 2008,[63] although his last gig with them was on Friday 24 April 2009, when they headlined the first concert in the new Live Room venue at Twickenham rugby stadium. This was also Glen's last gig with the band after temporarily standing in when Miskimmin was unavailable. Idan and Glen were replaced by Andy Mitchell (lead vocals, harmonica, acoustic guitar) and David Smale (bass, backing vocals), brother of the virtuoso guitarist Jonathan Smale. Dreja sat out the US spring 2012 tour to recover from an illness. It was announced in 2013 that he was leaving the band for medical reasons and would be replaced by original Yardbirds guitarist Topham.[64]
McCarty announced in December 2014 that the current lineup of the Yardbirds had disbanded. He told fans in an email that he would be "working on solo ventures and other Yardbirds projects in 2015.”[65] This has been proven to be untrue as the Yardbirds are on tour as of 2015.[66] In May 2015 Topham left the band and was replaced by Earl Slick,[67] though Slick never played a gig with the band.
In August 2015, it was announced they would play the Eel Pie Club in Twickenham, west London on 17 October with a line-up of Jim McCarty, John Idan, Ben King, David Smale and Billyboy Miskimmin. On 12 August 2015, it was announced that Boston-based guitarist Johnny A.[68] would become the newest member of the Yardbirds for their North American tour running from 30 October to 22 November 2015. Former Ram Jam harmonica player Myke Scavone joined the band at the end of 2015. On 15 April 2016, the band played at the Under the Bridge venue in London with a line-up of Jim McCarty, John Idan, Johnny A, Kenny Aaronson, and Billyboy Miskimmin.[69]
Godfrey Townsend replaces Johnny A in July 2018. Townsend had previously toured with John Entwistle, Alan Parsons and as musical director the past 10 years with the Happy Together tours.
Members [ edit ]
Current members
Discography [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources:In this episode, Clint describes his trip to the OP to meet the members of the Olympic Project during one of their expeditions. Included is a Class A encounter story, details about the hunt for DNA from the Nest Site, and a lengthy discussion about the amazing people involved with the group.
"I cannot possibly thank Derek, James, Shane, David, Shelly, Cindy and Barb enough. As well as all the others who welcomed me. The Olympic Project is a first class organization from top to bottom. Their focus is on hard science and research in their quest for answers. It's about family and friendship. I learned more in 2 days with those guys and gals than I'd ever amassed on my own. I can't recommend enough to everyone and anyone to jump at the opportunity to attend an expedition. Truly one of the highlights of my travels so far. Thanks again...I'm honored to call those involved friends." ~ Clint
Learn More About the Olympic ProjectARMONK, N.Y. - 10 Jan 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced that its inventors received a record 5,896 U.S. patents in 2010, marking the 18th consecutive year it has topped the list of the world’s most inventive companies. IBM became the first company to be granted as many as 5,000 U.S. patents in a single year. It took IBM's inventors more than 50 years to receive their first 5,000 patents after the company was established in 1911.
IBM received patents for a range of inventions in 2010, such as a method for gathering, analyzing, and processing patient information from multiple data sources to provide more effective diagnoses of medical conditions; a system for predicting traffic conditions based on information exchanged over short-range wireless communications; a technique that analyzes data from sensors in computer hard drives to enable faster emergency response in the event of earthquakes and other disasters; and a technology advancement for enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light instead of electrical signals, which can deliver increased performance of computing systems.
More than 7,000 IBM inventors residing in 46 different U.S. states and 29 countries generated the company's record-breaking 2010 patent tally. Inventors residing outside the U.S. contributed to more than 22% of the company's patents in 2010, representing a 27% increase over international inventor contributions during the last three years.
IBM’s 2010 patent total nearly quadrupled Hewlett-Packard’s and exceeded the combined issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, EMC, and Google.
2010 U.S. Patent Leaders* 1. IBM 5,896 2. Samsung 4,551 3. Microsoft 3.094 4. Canon 2,552 5. Panasonic 2,482 6. Toshiba 2,246 7. Sony 2,150 8. Intel 1,653 9. LG Electronics 1,490 10 H-P 1,480
Data provided by IFI CLAIMS Patent Services
“Patents, and the inventions they represent, reflect the commitment to innovation that has differentiated IBM and IBMers for a century,” said Kevin Reardon, general manager of Intellectual Property and vice president of Research Business Development for IBM. “Patent leadership is an important element of our high-value business strategy, which is focused on enabling instrumented, interconnected, intelligent infrastructures that can change how systems of all kinds work to support a smarter planet.”
IBM's inventiveness stems from the company's long-term commitment to development and bold, exploratory research. IBM spends approximately $6 billion in R&D annually.
This year marks IBM's Centennial, and from the first patent IBM received in 1911 for an invention related to punched card tabulation – to patents its inventors received in 2010 for analytics, core computing and software technologies, and smart utilities, traffic systems, and healthcare systems -- the company consistently has pursued a balanced and versatile intellectual property strategy that can translate into real-world solutions, and make systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and more responsive.
A few of the interesting and important inventions from IBM's 2010 patent total include:
U.S. Patent# 7,761,440: Methods, systems and computer program products for synthesizing diagnoses in healthcare databases - This patented invention enables improved analysis of healthcare data, which can enable a smarter healthcare system. Patent #7,761,440 was issued to IBM inventors Tony Chow, Robert Friedlander, Richard Hennessy and Anwer Kahn.
U.S. Patent #7,760,112: System and method based on short range wireless communications for notifying drivers of abnormal road traffic conditions - This invention predicts traffic conditions based on traffic information exchanged--via short range wireless communications--between vehicles. Patent #7,760,112 was issued to IBM inventors Frederic Bauchot and Gerard Marmigere.
U.S. Patent #7,693,663: System and method for detection of earthquakes and tsunamis, and interface to warning systems - The patent describes a technique that gathers and analyzes data from computer hard drive sensors to accurately and precisely conduct post-event analysis of seismic events, such as earthquakes, which can lead to more efficient emergency response needed following a natural disaster. Patent #7,693,663 was issued to IBM inventors Robert Friedlander and James Kraemer.
U.S. Patent #7,790,495: Optoelectronic device with germanium photodetector - This invention supports the CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology IBM introduced in December 2010. The technology, which integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enables computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), and is the culmination of a 10-year research effort across IBM's global research labs. Patent #7,790,495 was granted to IBM inventors Solomon Assefa, Walter Bedell, Yurii Vlasov and Fengnian Xia.
IBM inventors discuss what inspires them to invent in this video: http://tinyurl.com/2emca3w
For more information, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/research
Note to registered journalists and bloggers: You can view and download a VNR and images of our patent history at http://www.thenewsmarket.com/ibm. The VNR is available in HD, standard definition broadcast and streaming quality. [registration available online]Solid Explorer Coming to Android TV In The Coming Months
Your average user isn’t going to use a file browser to side load the latest update to their apps, they’d rather have it pushed out and update in the background silently. Fortunately for power users we have such great tools such as Solid Explorer. Till now it’s been seen as just a phone and tablet app. Then the developer of the app shared thoughts on an Android TV Version.
The following is a direct quote from a recent post:
As you already know I’m working on Android TV support. I’ve managed to adjust major remote control navigation issues, but I have to tell you that it’s still terrible. Perhaps I should totally change the UI to match Android TV ecosystem? This will probably take months to complete, but when done you could enjoy all SE features packed into convenient and intuitive leanback interface. This approach, however, would make SE for Android TV paid separately. Let me know what do you think.
Would you like to see Native Android TV support come to this App? Yes
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Anthony Garera Anthony is usually tinkering with everything and anything because there's always one more thing to do, reviewing games and apps and complaining about things normal people don't think about. More Posts - Website Follow Me:Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on Sunday said that mayhem caused by an executive order barring travelers from select Muslim countries was a "small price to pay" for the safety of Americans.
During an interview on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked Conway if the administration had made a mistake by failing to think through the chaos that would be caused Trump's executive order, which triggered the detention of permanent U.S. legal residents at airports across the country.
"You're talking about 325,000 people from overseas came into this country just yesterday through our airports," Conway replied. "You're talking about three hundred and some who have been detained or are prevented from gaining access to an aircraft in their home countries and must stay for now."
"That's 1 percent," she pointed out. "And I think in terms of the upside being greater protection of our borders, of our people, it's a small price to pay."
Conway was more exultant and even less compassionate last night tweeting on the story:The agitprop offensive against Donald Trump over the last two days has unmasked the breadth and scope of the anti-Trump opposition. The destroy Trump cadre includes most members of the press (written and electronic), the Democrats, the Socialists and the traditional Republican so-called moderates. It also includes civil servants, many in the intelligence community, who remain loyal to Barack Obama and are nothing more than embedded insurgents committed |
of globalist intervention. Her loss means they are now on the defensive, and like a cornered, enraged beast, they are lashing out with whatever they have in hand.
If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. This goes a long way in explaining the C.I.A's release of a painfully threadbare and politicized "report."
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.Seasons in the National Hockey League never unfurl quite the way they’re supposed to. Every team in the league is host to a multitude of surprises, both good and bad. Individual players overachieve, underachieve, blossom earlier than expected or see their development plateau, unable to get over the proverbial hump.
The 2016-17 Boston Bruins checked off every one of the aforementioned boxes. Both Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak shattered their previous respective scoring records. Marchand’s 85 points cemented his place among the league’s elite wingers, while his younger counterpart’s 70 points thrust him into the conversation for the first time.
Brandon Carlo, just 19 years old to begin the season, played 82 games of steady defense on Boston’s top pairing; no small feat for a guy selected in the second-round just one year prior. Dominic Moore, a man nearly twice Carlo’s age, had a bit of a renaissance last season. Signing just before camp for $900,000 on a one-year deal, the veteran pivot was an integral part of Boston’s bottom six and top-ranked penalty kill.
Unfortunately, not every surprise was a pleasant one. Matt Beleskey and Jimmy Hayes combined for just 13 points in 107 games, torpedoing the team’s third line. Malcolm Subban once again got a brief look as an NHL netminder and failed to finish the contest. He was pulled halfway through the affair for the second time in as many appearances. Ryan Spooner’s numbers and game regressed in a contract year, ending with multiple healthy-scratch designations in the playoffs.
The unexpected, good and bad, will happen every season to every team. Predicting how, and with whom, is the tricky part.
Regardless, I’ll take a crack at it. Who doesn’t enjoy attempting to predict the future, knowing full-well how foolish one can look in a year’s time?
Without further ado…
Charlie McAvoy Wins Calder Trophy
The road to unmatched rookie greatness will be a steep climb for the rearguard. Though his talent and ceiling are undeniable, the fact remains that just two of the previous ten Calder winners were defensemen. Points, and lots of them, historically have captured the eyes and votes of the Professional Hockey Writers Association.
I predict a season worthy of the award for Charlie McAvoy, and I believe the chips will fall in such a way that he edges out the stiff competition.
The path to the top is clearer this season for McAvoy than in seasons past. He figures to play big minutes in the top four for a presumptive playoff team in a major market. Extended time on the power play will bolster his offensive numbers and provide him with the opportunity to display his considerable talents with the puck. In the modern NHL, a defenseman’s ability to join the rush and inject offense is a prerequisite for any defenseman vying for an award, and McAvoy does so with aplomb.
It’s the same recipe that enabled Aaron Ekblad to capture the award in 2014-15. That season, Johnny Gaudreau, Mark Stone and Filip Forsberg all eclipsed 60 points. However, it was Ekblad’s impact at both ends of the ice in a top-four role (39 points, plus-12 rating) that brought home the hardware.
Outside Help
In addition to making his own case, McAvoy figures to receive a little outside assistance. Two of the presumptive candidates (Clayton Keller and Dylan Strome) play for the same team. We’ve seen time and again across all sports that teammates vying for the same award effectively steal votes from one another. Both Keller and Strome will receive ample ice time and figure to post solid numbers. The two also figure to frequently share the ice, and as such, separating their stats will be difficult. Is one the beneficiary of the other?
Two additional candidates, Kyle Connor and Joshua Ho-Sang, figure to play for teams that finish the season just outside the playoff bubble. Though excelling as a rookie on a non-playoff team doesn’t preclude a player from winning the award, it can serve as a de facto tiebreaker for voters when torn between two players.
Nico Hischier and Nolan Patrick find themselves in this category as well. Both project to be excellent future NHLers, but neither possesses the kind of franchise-altering talent of past top-two selections such as Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel.
As such, McAvoy figures to have an excellent shot at becoming Boston’s first Calder winner since Andrew Raycroft.
McIntyre Supplants Khudobin as Backup
Though he’s unlikely to win the job out of camp, Zane McIntyre will at some point this season replace Anton Khudobin as the team’s backup goaltender.
Khudobin was excellent down the stretch last season for Boston. A 6-1 record and.922 save percentage went a long way toward stabilizing the position. He could very well reprise that excellence to begin the upcoming campaign, but the law of averages suggests it’s only a matter of time before Boston turns to McIntyre.
In his last three seasons in the NHL, the Kazakh has posted a goals-against average of 2.64, 2.69 and 2.72. His save percentage? Even less impressive, at.904,.909 and.900.
Furthermore, Khudobin has of late failed to dominate the AHL when sent down, a la Jaroslav Halak last season. In Providence, a goals-against average (GAA) of 2.69 and save percentage of.898 through 11 appearances are hardly inspiring statistics. A 2.46 GAA over 31 appearances in San Diego the year prior is also inflated for a veteran netminder playing in the minor leagues.
Mighty Mac Himself
Conversely, McIntyre was a stud in his second season with the Baby B’s. His 2.03 GAA and.930 save percentage over 31 appearances were a marked improvement over his rookie year, and good enough to earn a trip to the AHL All-Star Game. He was a brick wall through two rounds of the AHL playoffs, backstopping Providence to the Conference Final. His 50 saves on 51 shots versus Wilkes-Barre Scranton in the deciding game of the first round were Tim Thomas-esque.
His initial foray to the NHL was not quite as successful. He finished the season 0-4-1, with a GAA just a hair under 4.00. However, McIntyre is hardly the first goaltender to initially struggle at the NHL level. Considering the significant improvement he made from Year 1 to Year 2, it stands to reason that Year 3 will be even better.
He may not be the heir apparent to Tuukka Rask, but I (and most of my colleagues) believe this is the year that Boston finally finds the steady backup they’ve spent seasons looking for. Throw some paint on that mask, kid!
Ryan Spooner Finishes Season Outside Boston
Many, including yours truly, expected Ryan Spooner to already be playing elsewhere. Despite having several in-house candidates to center the third line, uncertainty, arbitration and few dance partners for a trade forced Boston’s hand in re-signing the 25-year-old to a one-year deal.
I can’t remember a time when Spooner wasn’t reportedly on the team’s trade block. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if the constant chatter and uncertainty have played a role in his arrested development. Though 39 points through 78 games last season wasn’t terrible, it did represent his lowest scoring rate since the 2013-14 season. Inconsistency has plagued him for his entire Bruins career.
Spooner has submitted a 213-game portfolio highlighting sharp hands and vision, blazing straight-line speed, and slippery agility. But he’s also exhibited slack defensive-zone coverage and spotty even-strength presence. It’s all made for a shrug of the shoulders when projecting how the Bruins will proceed with the next segment of his career. The same could be said about each of Spooner’s shifts. -Fluto Shinzawa (Boston Globe) April 8, 2017
Pack It Up, Pack It In
One of two things will happen this season to make Spooner a likely trade chip prior to the trade deadline. Jakob Forsbacka-Karlsson is viewed as the heir apparent centering the third line. Should he prove ready to assume the role at some point this season, Spooner will once again be a man without a home. The experiment playing on the wing never did pan out, and his style of play is not conducive to a fourth line role, at least not within Boston’s philosophy.
Should “JFK” require a touch more seasoning, an alternate scenario could send Spooner packing. With so many talented prospects vying for spots on the wing, it’s possible that several will play well enough to warrant NHL roles. In this occurrence, David Backes likely becomes the new third-line center, sliding back into his natural position.
He may lack Spooner’s explosiveness, but his two-way approach and success on the dot (fourth in Selke voting in 2013-14) make him an ideal steadying presence centering a bottom-six line.
Be it in the form of another defenseman or impact goalscorer, Boston will be looking for a boost come February. Should Boston look to make a “hockey trade” with another contender, Spooner’s speed and deft playmaking will be attractive to clubs looking for depth down the middle.
Should the B’s look to pilfer talent from a “seller,” his $2.8 million cap hit leaving the books would likely enable the team to sneak a large, expiring contract under the cap. Furthermore, his pending RFA status and team control would be attractive to a rebuilding club.
One way or another, expect Ryan Spooner to end the 2017-18 season outside of Boston.
Kenny Agostino Earns (and Keeps) Middle-Six Role
The Bruins boast an impressive stable of young talent at wing. Anders Bjork, Jake DeBrusk, Danton Heinen, Peter Cehalrik and Zachary Senyshyn provide excitement and hope for the seasons ahead. However, it will be Boston’s newest addition at the position to make waves this year.
Kenny Agostino led the AHL in scoring last season with 83 points in just 65 games. A seven-game stint with St. Louis yielded three points and 17 shots on goal, illuminating his confidence in playing to his talents at the highest level.
As we’ve seen in years past, not every player who lights up the AHL is guaranteed success with the big boys. Most recently, Seth Griffith torched opponents to the tune of 77 points in 57 games with Providence during the 2015-16 season; good for second place in the entire AHL. Since that campaign, he has just six points (all assists) over 28 games in the NHL.
Where Agostino differs from Griffith and similar players is the speed at which he plays the game. At just 5-foot-9, Griffith’s lack of quickness and speed has proved too lethal a combination to bring about success in the NHL. Agostino, however, has the necessary speed, and then some.
Size+Skill+Speed=Spot
Bruce Cassidy has quickly done an admirable job in tailoring Boston’s style and game plan to the modern era. Speed kills, and it’s a philosophy that is finally being embraced in Boston.
Kenny Agostino can really scoot. More importantly, he can make plays at that speed. He possesses a nifty pair of hands, solid spatial and situational awareness, and excellent passing and finishing ability.
Now, that can be said for pretty much all of Boston’s prospects at the position. However, it’s Agostino’s experience that will likely give him a leg-up in training camp. With 214 games of professional experience between the AHL and NHL, he, unlike his internal competition, knows exactly what to expect. He’s been through the rigors of 70-plus game seasons, call-ups and demotions. Moreover, he’s shown steady improvement in each of his three full pro seasons, culminating with last year’s MVP campaign.
Combine that talent and experience with a 6-foot, 202-pound frame and steady two-way game, and you have a player who figures to carve out a year-long role in the team’s middle six, perhaps even alongside David Krejci and David Pastrnak. Agostino has a legitimate chance to be this season’s Jonathan Marchessault.
Brad Marchand Comes Up Shy of 70 Points
“The Little Ball of Hate,” fresh off an eight-year, $49 million extension figures to have an excellent season; don’t let the headline fool you. I still expect Brad Marchand to eclipse 30 goals while being a key cog in the engine that drives the Bruins.
But when looking at his career numbers, one thing is immediately, abundantly clear: Last season’s 46 assists are quite the aberration.
In fact, prior to last season, Marchand had never eclipsed 30 assists in one campaign, much less 40. His 18 assists during the strike-shortened 2012-13 campaign represented a rate of 30-plus assists per 82 games (33, to be precise), but nevertheless, the official benchmark had otherwise evaded him. His career average of 24 assists per 82 games is barely half of last season’s total.
Granted, he has taken his game to new heights over the past two seasons, evolving from talented pest into bona fide stud. And as long as he and Patrice Bergeron play together, the two will continue driving possession and scoring goals. But last season’s 85 points were a whopping 25 more than his previous career high; that screams unsustainable.
Why the Projected Regression?
Last season’s offensive output is likely unsustainable for several reasons.
For starters, Pastrnak will not be reprising his role from last season’s first half as the right wing alongside Marchand and Bergeron. This year, Pastrnak’s presence will likely be required alongside David Krejci in an attempt to make Boston’s top six matchup-proof. Only when the team is down a goal late should we expect a Nose-Face/Pasta reunion.
David Backes may not have had an ideal season offensively, but his strength, frame and net-front presence bought plenty of time and space for Marchand when the two were flanking Bergeron. There’s a chance that he too may not be reprising his role on the line in an attempt to further distribute offense throughout the lineup.
It’s quite possible Backes finds his ideal fit alongside Ryan Spooner this season, feasting on an opponent’s depth while helping to mask some of Spooner’s deficiencies defensively and on faceoffs.
The Halifax native’s offensive zone starts are also set to dip slightly this season. A year ago, 55 percent of his starts came in the offensive zone; a career high. With Dominic Moore departing, Bergeron will likely be called upon slightly more frequently to take defensive-zone draws.
The man will continue to score goals, and plenty of them. In fact, I predict Marchand will have the second-best statistical output of his career this season. However, a lack of elite talent on his right wing and the law of averages suggest a regression of sorts. Something along the lines of 30-plus goals and assists will leave Brad Marchand just shy of a 70-point campaign.From Sin to Science: Astrological Explanations for the Black Death, 1347-1350
By Rebecca Johnson
Ex Post Facto: Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University, Vol.18 (2009)
Introduction: By the time the first wave of the Black Death engulfed Western Europe, the validity of “natural” astrology was firmly accepted by literate elites. Associated with the revival of Aristotelian learning begun in the twelfth century, the concept that “superior” bodies such as stars and planets exercised at least a general influence on earthly events enjoyed a wide currency among clergy as well as laymen. A significant number of scholars doubted—whether based on the heretical implications of the idea, or their own empirical observations—that the stars actually determined the fate of individuals. But even they had to concede, on the evidence of the seasons and tides, that broader forces might emanate from the heavens. This naturalistic discourse of the stars ran parallel to (and often intersected with) the discourse of Christian apocalyptic, in which celestial bodies generally functioned as omens rather than causes. The rising prominence of both discourses during the fourteenth century ensured that the stars would play a central role in contemporary efforts to make sense of the plague’s devastation.
These efforts varied from deterministic analyses focused on the mechanical influences of the celestial spheres, to primarily apocalyptic readings that employed astrological illusions to buttress their authority. They also included accounts that, though mentioning astrology only incidentally, reveal how deeply embedded the idea that the planets were in some way responsible for events on earth had become in the plague discourse shared by the learned.
Although the degree of formal astrology employed in each varies, these accounts contrasted strikingly with contemporary arguments that the plague represented divine retribution for mankind’s sins. In this sense, they can be seen to represent the growth of a world-view that, if not quite “scientific” in the modern use of the word, was nonetheless increasingly deterministic and objective. This perspective was not necessarily irreconcilable with the idea of a vengeful God choosing to punish humanity for its trespasses at a particular moment in time. In the Aristotelian universe elaborated by scholastic thinkers, which received its definitive form in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, God was characterized as the primum movens, or first cause, of all things. He might thus be understood as operating through proximate causes, using the planets as vehicles to communicate his wrath.
Click here to read this article from Ex Post Facto: Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University
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our weekly emailThe good news: Fewer landlords are planning rent hikes than last year. The bad news: Despite the ongoing eruption of apartment buildings across the region, rents are still increasing.
The good news: Fewer landlords are planning rent hikes than last year. The bad news: Despite the ongoing eruption of apartment buildings across the region, rents are still rising.
The average one-bedroom rent in King County is $1,266, up 8 percent over the past 12 months, according to a new report.
In much of the Seattle area, the pace of hikes appears to be slowing as thousands of new apartment units open and more properties offer renters greater inducements to move in, according to Dupre+Scott Apartment Advisors.
Seattle’s highest and lowest rents Average one bedroom: $1,871 Belltown, downtown and South Lake Union, up 4.1% over a year ago. $1,063 Rainier Valley, up 8.4% over a year ago.
About 11 percent of King County landlords in the firm’s March survey of apartment properties with at least 20 units said they offered concessions that average $1,066. And only one-third of landlords said they plan to increase rent in the next six months, compared with 81 percent in last year’s spring survey.
But March’s vacancy rate of 3.2 percent was the lowest in nearly two decades, and the 8 percent annual gain in rent was still more than double the average annual gain from 1998 to 2012.
“It still is a tight rental market,” said Mike Scott, co-owner of the Seattle market-research firm. “It will soften up,” he predicted, but “it’s not going to do it immediately, overnight.”
The average renter in the three-county Seattle metro area is devoting nearly 31 percent of monthly income to rent, according to Seattle real-estate website Zillow. Most experts agree a housing cost over 30 percent is considered unaffordable.
That lack of affordability has wider implications.
“Rapidly rising rents, coupled with only meager income growth, means an ever-increasing share of income is siphoned off to rent every month, and not into a savings account for a down payment on a home,” Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries said in an email. “If this keeps up, renting will no longer be a steppingstone, but could instead become a barrier to homeownership.”
Wide differences
The countywide average rent masks huge variations in what renters are paying across the region.
Among the major cities, Kirkland’s one-bedroom rent of $1,522 was the highest, followed by Mercer Island, Seattle, Bellevue and Issaquah. These rents don’t include utilities or parking.
The lowest rent in major cities in King and Snohomish counties was in SeaTac ($784). Auburn, Everett, Marysville and Federal Way also had among the lowest rents.
Within Seattle, downtown led all neighborhoods with the highest average one-bedroom rent, at $1,871. Dupre+Scott includes Belltown and South Lake Union in its downtown statistics.
A slew of popular, close-in neighborhoods aren’t far behind, with average rents in a narrow range between $1,425 and $1,533: Ballard, Queen Anne, Green Lake, Fremont, Wallingford, Capitol Hill, Eastlake, First Hill and the Central Area.
The lowest rents in Seattle were at the fringes: $1,063 in Rainier Valley and $1,072 in North Seattle, according to data from Dupre+Scott.
The apartment-construction boom is skewing the statistics for average rents and annual rent growth, Scott said.
Among older properties in King County, the lowest average one-bedroom rent was $962 for apartments built from 1975 to 1984, according to Dupre+Scott. By contrast, the average rent in units built since 2010 is the highest, at $1,723.
Apartment boom
Developers are expected to open about 12,000 units this year, Scott said, with 11,000 more units next year and even more in 2017.
Some market observers have predicted the apartment-construction boom would eventually lead to high vacancies and softer rents.
But that hasn’t come to pass yet.
For example, in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, where a five-year building frenzy has more than doubled the number of apartment units, the average rent in March was 13 percent higher over the year. The vacancy rate was 3 percent, up from 1.2 percent a year ago, but still low enough to be considered a landlord’s market.
“We were surprised and impressed with the performance of the Ballard area,” said Tom Cain, head of market-research firm Apartment Insights Washington, in a recent report.
Including units in new properties that are still leasing up, the gross vacancy rate in King and Snohomish counties is about 6.6 percent, the highest in four years, Cain said.
Despite all the new construction, rents aren’t expected to fall.
Strong job growth and a tough housing market will keep renters in apartments. First-time homebuyers don’t have many homes to choose from, and homes are less affordable than a year ago, Cain said.
No longer in top 10
The slowdown in rent growth means that, for the first time in five years, the Seattle-Tacoma metro wasn’t in the top 10 markets nationally, according to MPF Research.
In the first quarter, the average Seattle metro rent grew 5.3 percent annually, ranking 14th in the nation. The Denver-Boulder area ranked first with a 10.5 percent increase, and Oakland and San Francisco each posted 10.2 percent gains.
Seattle’s rank contrasts with mid-2013, when it led the nation in rent hikes, according to one firm’s tally.
While the pace of rent hikes is slowing, thanks to strong job growth, demand remains high: The Seattle area ranked 10th among the metros in net apartments leased in the first quarter.
Nationally, the rent for new leases after move-in incentives was up 4.6 percent over the past 12 months, MPF reported. That’s higher than the 3.2 percent gain seen a year ago.
“Accelerating job creation is allowing more young adults to form new households, and almost all of the new households are opting to rent,” said Greg Willett, MPF Research vice president, in a statement. “At the same time, relatively few of the more-established renters are leaving apartments to make home purchases for the first time.”
Despite the easing of rent increases, working- and middle-class renters nationwide still have a tough time finding a place to call home, he said.
“Product availability is very limited in the middle-priced and most-affordable properties across the entire country,” Willett said. “The bulk of the available stock is found in brand new, expensive projects that are moving through the initial lease-up process.”The bond between a parent and a child is unparalleled. A parent and child grow and mature simultaneously, and become the biggest parts of each other’s lives. Being able to see your child make decisions (good or bad) and learn from their accomplishments and mistakes are some of the most rewarding moments in a parent’s life. A parent not getting the chance to experience these times with their child is a gut-wrenching feeling.
18-year old J.J. Mangina lived with his father for most of his childhood in the city of Cleveland, Ohio. Mangina spent his days doing normal kid stuff. He excelled in school where he achieved straight A’s. He was an athlete that starred for Cleveland High School, and he shared a great relationship with his dad who was a single parent. Or so he thought.
When Mangina was applying for colleges in his senior year of high school, one of his school counselors noticed a peculiar discrepancy with his identification. It turns out he wasn’t quite who he thought he was, and that his dad certainly had a lot of explaining to do.
Image Source: Heavy.comTEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israeli entrepreneur Avi Brenmiller says he was coaxed by investors into selling Solel, his solar-thermal power firm, to Germany’s Siemens for $418 million in 2009. Today, little is left of it after Siemens pulled out of the business.
Germany's then-President Christian Wulff (R) and Avi Brenmiller, CEO of Siemens' solar receiver production plant, wear protective glasses during a visit to the plant in Beit Shemesh in this November 29, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/Files
From a thriving company that employed over 500 people, Solel has been reduced to a factory with 50 workers.
Brenmiller’s experience is one of a growing number of cases illustrating the double-edged nature of Israel’s high-tech boom.
While many entrepreneurs and investors have made lots of money from Israel’s start-ups over the past two decades, increasingly firms acquired by foreign buyers are then either shut down, with their intellectual property moving abroad, or turned into R&D centers for the parent company.
Israel’s high tech industry is a major growth engine and investment magnet, attracting multinationals like Apple, Intel and Google, who have been eager to snap up local start-ups.
High-tech goods and services account for 12.5 percent of Israel’s gross domestic product (GDP) and half of its industrial exports, government data shows. Israel leads the OECD when it comes to R&D, spending 4.3 percent of GDP on it, nearly twice the OECD average, according to Ernst & Young.
Companies often tap into the skills of workers trained in the military or intelligence sectors and start-ups benefit from tax breaks and government funding.
But Karin Mayer Rubinstein, head of the Israel Advanced Technology Industry association, said that while M&A brought money into Israel, patents were being “vacuumed” out.
“In the last few years, most of the companies being bought don’t stay here as a separate entity,” she said.
JOBS WARNING
Many Israeli companies are not growing into global players that acquire others rather than being acquired. This trend is creating an economic problem, said tech pioneer Dov Moran, who sold his firm M-Systems - which developed the USB flash drive - to SanDisk for $1.6 billion.
He said some companies should be sold because they would not be successful on their own. He pointed to Google’s $1 billion acquisition of mapping start-up Waze as one such case.
“But the fact that companies are sold is not really great for the country. Only R&D is kept in Israel, not sales, not logistics,” Moran said. “We need companies that are creating jobs not just for talented engineers and programmers.”
After job creation in the high-tech sector grew an average of 2.5 percent annually from 2004-2012, it has started to shrink, contracting nearly 2 percent in total in the past two years, government figures show, even as the overall jobless rate fell.
Looking back, Moran said that had he stayed the course, M-Systems could have grown to a company with $3-$4 billion a year in sales. Today it operates as a SanDisk R&D center and its workforce has fallen to 700 from 1,000 before the sale in 2006.
There are 282 R&D centers in Israel, most owned by foreign firms. Eight out of 10 Israeli technology firms bought by multinationals become a foreign R&D center in Israel, or are integrated in existing foreign R&D centers, said the Israel Venture Capital (IVC) Research Center.
Entrepreneurs say investors are often looking for high returns as quickly as possible.
“To build a long-term success story takes hard work, many years and lots of patience,” Brenmiller said.
Patience is not a strong point in Israel’s start-up culture, where entrepreneurs like to move from one idea to the next.
Israeli venture capital-backed companies take an average of 3.95 years from the first round of funding to acquisition, compared with 6.41 years in Britain and 6.66 in France, according to third-quarter 2014 figures from Dow Jones VentureSource.
SIGNS OF MATURITY
Solel is not alone in its experience. Chromatis Networks was one of the biggest acquisitions ever of an Israeli company when it was bought by Lucent in 2000, but was shut down about a year later. IBM closed XIV in 2008 about a year after it paid $300 million for the storage technology firm, according to IVC.
But there are some signs the sector is starting to mature as more companies are willing to wait longer before selling, aiming to build themselves up to a stand-alone size.
In 2014 there were 70 Israeli “exits” - stake sales from mergers, acquisitions or initial public offerings (IPOs) - valued at nearly $15 billion, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). But of that, $9.8 billion was in IPOs - up from $1.2 billion in 2013 - while the value of M&A fell to $5 billion from $6.5 billion.
This can partly be attributed to the fact many successful entrepreneurs are on their second or third company, said Rubi Suliman, head of high-tech at PwC Israel.
Brenmiller is one such case. He poured $20 million from the sale of Solel into establishing Brenmiller Energy, which has developed a more efficient way to store heat from the sun.
To keep more companies, the Israeli government needs a long-term plan for incentives and support rather than simply early-stage aid, Rubinstein said.
With wealthier entrepreneurs and less pressure to sell, some believe Israel could begin producing more large companies such as network security provider Check Point Software.
“It is very understandable that a second-time entrepreneur with a large bank account is much more patient in his next venture and much more willing to take risks,” said Suliman.In a video released on Nov. 16 that showed the execution of Syrian soldiers and the severed head of an American, the Islamic State highlighted the oaths of allegiance that jihadists from several countries swore to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi last week.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published at The Daily Beast.
Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the al Qaeda offshoot that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria, has claimed to have beheaded yet another Western hostage, along with more than a dozen captured Syrian soldiers. In a newly-released video, a henchman for the group stands over what appears to be the severed head of Peter Kassig, a former US Army Ranger turned aid worker who was kidnapped in Syria in late 2013.
From the Islamic State’s perspective, such videos serve multiple purposes. They are meant to intimidate the organization’s enemies in the West and elsewhere, show defiance in the face of opposition, and to convince other jihadists that Baghdadi’s state is the strong horse. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s rival, long ago determined that graphic beheading videos do more harm than good for the jihadists’ cause, as they turn off more prospective supporters than they earn. But the Islamic State has clearly come to the opposite conclusion, cornering the market on savagery.
There is no doubt that the Islamic State’s ranks have swelled over the past year. Young recruits, in particular, have been attracted to the organization’s brazen violence. But Baghdadi has had much less success in attracting the allegiance of established jihadist organizations, many of which remain openly loyal to al Qaeda.
At first blush, Baghdadi had a big day on Nov. 10. Jihadists from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen all swore allegiance to Baghdadi in what was intended to be a show of global support for the self-appointed caliph. The Islamic State has been attempting to win the support of jihadists at the expense of al Qaeda, so the messages were widely heralded by Baghdadi’s boosters. Indeed, the group highlighted the oaths of allegiance in yesterday’s beheading video.
Baghdadi accepted the various loyalty oaths three days later in an audio message released on Nov. 13. The Islamic State leader’s speech served multiple purposes. It demonstrated that he was alive, contradicting thinly-sourced claims that he had been killed in airstrikes earlier in the month. And it gave Baghdadi the opportunity to praise his new minions, blessing them as his official representatives.
Baghdadi offered “glad tidings” as he trumpeted “the expansion of the Islamic State to new lands, to the lands of al Haramain [meaning Saudi Arabia] and Yemen, and to Egypt, Libya and Algeria.” Baghdadi accepted “the bayat (oath of allegiance) from those who gave us bayat in those lands” and pronounced “the nullification” of all other jihadist “groups therein.” He also announced the creation of “new wilayah [provinces] for the Islamic State” in all five countries, adding that the group would appoint “wali [provincial leaders] for them.” All jihadists in these areas, and indeed all Muslims, must now obey the Islamic State’s official representatives, according to Baghdadi and his supporters.
Of course, the Islamic State doesn’t really have provinces stretching from North Africa through the heart of Arabia. But how strong is Baghdadi’s network in all five countries? The short answer is: We don’t really know.
In three of the five countries–Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen–the jihadists who swore loyalty oaths to Baghdadi were anonymous. And they don’t represent any well-established terrorist organizations either.
For instance, the Islamic State has failed, thus far, to garner the allegiance of Ansar al Sharia Libya, which is notorious for its role in the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks in Benghazi and remains one of the most powerful jihadist organizations in eastern Libya. None of Ansar al Sharia’s allies in the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council, the Islamist coalition fighting General Khalifa Haftar’s forces for control of territory, pledged allegiance to Baghdadi. The Islamic State has supporters in Libya, particularly among the jihadist youth. But other groups are still, by all outward appearances, more entrenched.
Similarly, the messages from Saudi Arabia and Yemen were attributed generically to the “mujahideen” in both countries. Baghdadi and his supporters have attempted, and failed, to woo al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on multiple occasions.
AQAP, which is headquartered in Yemen, is the strongest jihadist group in the heart of Arabia. Some have assumed that the only person keeping AQAP loyal to al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri is Nasir al Wuhayshi, a protégé of Osama bin Laden who serves as both AQAP’s leader and as al Qaeda’s global general manager. There is no basis for this assumption. There are al Qaeda loyalists throughout AQAP’s chain-of-command.
A few AQAP ideologues have been quite vocal in their support for the Islamic State, but there was an interesting twist in this part of the story this past week.
Mamoon Hatem has been the Islamic State’s most zealous supporter within AQAP. Hatem frequently uses his Twitter feed, which has been suspended multiple times, to sing the Islamic State’s praises. Hatem encouraged Baghdadi to proclaim himself the new caliph even before the Islamic State’s caliphate announcement in late June. Before this past week, it was reasonable to assume that Hatem may break away from AQAP to form his own branch of the Islamic State.
That is still a possibility. Curiously, however, Hatem refused to endorse the group of unknown “mujahideen” in Yemen who swore allegiance to Baghdadi on Nov. 10. In a series of more than 20 tweets, Hatem admitted that he tried to get AQAP to switch allegiances from Zawahiri to Baghdadi. But Hatem explained that he failed for a number of reasons. And he said that the pro-Islamic State message out of Yemen would only exacerbate the many difficulties AQAP currently faces inside the country. This was no time to jump ship, Hatem argued, given that AQAP is hunted by the US while also embroiled in a vicious fight against the Houthis, Shiite rebels who have barnstormed throughout the country.
Hatem said he still wants the Islamic State to expand the territory under its control, including to parts of the Arabian Peninsula. But he doesn’t want Baghdadi to do so in a way that further divides the jihadists. Hatem said the men loyal to Baghdadi inside Yemen include “students,” but offered few other details. Hatem’s tweets indicate that, once again, the Islamic State is attracting |
next year."
Follow senior tech writer on Twitter @jguynn.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1SU559WThe following is an op-ed written by the staff sergeant who accosted you in the Marine Corps Exchange.
Ay there, devil dog! Yes, you! Get over here, yoohoo. Quick, fast, and in a hurry. “Aye aye, Staff Sergeant, ersumshit?” And I know we always give the daggone proper greeting of the day. Who’s your 1stSgt? You know what — belay that, just listen.
I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. I don’t like seein’ warfighters slimin’ around, smokin’ and jokin’, diddyboppin’ like they’re back on the block. You need to fix yourself before I can let you back out there hookin’ and jabbin’. You trackin’?
No impact, no idea?
I’m gonna break it down Barney-style for you then, soup to nuts. I’m gonna orientate you to all the wickets, so it would behoove of you to pay attention. Just for your S.A., this little hip pocket class is about daggone good order and discipline, you trackin’?
That daggone haircut on your grape is unsat, you trackin’? And that shave is bad-to-go, you trackin’? I get it, maybe you were just downrange, playin’ secret squirrel, all high-speed low-drag.
But I can’t have motivators walkin’ around my installation lookin’ like a soup sandwich.
I aint just runnin’ my suck for no reason, either. This is called puttin’ the S in BAMCIS, you trackin’?
And if you’re feelin’ lost in the sauce, well, sometimes you just gotta press the “I believe” button, drink the kool aid, and shut up and color. If you can get all that knowledge in your brain housing group, it’s gonna set you up for success… you trackin’, devil dog?
And just to caveat off of that: remember the buddy system, devil dog. Try goin’ alone and unafraid and you’re fixin’ to take one through the running lights, good-to-go? Now I’m gonna pop smoke, because I’ve gotta get oscar mike here in a few minutes. Just take this informal counseling as another tool for your tool kit.
You trackin’? ‘Rah.“I made a mistake and humbly ask for your forgiveness,” Gianforte says in his letter, acknowledging that his behavior was “unprofessional, unacceptable and unlawful.”
Jacobs was covering the special election for the state’s lone House seat last month when he asked the millionaire Republican candidate a question about health care. According to Jacobs and a Fox News crew that witnessed the attack, Gianforte responded by putting both hands around Jacobs’ neck, slamming him into the floor and punching him.
Jacobs said Gianforte “body-slammed” him and broke his glasses. The candidate’s team issued a statement blaming the “liberal” reporter. The following day, Gianforte won the special election, despite being charged with misdemeanor assault.
Gianforte’s apology does not directly address why his campaign first blamed the reporter for the altercation. The letter does, however, say that Jacobs “did not initiate any physical contact” with Gianforte. “I take full responsibility,” Gianforte adds.
Gianforte said he was making a $50,000 donation to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Jacobs has already donated money to the group from a GoFundMe account set up so he could buy new glasses.
The Guardian reporter will donate his broken glasses to the Newseum, at the Washington museum’s request.
Jacobs said he accepts the apology.
“I have accepted Mr. Gianforte’s apology and his willingness to take responsibility for his actions and statements,” Jacobs said in a statement. “I hope the constructive resolution of this incident reinforces for all the importance of respecting the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and encourages more civil and thoughtful discourse in our country”
Gianforte acknowledged the “critical role” of journalists, and that First Amendment protections for the press are core to American democracy.
He asked to postpone his court date, and is now scheduled to appear on or before June 20, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported. He faces a maximum punishment of six months in jail and a $500 fine.Scotland’s marine wildlife will be put at risk when a piece of legislation protecting it expires, environmental groups have warned.
WWF Scotland and RSPB Scotland said the EU failed to meet a deadline this month to introduce the amendments needed to extend the life of an agreement known as the fisheries Technical Conservation Regulation, designed to protect sensitive marine environments and species.
They said the conservation of vulnerable Scottish fish stocks could also be at risk when the legislation expires at midnight tonight.
The charities warned that the EU would no longer be able to legally prevent certain activities in fragile marine areas, such as the use of deep-sea gill nets.
Now, the groups are calling on the European Parliament, Council and Commission to resolve any outstanding issues as a matter of urgency and to introduce emergency measures early in the new year.
Helen McLachlan, senior marine policy officer at WWF Scotland, said: “It’s totally unacceptable that a failure to agree procedure at a European level is able to put at risk hard-fought protection for key species, fisheries and marine areas around Scotland and beyond.”
Kara Brydson, of RSPB Scotland, added: “Protecting marine wildlife from the worst effects of fishing shows the EU at its very best.
“We trust that the EU institutions will not play Russian roulette with our wildlife, and will come back around the table to ensure that vital conservation measures remain in place.”Missouri gun owners will now be able to carry concealed weapons without a permit or any training.
The new gun laws took affect January 1-- including one KC police chief Daryl Forte fought against.
The law, which was passed by the Republican-led legislature despite a veto by outgoing Gov. Jay Nixon, expands the state’s “castle doctrine,” which permits homeowners to use deadly force against intruders. The revised law will allow invited guests, like babysitters, to use lethal force.
The measure also would create a “stand-your-ground” right, meaning people no longer would need to retreat from danger before shooting in any place they are legally entitled to be present.
Kansas City police chief Darryl Forte says even though professional training is no longer mandatory, people should still get it for the well-being of anyone who comes into their home.
In a blog post, Forte points out several instances where children were victims of accidental gun violence. That includes both a 18-month-old girl who shot and killed herself and a 5-year-old boy who accidentally killed his 3-year-old brother.
He also said research by Innocents Lost found that 70 percent of unintentional child gun deaths could have been prevented by proper storage alone.
That includes using gun locks, which are given out at the KCPD.
National Rifle Association spokeswoman Nicole Waugh said in an email that the new laws will make Missouri safer and allow law-abiding gun owners to carry firearms and protect themselves.
Opponents argue the opposite.
“Now there will be people among us when we’re out with our kids who are carrying concealed firearms without any training at all. Some of them could be dangerous people,” said Becky Morgan, leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “That’s just our new reality.”
Criminal laws
The first comprehensive overhaul of Missouri’s criminal laws since 1979 will finally take effect, two years after lawmakers passed the changes in 2014.
The 600-page revision of the criminal code reduces possible prison sentences for some nonviolent drug crimes, and jail time will no longer be a possibility for first-time offenders convicted of possessing less than 10 grams of marijuana. Possessing up to 35 grams of the drug was punishable by up to a year in prison under the previous criminal code.
“The smaller amounts are not what we need to be concerned with,” said state Sen. Bob Dixon, a Springfield Republican who helped draft the legislation.
Also under the bill, people who drive while intoxicated or sexually abuse their family members would face harsher prison sentences than under current law.
Other changes include more options for sentencing in felony cases.
A new misdemeanor class also will be enacted that won’t include jail time as a possibility. Crimes that fall under that category include driving with a suspended or revoked license.
Missouri Bar President Dana Tippin Cutler said the overhaul “will make better use of taxpayer funds.”
Critics say the proposal did not receive enough vetting. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon allowed it to pass into law without his signature.
Welfare and health-related laws
The Department of Social Services will contract with a private company to check welfare recipients’ eligibility for benefits, including food stamps, child care, Medicaid and cash welfare payments. The law calls for a private company to flag questionable cases for state employees to review further. It would still be up to agency staff to make a final determination of eligibility.
Health insurers will be required to cover “medically necessary” mental and physical treatment of eating disorders provided by licensed experts under another new law. The goal is to ensure families have access to care for not just the physical aspects of eating disorders, but also the underlying mental issues.
Another law adds “bubble boy disease” to a list of conditions infants are screened for in Missouri. Severe combined immunodeficiency affects about one in 50,000 live births. It impairs the immune system, making infants susceptible to infections. Screenings will only take place if lawmakers set aside enough money for tests.
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Like 41 Action News on Facebook:A man has called for answers after a can of Irn-Bru exploded in his fridge, blowing the door wide open and frightening his dog.
Bud Kane was at his Aberdeen home with his pet dog Parker when the multipack can inexplicably blew up, shattering the lid and blasting the fridge door open.
AG Barr, which makes the drink, said it was investigating the incident.
The experience, said Mr Kane, left his two-year-old beagle Parker in shock and with “toilet problems” – and he has asked the manufacturers of the popular Scottish soft drink to explain what could have gone wrong.
Mr Kane, 62, said: “I’ve been drinking Irn Bru for years and nothing like this has ever happened before. You don’t expect your fridge to blow up.”
Explaining what happened, the former manager of the Gray’s Inn pub, said: “I was two rooms away and heard a loud bang.
“I was confused as to what it could have been so I came into the room and saw Parker there in shock. Things were coming out of him at both ends.
“I saw the fridge opened and checked what had happened -– the explosion had taken the top of the can straight off and there was a strange red substance on the lid. Maybe that’s the secret ingredient – who knows?”
Along with Mr Kane, his daughter Jennifer, 38, and granddaughter Alex, 19, were also at his Mastrick home, but nobody was injured in the incident, which happened at 3.30pm on Friday.
He said: “I’m just glad that none of us were near it. It could have caused someone quite an injury.
“I have contacted the people who make Irn Bru to find out what may have happened and they haven’t got back yet.
“The last thing anyone would want is for this to happen to anyone else and for anybody to be hurt.”
A spokesman for AG Barr, said: “We are sorry that Mr Kane and his dog experienced the can incident.
“We take the safety of our packaging and products very seriously so we’ll arrange for the can to be sent to us straight away so we can fully investigate.”Deck used to archieve rank #1 legend on August season
22/08/2016 - I just edited some cards to fit the new meta
Hi everyone! I decided to make a new Spellsword token deck, since the deck i used to play on closed beta change a lot with the open beta and the new metagame we are facing.
This deck is one of the strongest counter of the Archer deck, who is very popular on ladder, and overall have positive win rate against other populars deck. I think atm the only bad matchup for this deck is Control Mage.
Mulligan: Try to look for any 1 or 2 drops except Fifth Legion Trainer and keep divine fervor if you get it. If you already have a creature of 1 magicka and another one for 2 magicka, looks for Haunting Spirit, Lion Pit or Pack Wolf.
Optional cards
Black Marsh Warden - This card is insane if not contested, but since everyone is teching Crushing Blow or any early removal (Depending of colour) to kill Murkwater Shaman on the archer matchup, i decided to remove him.
Catapult: The card is really good, but since i'm not running Black Marsh Warden and there arent much execute now i replace him for Wind Keep Spellsword
Imprison: Since i run Edict of asura x2 and Javelin x3, running imprison could be too much, still a nice card tho
I hope you like this guy, see ya around!
You can follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TESLSkull
Or follow Team Prophecy too!:
https://twitter.com/ProphecyTESLJustin’s Note: Cryptocurrencies are on fire.
Bitcoin is up 286% this year. Ethereum, another major cryptocurrency, is up 3,222% since the start of the year. Smaller cryptos have soared more than 10,000%.
Every investor is now wondering if this mania has legs, or if it’s a bubble that’s about to burst.
To answer this question, I called up Casey Research founder Doug Casey. You see, Doug’s been on the winning side of more manias than we can count. He was also an early investor in bitcoin.
Below is a transcript of our conversation. I encourage you to read it closely. It’s one of the more eye-opening Conversations with Casey we’ve ever published.
Justin: Doug, you’ve owned Bitcoin for some time now. How’d you get started in cryptocurrencies?
Doug: I was first introduced to them several years ago in Cafayate, Argentina. A lot of interesting people come through town.
A young Belgian guy came to visit, and I bought him lunch, and we discussed Bitcoin. He was a very early enthusiast. Because I bought him lunch, he gave me a physical Bitcoin as a souvenir. They actually exist. They’re collectibles that have the codes inscribed on them.
I still have that Bitcoin. At the time, a Bitcoin was worth $13. Now, they’re trading for about $4,000.
So, for that reason, that was the cheapest lunch I ever bought anyone. I wish I had listened to his argument, because I could have made millions. About 300-1 over just a few years…
Justin: Yeah, it’s crazy how much Bitcoin’s run over the last few years.
Do you think it’s headed even higher? Or is it a bubble about to burst?
Doug: I’m suspicious of where Bitcoin currently trades. The bright side is that there will never be more than 21 million created. I understand that only about half of them have come into existence.
And there are only about 25 million people in the world that own Bitcoin right now.
That’s a tiny proportion of the people in the world, and it’s going to grow. There’s going to be a lot more buying of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies simply because so few people own them right now, and there’s good reason to own them.
Justin: I agree that the market for cryptocurrencies will get bigger. But why exactly?
Doug: Cryptocurrencies are only the first and most obvious application of blockchain technology.
I’m not a computer jock, but that’s unimportant when it comes to seeing the implications of the technology—much as it was unnecessary to be either a driver or a mechanic 100 years ago to appreciate the merits of the automobile. It’s been said that the blockchain technology may be the most important single development since the invention of the internet itself.
It’s going to change the way documents are transmitted, the way real estate is sold and registered, the way stocks and bonds are tracked, the way inventory is tracked. It’s a game changer in many ways.
As far as the cryptocurrencies are concerned, my original objection to Bitcoin was that it’s not backed by anything. So, it’s really a fiat currency. It’s very much like the US dollar, the Zambian Kwacha, the Argentine peso, or any of the other 150-plus currencies in today’s world. It’s a floating abstraction.
But I missed something when I said, back then, that it had no value. It’s a fiat currency, but it has much more value than any other.
Justin: And what did you miss?
Doug: Aristotle defined the five characteristics of good money in the 4th century BC. And his analysis is as accurate now as it was then. It must be durable, divisible, convenient, consistent, and have use value in and of itself. Based on that, Aristotle believed gold and silver were best suited for use as money. Let’s analyze how Bitcoin does by these five criteria.
Durable. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are definitely durable, unless we have an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or a significant solar flare that wipes out all the computers. They’re not as durable as the metals, but they’re adequate, barring a collapse of civilization.
Divisible. They’re infinitely divisible. Better than the physical metals—although the metals can be accounted in tiny fractions too.
Convenient. Yes—as long as you have a smartphone, Bitcoin is very convenient. But your smartphone, or something like it, may not always be with you. And your counterparty also has to have one. And it’s not very convenient if someone doesn’t know or trust Bitcoin. Right now, that’s probably 98% of humanity.
Consistent. Absolutely. Every Bitcoin is exactly like another one. It’s at least as good as.999 fine gold that way.
The problem I had with Bitcoin to start with was the fifth point: does it have use value in itself, so you can’t get stuck holding the bag?
If you have a million US dollars and nobody accepts them, they have no use in and of themselves. They’re just unsecured liabilities of a bankrupt government. Like a million Zimbabwe dollars. And a fiat currency is easily destroyed by its issuer. The things are burning matches. They have half-lives, like radioactive elements.
And I said that was the problem with Bitcoin. But I was wrong about that.
Bitcoin is certainly a fiat currency like the dollar or the Kwacha. But it’s also an excellent transfer device. You can move wealth from one country to another, or to another person, quickly and privately. I’d say secretly, but you’re not supposed to say “secret” anymore, you can only say “private.” Part of the politically correct corruption of language, I might add.
And you can do so outside of the banking system, which is increasingly important.
Hopefully, among other things, blockchain and Bitcoin are going to destroy the SWIFT system, which is expensive (at least $50-100 per transaction), slow (generally a day or two, sometimes a week or more), and insecure (who trusts either big banks or the US Government?). And SWIFT requires that all dollars clear through New York.
[Editor’s note: SWIFT is used by thousands of banks around the world to send payment instructions worth trillions of dollars each day.]
So, this is the use value of Bitcoin. It allows you to transfer something that is accepted as money outside of the banking system, and outside of fiat money currencies.
Justin: Would you go as far as to call it money?
Doug: Sure, because what is money? Money is a medium of exchange and a store of value. So, almost anything can be used as money. Some things are just much better than others.
Salt, seashells, and cows have all historically been used as money. After all, the word pecuniary comes from the Latin pecus, which means cow. And salary comes from the Latin sal, which is salt. Wampum were seashells. Cigarettes are money in prisons and war zones. Even giant Yap island discs have been used as money.
Anything can be a medium of exchange, as long as it’s accepted. And Bitcoin increasingly is. It fulfills that—or is in process of doing so. It will become more and more accepted as most government fiat currencies approach their intrinsic values—essentially zero—over the next business cycle.
Justin: What about as a store of value?
Doug: Well, this is more of a problem. You’ve got two kinds of currencies: commodity currencies and fiat currencies.
The commodity currencies are physical commodities. You know they have use value. Fiat currencies, on the other hand, are just made up. They’re totally arbitrary.
It’s like that joke about sardines. You’ve got eating sardines and trading sardines. Commodity currencies are like eating sardines. Fiat currencies are like trading sardines. Of course, there’s no guarantee that Bitcoin is going to be accepted a year or two from now; if it’s not, it fails the store of value test. But it’s accepted at the moment. And it’s been growing in value at a spectacular rate—unlike fiat currencies, which have all been falling against real goods and services at about 5-10% a year. Incidentally, I don’t put much faith in the accuracy of government inflation figures.
But Bitcoin is a technological innovation. There might be Bitcoin 2.0 and 3.0. What will the current Bitcoin then be worth? There’s a reason the expression “High tech, big wreck” is true. Just because so far it’s been a great speculation doesn’t mean it’s a good store of value. Technology, a solar flare, or even government action could wipe it out.
The bottom line, Bitcoin passes the medium of exchange test for the moment and store of value test for the moment. So you can definitely say it’s money—for the moment. But so’s the Argentine peso. I have little confidence Bitcoin will be here say five years from now.
Justin’s note: Keep an eye out for part 2 of this interview, which we’ll share soon. You don’t want to miss it.
In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about cryptos, I suggest you check out the work from our go-to cryptocurrency expert, Teeka Tiwari. Teeka spent all of last year traveling the globe, meeting cryptocurrency insiders, and learning everything he could about the booming crypto market. And it paid off—because he recently shared a play with his readers that shot up 27,166% in 6 months.
Teeka has just put the final touches on what he calls the Crypto Millionaire Master Plan, a crash course on cryptos that works even for complete beginners. Here’s the entire story on the Master Plan, including how you can get started for free…Are you 12 - 14 years old? Would you like to travel on MiWay for free this summer? How about free public swimming at both indoor and outdoor pools? Then you need a Freedom Pass!
Your Freedom Pass allows you to ride for free on
Quantities are limited, so get yours starting May 1, 2018.
Swimming and Other Free Stuff Experience the freedom. There are so many free activities available this summer in the city, here's a list of some places you can go and things to do with your Freedom Pass: Public Swimming
Multi-Use Ramp Parks for Skateboarding
Biking/Scooters/Inline Skating
Biking/Scooters/Inline Skating Mountain Bike Park
Dirt Jump Parks
Basketball Hoops
Celebration Square
Check out the Youth Movement webpage for other exciting concerts, festivals, programs, classes and more for youth! Frequently Asked Questions NOTE: Freedom Pass is available to Mississauga residents only.
How much does the pass cost?
The Freedom Pass is completely free for 12, 13 or 14 year olds (date of birth January 1, 2003 - December 31, 2006).
How do I get my Freedom Pass?
Simply fill out an application form, print it, sign it and bring it into a City of Mississauga community center. You can also pick up an application form at any City of Mississauga community centre.
When can I apply for a Freedom Pass?
Applications will be accepted May 1, 2018 through to August 31, 2018. There are only a limited number of cards available, so get yours early!
How long are the Freedom Passes valid for?
The Freedom Pass can be used from July 1, 2018 to August 31, 2018.
Where does the Freedom Pass allow me to travel?
The Freedom Pass is exclusive to MiWay services and routes within Mississauga.
Can a parent or sibling of a Freedom Pass holder travel for free?
Only the photographed Freedom Pass holder is eligible, all other riders pay the applicable fare. For more details, go to www.miway.ca/fares. Passes will be confiscated by Transit Authority if used fraudulently or reproduced illegally.
Are the free public swims valid at outdoor pools?
Yes, all City of Mississauga operated indoor and outdoor pools will accept and scan your Freedom Pass to allow you unlimited free public swims from July 1, 2018 to August 31, 2018. Outdoor pools are heated.
What if I lose my Freedom Pass?
You will need to bring 1 piece of identification to any City of Mississauga community centre to verify your identity in our system. A card replacement fee will be charged for lost Freedom Passes.
How does riding MiWay help the environment?
Everyone who chooses to ride MiWay reduces their carbon footprint and helps conserve energy by eliminating travel that would have otherwise been made in a single occupancy car.
MiWay buses take 11,000 cars of the road annually - that's 55,000 tonnes of C02 every year!
Taking public transit is one of the most effective actions people can take to combat climate change. Emissions from the transportation sector (namely personal vehicle use) accounts for 32% of all GHG emissions in the community.
Your Freedom Pass allows you to ride for free on MiWay within Mississauga and free participation in public swims at City operated pools from July 1 to August 31, 2018. All you have to do is click here or go to any City of Mississauga community centre to complete an application form, then submit your completed form in person at your local community center (along with one piece of identification) and have your photo taken to create your personalized pass.Experience the freedom. There are so many free activities available this summer in the city, here's a list of some places you can go and things to do with your Freedom Pass:It looks like one of Microsoft's E3 2017 surprises might have been revealed early. The company filed a trademark application for something called "Direct Reality"--and it's related to gaming.
The trademark covers "computer game software," and more interestingly, "computer software for holographic applications." Additionally, it covers "online computer game software," including holographic applications. The application was filed just days ago, on June 2.
Trademark application filings do not always lead to product announcements. For example, Activision registered things like Call of Duty: Future Warfare and Secret Warfare.
There is nothing more to go on regarding Direct Reality, though its name and how it's connected to holographic applications suggests it may be related to Microsoft's HoloLens technology.
We have contacted Microsoft in an attempt to get more details and will update this story with anything we hear back.
Microsoft's Project Scorpio console will support virtual reality, but it remains to be seen how that will happen or if the console will work with HoloLens.
Microsoft E3 2017 briefing takes place on Sunday, June 11, starting at 2 PM PT. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.So, the narrative in the fake news media now is that it would somehow be inappropriate for the Justice Department to investigate President Trump’s “political opponent”, Hillary Rotten, er, Rodham Clinton. That is the theme advanced by NBC’s Chuck Todd and two other fake reporters in a piece published a NBC.com on Tuesday.
To no one’s surprise, this piece – which simply advances the narrative being pushed jointly by the fake media at large and the rest of the Democrat Party – ignores the fact that as of today, Hillary Clinton is in fact no one’s political opponent. She’s not running for anything, and has announced that she does not plan to run for anything in the future. Thus, labeling her as the President’s “political opponent” is just a canard designed to make this life-long criminal immune from any prosecution at all.
The piece also ignores the fact that two of Hillary Clinton’s looming scandals germinated long before the 2016 election campaign. The Uranium One scandal and her scandal involving illegal distribution of classifed information via her private email server date to her time as Secretary of State, and the years prior to that. An immense amount of evidence exists in the public record today that she likely did in fact violate many federal laws related to these two scandals, and in fact most likely would have long ago been prosecuted if she were not a member of the nation’s protected political class.
Despite Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ hemming and hawing on Tuesday about whether there is sufficient evidence around either of these major scandals to warrant the appointment of a special counsel to investigate them (more on that in a moment), there would nothing at all improper were the Department of Justice to conduct a thorough investigation into a scandal (Uranium One) that ended with the sale of 20% of our nation’s uranium resources to Russian companies. And the thought that Hillary Clinton or anyone else who serves in any presidential administration is somehow immune from prosecution for illegally sharing national security secrets on public servers is so absurd as to not deserve serious comment. It’s abject nonsense that, taken to its logical conclusion, means that Todd and his fellow Democrats with press passes believe that the Fainting Felon is simply above the law, and that the country can have no national security at all.
The third major scandal in which The Coughing Crook is currently entangled involves the fact – and we know it to be an absolute fact at this point – that her campaign and the DNC colluded with Fusion GPS, a former British spy, and Russian agents to compile the fake Trump Dossier during the presidential campaign. To contend, as Todd and his fellow fake journalists do, that Mrs. Clinton should somehow be exempt from the same investigation into Russian collusion that has now been targeting the Trump campaign for the last 6 months is bizarrely stupid and simply defies logic.
But hey, when have fake journalists like Chuck Todd ever allowed pesky things like facts and logic get in the way of their shilling for the Clintons and Obamas? It’s how these people make their livings.
Now, let’s talk about Mr. Sessions’ unwillingness to say, in an exchange with Republican Rep. Jim Jordan during his testimony yesterday, whether or when he will name a special counsel to investigate all of the Pantsuit Princess’s alleged crimes. While that answer is frustrating to those who want to see justice served, it’s important to understand the full context in which the Attorney General is operating. In addition to having to determine whether or not sufficient factual evidence exists against the accused to warrant an investigation by a special counsel, DOJ must also determine that such an investigation cannot be adequately performed within the Department of Justice itself.
One major reason why a special counsel was appointed to investigation the whole media/Democrat Trump/Russia collusion fantasy was because it allegedly involved the sitting President who had appointed Mr. Sessions to become Attorney General and Rosenstein as his Deputy. That is a clear conflict of interest that could only be avoided with the appointment of a special counsel.
No similar conflict exists where Hillary Clinton is concerned. Thus, assuming this isn’t all being done just for show, General Sessions could well decide that a special counsel is not necessary because a full and fair investigation can be conducted at DOJ itself.
This is how the system is set up to work, like it or not. All the rest of us can do is wait and see what happens, hoping against hope that Mr. Sessions can finally prove himself to be worthy of the job he holds.
Just another day in cleaning out the DC Swamp ain’t easy America.
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When the cops are stumped, Alexandra Trese is there to protect Manila from threats of the supernatural kind. Based on the award-winning Filipino comic.Presence of radioactive substances where they are undesirable
The sources of radioactive pollution can be classified into two groups: natural and man made.
Radioactive contamination, also called radiological contamination, is the deposition of, or presence of radioactive substances on surfaces or within solids, liquids or gases (including the human body), where their presence is unintended or undesirable (from the International Atomic Energy Agency – IAEA – definition).[3]
Such contamination presents a hazard because of the radioactive decay of the contaminants, which emit harmful ionising radiation such as alpha particles or beta particles, gamma rays or neutrons. The degree of hazard is determined by the concentration of the contaminants, the energy of the radiation being emitted, the type of radiation, and the proximity of the contamination to organs of the body. It is important to be clear that the contamination gives rise to the radiation hazard, and the terms "radiation" and "contamination" are not interchangeable.
Contamination may affect a person, a place, an animal, or an object such as clothing. Following an atmospheric nuclear weapon discharge or a nuclear reactor containment breach, the air, soil, people, plants, and animals in the vicinity will become contaminated by nuclear fuel and fission products. A spilled vial of radioactive material like uranyl nitrate may contaminate the floor and any rags used to wipe up the spill. Cases of widespread radioactive contamination include the Bikini Atoll, the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl disaster, and the area around the Mayak facility in Russia.
Sources of contamination [ edit ]
Global airborne contamination Atmospheric nuclear weapon tests almost doubled the concentration of 14C in the Northern Hemisphere. Plot of atmospheric 14C, [4] and [5] The New Zealand curve is representative for the Southern Hemisphere, the Austrian curve is representative for the Northern Hemisphere..[6] Atmospheric nuclear weapon tests almost doubled the concentration ofC in the Northern Hemisphere. Plot of atmosphericC, New Zealand and Austria The New Zealand curve is representative for the Southern Hemisphere, the Austrian curve is representative for the Northern Hemisphere..
Radioactive contamination can be due to a variety of causes. It may occur due to release of radioactive gases, liquids or particles. For example, if a radionuclide used in nuclear medicine is spilled (accidentally or, as in the case of the Goiânia accident, through ignorance), the material could be spread by people as they walk around.
Radioactive contamination may also be an inevitable result of certain processes, such as the release of radioactive xenon in nuclear fuel reprocessing. In cases that radioactive material cannot be contained, it may be diluted to safe concentrations. For a discussion of environmental contamination by alpha emitters please see actinides in the environment.
Nuclear fallout is the distribution of radioactive contamination by the 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s.
In nuclear accidents, a measure of the type and amount of radioactivity released,such as from a reactor containment failure, is known as the source term. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines this as "Types and amounts of radioactive or hazardous material released to the environment following an accident."[7]
Contamination does not include residual radioactive material remaining at a site after the completion of decommissioning. Therefore, radioactive material in sealed and designated containers is not properly referred to as contamination, although the units of measurement might be the same.
Containment [ edit ]
Large industrial glovebox in the nuclear industry
Containment is the primary way of preventing contamination being released into the environment or coming into contact or being ingested by humans.
Being within the intended Containment differentiates radioactive material from radioactive contamination. When radioactive materials are concentrated to a detectable level outside a containment, the area affected is generally referred to as "contaminated".
There are a large number of techniques for containing radioactive materials so that it does not spread beyond the containment and become contamination. In the case of liquids this is by the use of high integrity tanks or containers, usually with a sump system so that leakage can be detected by radiometric or conventional instrumentation.
Where material is likely to become airborne, then extensive use is made of the glovebox, which is a common technique in hazardous laboratory and process operations in many industries. The gloveboxes are kept under a slight negative pressure and the vent gas is filtered in high efficiency filters, which are monitored by radiological instrumentation to ensure they are functioning correctly.
Naturally occurring radioactivity [ edit ]
A variety of radionuclides occur naturally in the environment. Elements like uranium and thorium, and their decay products, are present in rock and soil. Potassium-40, a primordial nuclide, makes up a small percentage of all potassium and is present in the human body. Other nuclides, like carbon-14, which is present in all living organisms, are continuously created by cosmic rays.
These levels of radioactivity pose |
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